Advance word said Alan Moore’s second novel was going to be a million words long, and set entirely in one Northampton district, the Boroughs. Neither half of this is strictly true; there are sections outside Northampton, even as far as London, and if Moore’s cosmology can claim Lambeth as somehow part of the Boroughs, it surely can’t carry off quite the same trick with St Paul's. But, it's close enough. Still, if he'd really wanted to fuck with people he should have said, quite honestly, that it

Advance word said Alan Moore’s second novel was going to be a million words long, and set entirely in one Northampton district, the Boroughs. Neither half of this is strictly true; there are sections outside Northampton, even as far as London, and if Moore’s cosmology can claim Lambeth as somehow part of the Boroughs, it surely can’t carry off quite the same trick with St Paul's. But, it's close enough. Still, if he'd really wanted to fuck with people he should have said, quite honestly, that it was the best part of 1,200 pages concerning the cosmic ramifications of a small boy from an unregarded area of 1950s Northampton choking on a cough sweet. A small boy who happens to be the brother of a cult artist - yes, Alan Moore himself, here going by the name Alma Warren. She’s an artist rather than a writer, and the beard has been swapped for lipstick, but is very obviously the same person in all other respects, and as Moore has himself admitted, not an entirely plausible female character. But then, as he equally fairly caveated, Alan Moore isn’t a particularly plausible male character either.And the million words? No, a mere 600,000. Which is to say, longer thanandcombined; the change left over would be sufficient for a Narnia book, and one way to understandwould be to consider it as a combination of all three. Still, its size has an impact all its own, and you can tell that Moore is at least a little annoyedis not in fact longer than the whole Bible (all Steve Jones' fault, apparently. As in the science writer, though given Moore it could equally have been the Sex Pistol). But again, think of it as a new Testament with the myths of sin and redemption grounded among the beggars, sinners and tax-collectors of a new age and you’ll not go far wrong; for saying it was written by a wizard who worships a serpent, it’s a surprisingly christian text, albeit perhaps not in the way passers by assume when they see you carrying a mammoth tome called. It’s a solid, craftsman’s reinterpretation, earthy even as it’s cosmic, where angels are always called ‘angles’ or ‘builders' - and the novel feels built, a structure whose every beam interlocks so perfectly with every other that it could never have been otherwise, thus embodying the vision of the world it expounds.So how does such a small incident fill all those pages? By ricocheting out, centuries into the past and even further into the future, and bouncing off the lives and afterlives of all manner of Boroughs folk, from the lowliest beggar to fiends and archangels. There are layers upon layers here, events intertwining across the decades, and up and down the layers of reality. In some respects I think this may be pretty much the bookwhich Lawrence Norfolk failed to write, and which ever since I first heard about it I’ve regretted our world does not possess. Well, I need grieve no longer, because not only has Moore done it but I think he’s done it as well as it can be done. He knows that to encompass the full spectrum of human experience requires a novel that’s as happy being fantasy, horror, comedy, Olaf Stapledon-style SF, kids’ adventure story, tragedy, noir pastiche, verse or a weirdly close parallel to Pixar'sas anything recognisably litfic. Sometimes, as in, you even need a whole chapter which is actively annoying (there the ringtone trill of the Sirens; here, the self-justificatory internal monologue of a bent ex-councillor). And if the result is verging on the unmanageable…well, so be it, because isn't life? Within, Alma is working on a series of paintings bearing the same titles and themes as the novel’s chapters, and in some ways that exhibition might be a better way to encounter this matter. There’s another work of provincial English visionary literature,, which I always compare to a great cathedral – it’s amazing, it’s majestic, but who the Hell wants to look at every stone of a cathedral? So of course you don't read the whole thing. And I suspect the same may come to apply here. If certain chapters ofcame to be read more often than others down the years, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised. Though looking at other reviews, it’s interesting how there’s no clear consensus on the best or worst bits. Some found the middle section following the Dead Dead Gang unbearable, whereas I'd say that this posthumous romp with the afterlife’s own amalgam of every Outlaws, Famous Five et al the easiest and most immediately rewarding going of the whole affair. Others considered the opening section’s stories of various Boroughs residents fractured and dull. Interestingly, only a broadsheet critic seemed willing to suggest the already notorious Lucia Joyce chapter was a sham, perhaps feeling that his venue inoculated him against accusations of philistinism (in which case, more fool him). But let the record state that yes, that chapter is a bastard, albeit a justified bastard which perfectly summarises itself and thus the whole project: “”a letterchewer in’ formerspeech so danse datenot evern daelight o’ meanhim cannyskip is’t dadfull graphity. Noteben literself contravail eover daddyvent hereye’son”.And yes, without a run-up, that passage is basically incomprehensible. But Moore knows this. Without whitewashing the working classes, there's a fierce pride in them here which is rare in modern fiction, at least divorced from sheer thuggishness. But also a rueful awareness that many of the people celebrated here are precisely those least likely to slog through the monument Moore has erected to them. And it is a monument; not the first recent work from Moore where one axis could be summarised as an old man moaning that 'It were all fields around here when I were a lad' (compare). But that's inextricable from the project: a man closer to the end of life than its beginning constructing a solid block of a book in which, like the solid blocks of time envisioned therein, all those lost relatives and scenes and sweets are preserved for eternity. And after all, if this is a problem it's a problem that's been in Western literature from its foundations: what's the Divine Comedy if not one writer turning his considerable gifts to a baroque rendition of the afterlife as it seems fair to him personally? And thus far at least, there's a lot less bloodshed which can be blamed on Moore's metaphysics.There are other little annoyances, though. Inevitably; a work of this size may be grand, even great, but I don’t think it’s possible for it to be perfect. Sometimes, the degree to which pretty much every character can flawlessly reel off details of local history gets a bit silly (cf Netflix's recent, where what worked brilliantly from Cage and Cottonmouth felt a bit daft once Goon #3 started getting in on the act; yes, absolutely there are people in poor neighbourhoods who know this stuff, but not *all* of them). Most of the polemic is managed such that it doesn’t tip over into Pat Mills territory; there’s one bravura chapter in which the global rise and imminent fall of money as a concept is paralleled with the life of one heroic, shambolic local leading the fight against the local manifestations of the corruption lucre bred. But that does lapse at times, especially in the Cromwell chapter (and as so often when I say this, that doesn’t even mean I disagree with the agenda, just the presentation). Too many editing mistakes creep in towards the end – something I’ve often noticed in recent books, but a particular shame here even as it’s particularly understandable, after hundreds upon hundreds of pages with nary a misplaced apostrophe. Not just typos, either, but a surprising slip when Sheridan is described as a novelist, itself tied into one frustrating cheat regarding the birth of genre fiction. This last is a particular shame given what a great job Moore mostly does in convincingly tying the birth and death of pretty much everything else, from free market capitalism to the gothic revivals, to his one small patch of English earth.Of course, part of the beauty of Alan Moore is that for all his fierce principles and justified self-regard, he’s also a master of that (fading, alas) British virtue of not taking oneself entirely seriously. Alma is by no means a wholly flattering self-portrait, and the book closes with the exhibition of heranalogue, seen through the eyes of her baffled, bullied brother. It’s a lightly self-mocking reprise of the whole novel, laced with wry half-admissions of failure: “you don’t think that there’s some element missing? As if I was using all the obvious effort as a camouflage to hide the fact that I’m not saying very much”. But that only makes the bold (if by that point unsurprising) conclusion all the more compelling: whatever its failings, only art can save the world, if not perhaps in the sense you might think.And ultimately, that’s the thing. It’s a book about predestination, and eternal recurrence. Which are concepts Moore seems on balance to find consoling, while also being aware that from another perspective they’re bloody terrifying. The angel's-eye chapter, and the finale of the novel's second section (with its competing carnivals of despair and joy), are two of the most truly staggering passages in the whole fabulous work, but also among those where this is most to the fore. And of them, the former at least also accepts the monstrousness of the whole set-up. 'Justice above the street’ is a seductive motto, but the way it plays out can be uncomfortably close to Spinoza, or even Leibniz' facile published work - everything for the best in this best of all possible worlds (which may not mean all that much if it was the only possible world all along). There's a hint to why the poor might have a better afterlife than the well-off, but to some extent those who have do better, forever, than those who have not. The only reward for being good is that you get to live with that always, but then people too limited even to torment themselves with their many sins – which is to say, the real monsters – will get to happily slaughter their way through eternity too. We do see one glimpse of how Hell might exist in this set-up, but it seems a matter of luck as much as anything else, with forgiveness perhaps too cheap for some other fairly grave offenders. And then, of course, if there’s no free will, what can sin and justice even mean? It’s a question prodded at but never really answered. Still, who said the universe was fair, or would become so just because you add metaphysics?