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Alan Moore Talks Prince Monolulu, Michael X And His Long London

Alan Moore was asked if he expected his upcoming series of prose fantasy novels, Long London to be as experimental as his other prose work.

Last month, Alan Moore held an audience with the Scottish Book Trust, hosted by fellow author Heather Parry in which he talked about saving Brazil from fascism. As it concluded, he was asked if he expected his upcoming series of prose fantasy novels, Long London to be as experimental as his other prose works such as Voice Of The Fire, Jerusalem and Illuminations. Bleeding Cool first scooped their existence before we were then rescooped by the Guardian. The first book is called The Great When, and Alan went into further details.

He told the group, "It's kind of experimental with the prose to a certain degree but probably not as experimental as my other stuff. I'm loading all the experiment into the actual narrative rather than into the mechanics of the narrative. That said, there are some nice little touches and special effects in there. But basically, with Long London, I'm trying to make it very accessible. This is me as a commercial writer with a six-book contract, so I feel that if I did something that was impenetrable, that wouldn't serve me or the audience or the publishers particularly well."

There may be shades of the first chapter of Voice Of The Fire here, told in a 30,000 BC vernacular of limited vocabulary, all in the present tense. Alan continued, "So I really want to make this as accessible as possible. It's a story about another London that coexists with the one that we know, which is kind of the symbolic layer of reality. Things that happen on the symbol layer will play out in our world; they start as symbols."

Alan Moore's River Of Fire

Fine, I'll read Plato again. Plato Meets Neverwhere. Alan Moore continued, "The world of our imagination is clearly the world that is actually under this physical world. It's where this physical world came from and so we've got this hapless character who in the first book is 18, in the second book he's 28 and so on. They happen at sort of roughly decade intervals until 1979 when there's a twenty-year gap and then the last book is set in 1999 on Millennium Eve more or less. The working title for the last book is at the moment River Of Fire."

The River Of Fire, or the Phlegethon was one of five rivers in Hades in Greek mythology, but also was meant to be a Millenium Eve spectacle in London along the Thames that didn't work. A damp squib to usher in the year 2000. Alan continues, "I'm trying to talk about a lot of things in it; I've got characters who can be used to represent certain strands of culture. In the first book, I've got the recent arrival of the Windrush and also a character, Prince Monolulu, who was a racing tipster who arrived here in the very early 20th century um and was a self-invented African. He actually came from St Croix in the Danish West Indies but reinvented himself as an Abyssinian Prince with a really unlikely history and a fantastic sense of dress and he was playing to the white imagination. He came up with this cartoon African that really played upon all those colonial concepts and people loved him." Yup, he's real.

"So I've got him representing the Black experience in Britain in the first book. In the second book, Michael de Freitas turns up, who was Michael X, a 60's radical who had been an enforcer for Peter Rachman, the slum landlord in Notting Hill who was one of the causes of the Notting Hill Riots of 1958, which was the first race riot in England." Yup, they are both real too. As were the riots.

"We've got queer characters so that we can actually show the evolution of queer identity. We've hopefully more women characters starting with the second book. It was a bit light on the first book just because of the way it seemed to work itself out.  Although my daughter was saying that the personality of Coffin Ada was probably enough for three woman characters"

Coffin Ada, previously described as the boss and landlord of Dennis Knuckleyard, the hapless 18-year-old. Alan Moore looked at the wider picture of the series. "I just want to take the British attitude to Europe, how that has changed, and the British attitude to nuclear weapons and politics and all of these strands that actually make up London and, by extension, the wider world. I want to follow these through uh 50 or 60 years of history and see what happens. And all the time, this other world, the symbolic world that underlies this one. So those are my hopes for the series but you have to judge for yourselves when it's out."

Long London as a bit of a laugh

But don't expect a monumentally depressing volume. Alan Moore is famously unrecognised for his levels of comedy. "I want to have fun with everything I'm doing, even all the really big depressing things.  I am having a certain amount of fun with them, even if it's just kind of unintelligible writers' fun, but with the Long London things, it is actually kind of quite funny. There's probably at least as much in there that's funny as there is that's horrific and I really like squashing them all up together. Because that is my experience of life. It's horror and comedy and tragedy and everything all at once. It's not divided into genres, so that's what I'm trying for with Long London. Something that is outside genres, although yeah, you could say it's kind of Offal Noir, Lowlife Crime Fiction, Social History or something but I'm pleased with it so far."

For me, as a Londoner, I am excited to see Alan Moore do more for London comparable to what he has done for Northampton. I love discovering some of the weird and wonderful characters who have lived here over the past two thousand years, and am very much looking forward to Alan's excavations. Here is the previous listing;

"Dennis Knuckleyard is a hapless eighteen-year-old who works and lives in a second-hand bookstore in 1949 London. Aspiring writer though he is, his life feels quite uneventful. But one day his boss and landlord, Coffin Ada, sends him to retrieve some rare books from a strange and paranoid dealer, and he discovers that one of them, A London Walk by Rev. Thomas Hampole, does not exist; Hamphole and A London Walk are both fictions made by another author, so how did they come to be physically in his hands? Coffin Ada informs him they come from the other London, the Great When, a version of the city that is beyond time, in which every aspect of its history from its origin to its demise is somehow made manifest. There epochs blend and realities and unrealities blur and concets such as Crime and Poetry are incarnated as wondrous and terrible beings. Further, Coffin Ada tells Dennis, if he does not return the book to this other London, he will be killed, literally turned inside out."

So begins Dennis' adventure in Long London. To return the otherworldly book, he must dive deep into the city's occult underbelly, meeting an eccentric cast of sorcerers and gangsters, including Grace Shilling, a sex worker who agrees to help Dennis with the caveat that she will stab him if he makes any advances, Prince Monolulu, an infamous horse race tipster who claims to be an Abyssinian Prince, and Jack Spot, a ruthless mob boss looking to cement his status on top of the city's underworld. But upon entering The Great When, Dennis finds himself at the center of an explosive series of events, one that may have altered and endangered both Londons for good."

From the New York Times bestselling author and legendary storyteller Alan Moore, the first book in an incredible, enthralling new series about murder, madness, and magic in post-WWII London. Hilarious and mystical and magnificently written, The Great When is Moore's most imaginative work yet. It is the unforgettable introduction to the brilliant, staggering, consciousness-altering world of Long London.

The first book, The Great When, will be published by Bloomsbury on the 24th of September, 2024. Since 1998, Scottish Book Trust has working with partners from small community groups to the Scottish Government. As a national charity, they believe that reading and writing for pleasure have the power to transform lives and everyone should have access to their benefits. You'll find the Scottish Book Trust in schools and libraries, at community events, in towns, cities, and isolated rural communities, bringing books to life for children in care, families living in challenging circumstances, people living with dementia and people in prison.

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