Alan Moore is, to put it mildly, loquacious. Over the course of nearly two hours, he casts his net from the sprawling subject of fantasy fiction to the numerous real-life charlatans and visionaries – not, in his telling, mutually exclusive groupings – that ushered magic into the modern age. He would likely have covered the topics of magic in fiction and historical sorcery at any time of your choosing, but on this occasion they’re particularly relevant. For he has returned with not one, but two, new books with magic at their core.
One is The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, an almanac he wrote with the late Steve Moore (no relation) that covers magic across the ages, and serves as a how-to guide for beginning your own adventures in enchantment. The other is The Great When, a dark urban fantasy novel, set in a London reeling from the effects of the second World War, and on the cusp of a great schism in its hidden, magical foundations.
“I never have these things planned even days in advance,” he says, when I ask if this double dose of magical Moore is part of some grand plan. “So, no this is purely just the way things have worked out. I started working on the Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic 15 years ago, then the project expanded and Steve passed away, and we realised that although we’d got all the writing done for it we hadn’t got any of the art commissioned. So that’s what the last few years have been about, getting it all drawn.
“As for The Great When, it wasn’t deliberate so much as a coincidence of scheduling but, yes, it’s two books about magic that even have some crossover.”
Having spent three decades helming dozens of the most famous and critically acclaimed works in comics, from Watchmen and V For Vendetta to From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moore left the medium six years ago and set his mind to other pursuits. Alongside consistent forays into film, music and performance, he released Jerusalem – a 500,000-word novel set in his native Northampton – and short story collection Illuminations which included a 240-page story about a fictional superhero named Thunderman, that acted as his final kiss of death to the comics medium.
He also, however, solidified his long-established interest in magic, as both scholar and practitioner, but disputes the idea that both books came from the same source.
“Well,” he argues, “The Bumper Book is about magic, whereas The Great When has got some magicians in it, but it isn’t really anything that is traditional magic – I just made it up. We’ve got [real-life magician] characters like Austin Osman Spare, Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune in both, so there’s a tiny bit of overlap, but the intents of both books are different. One is to explain magic as it is, and has been. The other is an attempt to create something new in fantasy, without relying upon all the magical tropes you get reiterated so often in fantasy novels.”
The Bumper Book is a joyously varied object, alternating between comics panels detailing the lives of famous figures in magical history, and explainers on what magic actually is and what it can be used for. It posits magic less as a dark and mysterious vocation of hoary old spells, but as a practice, and system, for travelling through one’s consciousness. Part engaging scholarship, part Make & Do annual, (complete with a cut-out-and-keep magic altar and wizard’s staff at the back), it’s a read he hopes will be enjoyed by young and old.
“Right from the start, me and Steve said magic is not this big, spooky, dark thing that’s intimidating and full of nightmares and horrors. We thought of magic as something that was quite beautiful and which, at times, appears to have a sense of humour. I mean, magic has got to have a sense of humour just to put up with the spectacularly absurd parade of magicians that have emerged over the centuries.
One of the things I’m really tired of in current fantasy is how the kids go through the back of the wardrobe in Narnia and it’s not really a big deal. People go into these worlds as if it was visiting Milton Keynes. No! You’d be booking yourself into psychiatric care! You’d have a complete mental breakdown!
“We also wanted to dispel all this exclusivity. If we were to have a book of magic, it would have to be the kind of thing where, whatever age you are, if you were to look at it, you would think, ‘Yeah ... that’s a book of magic!’ Even a seven-year-old, because the child’s perspective on magic is, I think, just as important – it’s where most of us get our attachment to magic and magical ideas. It’s not for children, it’s clearly for adults, as we say on the back cover. But we also wanted to have the ‘best children’s annual ever made’ kind of feel to it.”
Throughout, we encounter notorious sorcerers in sections titled Old Moore’s Guide To The Great Enchanters, which offer nutshell biographies of practitioners like Solomon and Merlin as well as later figures like Johannes Faust, Simon Magus, John Dee and Aleister Crowley, listing their lives and works, as well as the propaganda efforts put in place by a Christian church in ascendancy to make magicians seem wicked and evil.
I venture that the opposite is often common in Irish tradition, where pre-Christian figures like St Brigid were sometimes co-opted, rather than demonised. “Well,” he says, evidently delighted that I’ve teed him up so neatly, “St Bridid is St Bride, which means she has quite a bit to do with The Great When, since one of the entry points into the other London is Bride Lane, just down from St Bride’s Church – that’s Bridid or Brid, a mother goddess.”
The titular conceit of The Great When is the magical, higher dimension of London that lives, breathes and scuttles inside the one we already know; a “Long London” that can only be visited at certain entry points by mortals, and always with extreme caution. Our hero – the spectacularly named bookseller’s apprentice, Dennis Knuckleyard – first learns of this plane’s existence when he takes possession of a book that should not exist, a sure sign that it comes from the other, more magical metropolis that gives The Great When its title.
Thence he must dodge crooks and magicians to keep the book from falling into the hands of those who’d use it for ill deeds, and deliver it back to the swarming chaos of The Great When itself, where reality warps and tears, every object seems alive, and human minds can barely process a fraction of what’s on display. The reader, too, might initially stumble, as every section set in this hidden city, sees the text shift to densely descriptive italics, brimming with enough overpowered verbiage to make you feel like you’re going slightly mad yourself.
“I wanted the sections set in The Great When to feel as disorienting as it would do if you were suddenly in another world,” Moore says. “One of the things I’m really tired of in current fantasy is how the kids go through the back of the wardrobe in Narnia and it’s not really a big deal. People go into these worlds as if it was visiting Milton Keynes. No! You’d be booking yourself into psychiatric care! You’d have a complete mental breakdown!
“Any time any of my characters enter The Great When, they’re vomiting, weeping, fainting – because that’s what I figure ordinary people would do, if something even slightly fantastic happened. And if something happened that challenged your whole ideas of reality, you would fall to bits. Any of us would. We certainly wouldn’t be acting like action heroes.”
Shifting up the formatting, he says, is just his way of getting a reader into this unhinged state. “Italics makes everything seem more urgent, and the shift to the present tense makes it more immediate … the prose becomes more intense and poetic, perhaps a bit more ambiguous and difficult to focus on.” Not that it doesn’t have other benefits, he concedes. “Well, it also allows me to take the brakes off and do a drift of hallucinogenic prose.”
These gods, these demons. They don’t need to exist, they just need to exist in people’s minds
The Great When is the first in a planned quintet of Long London novels, the second of which Moore is currently writing. It will be the first time he’s put together a novel series, and the thrill of telling a story of such scope has clearly not abated. He speaks emphatically about the possibilities of taking his cast, a blend of fictional and real-life Londoners, and pushing them through a narrative that spans the rest of the 20th century.
“What I’m enjoying about Dennis is that in the first book he’s 18,″ he says. “In the book I’m writing now [an as yet unnamed sequel] he’s 28. So, characters like Dennis, you can show their development up through 50 years and you can also do that with the book’s main character, which is probably London. I can look at things like the art in London, the state of crime, the state of black culture, queer culture, what the politics was like. And what was happening in the world, you can bring all these different threads ... what were the films like?
“I can comment on culture as well as the stuff in the plotline to see how all of these things have developed in London since the tabula rasa of the postwar period, where London was just rubble, physically and psychologically. You’ve got a clean slate it has to rebuild itself from. Watching the process of that rebuilding, and how we got to here from there, is a big part of what the Long London quintet is all about.”
That act of creation, of building something from nothing is, he assures me, the purest essence of magic itself.
“It’s always a rabbit out of a hat,” he says, “an idea out of an empty mind. And that, along with a whole universe out of a quantum vacuum, is the essence of magic; it’s something from nothing. And I think it’s in our consciousness, that’s the only place it needs to be, these gods, these demons. They don’t need to exist, they just need to exist in people’s minds, and they can cause all the religious wars and changes to society you could imagine. You don’t need a guy standing there in a toga. But it’s nice to have.”
The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic is published by Knockabout; The Great When is published by Bloomsbury
