Brilliance and bafflement collide in this almost visionary tale of recovered memories, art and madness
Somewhere in this sprawling behemoth, this teeming leviathan, this pythonic mammoth of a novel there is a very good – even visionary – book struggling to get out. Notoriously, it runs to more than 600,000 words and is longer than the Bible. None of this will deter Alan Moore’s legions of fans, though I suspect that many of them may indulge in what Sir Walter Scott once referred to as the “laudable practice of skipping”.
The plot is simple enough. We open with Alma Warren, an artist and eccentric, whose brother Michael once nearly choked on a cough sweet and miraculously came back to life. Many years later a bonk on the noggin has allowed him to access the memories of what happened when he was between life and death. He is worried that he is going mad, which seems to be something of a family tradition, going back at least as far as his great-great-grandfather Ernest Vernall. Alma uses Michael’s memories or hallucinations or epiphanies as the inspiration for a series of paintings, and on the night of the private viewing, various lives converge en route to the gallery in Northampton district the Boroughs. There is a heroin-addicted prostitute looking for a client, a middle-aged poetaster still living with his mother, a predatory monster, a bewildered boy, a compromised council official, someone who works with refugees, a car crash. Some chapters fill in the Vernall family history; others deal with the countercultural history of Northampton: Lucia Joyce, daughter of James, confined in an asylum; John Clare and Sir Malcolm Arnold; Samuel Beckett and Thomas a Becket and a surprising amount of hymnology. There are also ghosts, often intersecting across centuries; a monk who brought a relic to Northampton as the “heart of England”, a “rough sleeper” ghost who laments the problematic logistics of ghost sex and is charged with a mission of deadly import. Finally, there are the chapters set in Moore’s most visionary mode. These are mostly associated with what happened to Michael Warren in his betwixt time: in which “Builders” play “trilliards” with human souls in a metaphysical pool hall; two Vernall spirits embark on an epic pilgrimage to the end of time; and there’s a night flight with demon king Asmodeus. The final chapter gives us Alma’s exhibition, where the titles of the painting correspond with the titles of the individual chapters in another one of the crisscrossings found throughout the novel.
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