The Great When: A Long London Novel
Long paragraphs and unusual sentence constructions make immersion into The Great When challenging. Teenaged Dennis Knuckleyard works in a secondhand bookstore in a slum-like section of postwar London in 1949—working for Ada Coffin, a frightening and grotesque personage whose “room and board” for Dennis seems more like punishment than benefit. But keep reading! What Ada assigns to Dennis as a chore, returning a book to the seller, turns out to be so dangerous that she does not expect him to return from the effort. Indeed, it is only because of his outrageous friends and allies that he makes it through his first encounter with an edge of reality that opens into “Long London”: a mystical counterpart city where potent gods, mythic memes, and bloodthirsty residents roam.
Get this far in the book, and despite its unusual language and disgusting descriptions of filth and poverty, the hooks of the fantasy-plus-crime novel in two worlds at once can set deeply into dogged readers. Good thing, too, because this is book one of a projected five-book fantasy series.
When explanations finally arrive, it is a relief to Dennis, although what his painter friend says about the “other London” is tough to grasp: “That was crackers before the war. Crackers before the Romans, that was. It’s a Symbolist substratum, as yer might say…This ‘ere is echo, and that there is music.”
No, Dennis does not quite understand that, either. But Moore’s tumbling, chaotic, and remarkable plot instills a fine dose of Symbolism by the end, as well as respect for the loyalty and persistence that drive Dennis—even when Coffin Ada makes his real life almost as hard as in the other London.
