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| Ave, Glicone! |
Alan Moore: [...] Well, The Bumper Book is about magic, whereas The Great When has got some magicians in it, but it isn’t really anything that is traditional magic — I was prepared to just make most of it up. The Bumper Book is an encyclopaedic history of magic and all sorts of other things as well, but we’ve got characters like Austin Osman Spare, Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune in both.
So, there’s a tiny bit of overlap, but the intents of both books are different. One is to explain magic as it is and as it has been, and the other is an attempt to try and create something new in fantasy, without relying upon all the magical tropes you get reiterated so often in fantasy novels. [...]
I mean, the book is me and Steve but if there’s a third contributor it would have to be John, not only for his own beautiful art but his design of the entire book, and making all the other artists fit into it so beautifully. It was him who decided to have the cut-out and assemble temple at the back and the puzzle pages with the goat of Mendes as a join the dots picture, that was him. We thought as well as the immense amount of information in the book, we should have some fun as well. Something that reminds me of an old British annual like the Beano. [...]
[...] with the sequences in Long London I thought I want these to feel as disorienting as it would do if you were suddenly in another world. One of the things about this book is I’m really tired in current fantasy about how the kids go through the back of the wardrobe in Narnia and it’s not really a big deal. Y’know, people go into these worlds as if it was visiting Milton Keynes. [...]
Any time any of my characters enter The Great When, they’re vomiting, weeping, fainting, because that’s what I figure ordinary people would do, if something even slightly fantastic happened. If something happened that challenged your whole ideas of reality, you would fall to bits. Any of us would. We certainly wouldn’t be acting like action heroes. I wanted to get the alienness of this other world, I wanted to establish that. So I thought when we get to the Great When, we shift to italics, because italics makes everything seem more urgent, and shift to the present tense to make it more immediate. [...]
[about alien existence] Let’s act as if we’re on our own. If we do find some nice aliens at some point, that’ll be a treat, but let’s act as if we’re on our own and actively try and sustain life on this planet. Let’s not have these science fiction wank dreams that people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson seem to be having, this cosmic circle jerk. Let’s not talk about terraforming Mars, because anyone who knows about that stuff knows it’s impossible. First we’d have to work out what turned Mars’ electromagnetic field off in the first place, because it hasn’t got one, and then turn it back on, if that’s even possible. [...]
[about Dennis Knuckleyard's name] Well, it was the first time it’s ever happened to me where it came to be semi-conscious, and I suspect a name like that can only come to you when you’re semi-conscious. I was drifting off to sleep and I was in that hypnagogic wilderness between awake and asleep, where there’s just a load of nonsense going through your head. Just a word salad, a stream of connected words and thoughts that don’t really connect but become a narrative you’re telling yourself as you’re drifting off to sleep.
I was just on the verge of sleep when the internal narrator said “so then Dennis Knuckleyard went…” and I sat up in bed, laughing. I just thought that is the most ridiculous name I’ve ever heard, I’m going to write that down. I did have a pen and pad by the bed for writing down dreams but I’m undisciplined when it comes to that so I don’t generally do it. I’d never written an idea down in the middle of the night before, but I put the light on, wrote “Dennis Knuckleyard” and then went off to sleep. It’s a great name, I did a little piece for the local Arts Lab magazine, an experimental piece where I actually tried out the name, not the character, but it wasn’t very satisfying. When it came to The Long London books, I thought that’s the one, isn’t it.
When I found out that there had never, in the history of the world, been anybody or anything called Knuckleyard then, rather than be discouraged, I thought let’s make him part of the story; that both Dennis and his mother have no idea where his now deceased father got the name from in the first place. Did he make it up as a joke? Is it a misspelling of some foreign name? They’ll never know. It was something of a gift. [...]
What I’m enjoying about Dennis is that in the first book he’s 18. The book I’m writing now he’s 28, he’s not grown up a huge amount but he’s grown up some and he’s doing some of that in the course of the book. At 28, you’re only just out of your adolescence, we don’t get out of adolescence until we’re 25, 26, so you’re not quite settled into adult life — you’re having to pretend that you’re an adult, but you’re not quite settled into what feels like an adult identity yet. That’s where Dennis is at the moment, and it’s interesting. One of the things about writing these books, one’s in 1949, 59, 69, 79 — twenty year gap — 1999.So, characters like Dennis, you can show their development up through fifty years and you can also do that with the book’s main character, which is London. [...]
[about Glycon] Glycon, in various forms, is in the room with us. He’s on a bunch of Romanian postage stamps and money, that I’ve been sent over the year that have images of Glycon on.
It’s still a very big part of my life, even if he was a glove puppet. Especially because he was a glove puppet. [...]
The complete interview is available HERE.
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