Telegraph e-paper

Meet the Shakespeare of the comic book

Alan Moore, author of ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ and ‘V for Vendetta’, is back – and furious

By Jake KERRIDGE ILLUMINATIONS by Alan Moore

464pp, Bloomsbury, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £9.38

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To many readers, the comic book is the most vital literary form of our time, and Alan Moore – the writer behind Watchmen, V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – is its Shakespeare, destined to be pored over when every novel of the past half-century has been forgotten. But if prose fiction is moribund, nobody has told Moore himself, who did more than dip a toe into the form with his 2016 novel Jerusalem – proudly marketed, at 1,200-odd pages, as longer than the Bible – and now presents us with his first collection of not especially short stories.

It is no wonder that Moore, who formally announced his retirement from writing comics in 2019, reaches such dizzying page-counts: he crams his sentences past bursting point, displaying the lexical gluttony you might expect from somebody whose prose has largely been kept within the spartan confines of speech bubbles for 40 years. (In fact he has always been a bit of a gasbag, as evidenced by the prose appendices attached to many of his comics, such as the 40-page addendum of explanatory notes in the collected From Hell.)

His prose fiction thrums with the zest of somebody who feels newly untrammelled – released not just from the artistic restraints of comic books but from a publishing industry he finds unsympathetic (in the same sense that Superman finds Kryptonite unsympathetic).

Even if you’re not familiar with Moore’s many jeremiads against his ex-publishers or the movie studios he’s accused of mangling his work, you’d get the idea from the longest story in this book, “What We Can Know About Thunderman”, which clocks in at nearly 250 pages. It is a celebration of the central role once played in the imaginative life of American children by comic books (“the flimsy miracles that … filled the boy’s fixed, dilated gaze”), but one that curdles into a righteous excoriation of “an industry that’s sitting in a mess of its prolapsed intestines”, neglecting kids while infantilising adult readers. Moore scholars of the future will be able to spend whole careers annotating this Dunciad of the comic-book world: but his postlapsarian anger gives it a vigour and depth of feeling that will resonate even with readers who don’t know the heavily hinted at real-life identities of the characters – indeed, they might be the story’s ideal readers, as they won’t be distracted by the point scoring.

The rest of the stories are, by and large, fantastical or eldritch. The highlight of the book is “Location, Location, Location”, which imagines the events promised in the Book of Revelations playing out on (or, in the case of the celestial battles, above) the streets of Bedford: Moore fans will see echoes of Jerusalem, and superfans of his largely forgotten sole previous novel Voice of the Fire (1996), both of which used impeccably ordinary Midlands towns as the backdrop for extraordinary Blakean visions in prose (Moore was brought up in Northampton). The story is also very funny – Moore’s Christ is an amiable box-set addict keen to make sure the legal aspects of the Second Coming are above board – without descending into burlesque.

It also features a cheerfully blasphemous sex scene – one of many odd erotic encounters in this book that left me uncertain of whether I needed a cold shower or a therapy session. His description of congress between two disembodied brains who are (possibly) the only conscious entities in the universe is even more repulsive than you might expect – but the story itself is a little masterclass in world building.

Some of the stories – a clever sketch about a man who lives backwards (“I [experienced] giddy euphoria on reaching Christmas 2019, after years of lockdown and disruption”), a Tales of the Unexpected homage featuring a fraudulent medium – are written in a relatively sedate style that provides some relief from the maximalist, thesaurus-drunk prose that characterises most of the book. But Moore’s prolixity is oddly energising, conveying the exhilarating sense of words rushing to catch up with the author’s never-ending stream of ingenious ideas. Still, without wishing to put anybody off Jerusalem, 50 or so pages at a time seems like the ideal dose.

Books

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2022-10-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-10-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://dailytelegraph.pressreader.com/article/281827172648160

Daily Telegraph