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I Hear a New World
By Alan Moore
Bloomsbury
Reviewed by Cushla McKinney
Like Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London on meth, Britain’s capital is a central character in Alan Moore’s dark fantasy series, Long London.
For beneath the surface of the city is another London, an accretion of centuries of story and time superimposed upon one another in constant flux.
Its inhabitants are just as fantastical and disturbing, not to mention the source of some terrible puns.
The “City Heads” are just that — jars containing the remains of London’s most famous decapitees, from William Wallace to Anne Bolyn.
The “Prime Monster”, who governs from “Worstminster”, is a slime-mould amalgamation of Prime Ministers past and present.
Even the infrastructure is, in places, both sentient and carnivorous.
Then there are the Arcana, emergent beings of symbol and association, who are a law unto themselves.
This other London keeps its existence a closely guarded secret.
Items and entities occasionally travel between the two cities.
And although “ordinary” folk tend to emerge from these encounters mad or dead, the occasional person manages to survive more-or-less unscathed.
One such is Dennis Knuckleyard, whose accidental acquisition of a book from the shadow London and its perilous return are the subject of The Great When, the first novel in this series.
I Hear a New World is the second of the series’ five planned novels.
It is now 1958 and Dennis, now 27, has spent the last nine years putting those nightmarish events out of his mind.
However, he has not been forgotten, and when a new series of incursions threaten both Londons, he is summoned by the aforementioned City Heads to investigate.
To make matters worse, Dennis, a reluctant and ineffectual hero at the best of times, rather suspects the problems might be his fault.
Moore revels in language, bodies and their various excrescences and violences are described in visceral detail.
Even the sex scenes are more concerned with linguistic efflorescence than titillation.
It is a linguistic tour-de-force.
But as words and images pile one upon the other in an unrelenting barrage it soon becomes exhausting, an effect amplified by font and type-setting that delivers page after page of cramped text with nary a paragraph break.
The world he has created is memorable indeed, but the Long London novels are not for the fainthearted.
You have been warned.
Cushla McKinney is a Dunedin scientist