Judge, O blog readers! We had a few days in Wales, then, on returning to Lancaster, I was called upon to address another literary matter. Family members buy me Alan Moore's prose works. Yossi, granddaughter, had just bought me Moore's second Long London volume, I Hear A New World. After reading through this just-published novel, I wrote two snail-mail letters to their author, the first on the philosophy of consciousness, the second on other aspects of this and two earlier works by Moore.
Tomorrow, I will visit Blackpool and we approach the end of the month when my posts usually slow down but an extended break from regular blogging is ok. We had begun to reread Poul Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions and can now contrast this 1953 novel with Alan Moore's newly published novel.
In Three Hearts..., Holger Carlsen is transported from World War II Denmark to the Carolingian universe and back whereas, in I Hear A New World, Dennis Knuckleyard interacts with fictional and historical characters in late1950's London and makes several excursions into the fantastic archetypal "Long London." In terms of character interactions, ...A New World displays more of the features that have come to be associated with the term, "novel," although, since a novel can be identified only as a long prose fiction, both of these works are indeed novels. We value variety.
Knuckleyard interacts with:
Moore gives us something of 1950's London as well as its fantastic counterpart.
(Each reference to Alan Moore links to a different other blog.)
7 comments:
I like the concept of an "archetypal" London City -- Long London. It's fascinating.
Kaor, Paul!
I've never read any of Alan Moore's books, if only because there's so many books worthy of being read and of how impossible it is to read them all.
Besides the correspondence I've had with Anderson I have written snail mail letters to Harry Turtledove (many of whose stories I've read) and to Sissela Bok, two of whose books I've read. They were both interested enough by my letters to honor me with replies.
I would have loved writing to JRR Tolkien as well--but, by the time I was old enough to write intelligibly (say, age 16), Tolkien was getting too elderly to be badgered by fan mail.
Ad astra! Sean
But Moore's "Long London" is bizarre. It is described in italicized, partly unpunctuated prose and in the present tense to given an impression of a different experience of reality and this can continue for several pages. Buildings transition or metamorphose through different historical periods, including some future to the observer. Swedenborg's vision of Hell is real there. There are other oddities. The City Heads are the reanimated heads of decapitated personages. And so on. It is disorienting to read about.
Kaor, Paul!
Moore's work seems to be both confusing and interesting! Charles I and even Oliver Cromwell could be among those reanimated Heads (Oliver being posthumously beheaded at the Restoration).
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Indeed they are. I wondered why Cromwell was there. There are also Thomas Cromwell, two of Henry VIII's wives and Thomas More.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
At the restoration of Charles II a raging mob exhumed Cromwell's corpse, heaping abuse on it as it was dragged thru the streets of London, with the head ending up on London Bridge.
Several of the other regicides who died during the Interregnum also had their remains exhumed to be posthumously hanged, drawn, and quartered for treason.
Not surprised by the other beheaded persons you listed.
Ad astra! Sean
And Swedenborg.
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