The Great When

I was really hoping to like this more. Jerusalem really left a mark on me, and the setup of this seemed like it would be able to repeat at least some of those tricks. But I'm not entirely sure it does.

Of course, the idea of a different, realer city under/inside/beyond the actual city has been done before; Gaiman, Jemisin, Lovecraft... and late 40s London is obviously a great place to discover it. (This very much feels like a post-Covid, post-Brexit novel; what happens when a society has been ripped apart, what happens when people have to readjust to each other after all the old structures have been shown to be made up...) And as long as it stays in that/our London, it's not a bad novel. Dennis Knuckleyard has one of the greatest names in literary history even if he's a fairly standard character himself. But the novel is off-balance; the few excursions into the other London so brief, so intense, so overloaded on acid-trip imagery that it's hard to make sense of what it's even doing in the story.

The shining star here, of course, is Moore's prose, which is as mad as ever, even if it rarely reaches the extremes of Jerusalem. But at some point in the back half of the 310 pages, I find myself wondering if the prose doesn't deserve more meat to the story. Yes, this is part 1 of a planned pentalogy, there are several hints at future seeds being planted, and it's easing us into the setting. Maybe if I read the other parts, everything here will reveal itself. But I feel like part 1 should probably draw you in more to even get you to read the upcoming bits.