Is occult knowledge even possible in the age of the internet? If a recondite author obsessed you back in the day, it took hours of fossicking in far-flung dusty bookshops to feed your hunger. Oh, the joys of hunting down a shabby collection of Arthur Machen weirdiana! Now a few keystrokes will do the job. The magic has been lost.
Magic is Alan Moore’s business, and he’s also a Machen devotee. The graphic novelist is well known for issuing his illustrators with exceptionally detailed written instructions for series such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell, which perhaps accounts for the throbbing prose style of this fantasy novel. While the notion of an alternate London is not new (see, for example, China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun), The Great When is a tasty stew of Moore’s influences, such that fans can tick them off on their fingers and newcomers can delight in its rich savour.
First you have to get through the opening pages. Even Ulysses offers an easier start. Aficionados will recognise the two seniors in conversation as Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune; but what’s this African racing tipster doing on the next page? Then the surrealist poet David Gascoyne at the Battle of Cable Street, seemingly witnessing Delacroix’s Liberty leading not French revolutionaries but anti-fascist rioters? It might be best to skip these passages (they will make sense later) and go straight to ‘The Best Way to Start a Book’, with its references to George Orwell, whose Nineteen Eighty-Four has just come out.
Our hero is timid Dennis Knuckleyard, 18 years old. His adventures kickstart with, of all the hoary clichés, a cursed book.
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