On Machen and Long London

Excerpt from The View from Canons Park: Arthur Machen and the Writing of Long London, a text written by Moore and published in Faunus n. 51 (pp. 13-25).

Alan Moore: [...] Machen’s narratives, especially those courting ecstasy and terror, do not offer anything as simpleminded as escapism, but rather would seem to promote a more perceptive and involved engagement with the mysteries of our mortal condition. Given that, politically, Machen’s position and my own would almost certainly be very different, it is not political but overarching human relevance that I find in his fantasies and, for that matter, in all of the fantasies from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress through to Brian Catling’s Vorrh that I consider to be relevant to their historic moments; that I feel successfully perform fantasy’s one real job, which is to cast light on reality from a projected point outside it. For the genre to achieve this apex would seem to require a burning passion in the fantasist concerned, to demand the conviction and commitment that we find in William Blake, or Rabelais, or in the major works of Arthur Machen.

[...] it must be a fantasy that had some kind of relevance to the contemporary world where, with luck, it is being read. I had decided by then that the story taking shape would need five volumes to tell properly, and that these would be set successively at the ends of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and, after a narrative gap of some twenty years, the 1990s. The sequences, both those set in historic London and its underlying, glorious symbolic counterpart, enable me, I realised, to obliquely speak about our present century by offering an alternate history of the last one; a poetic, metaphorical account of how we got here, making Machen’s secret capital into a place outside of history that lends us a fresh angle from which to observe that history, a view from Canons Park. This, at least, is the hare-brained theory that I’m hoping will sustain both me and this unprecedented venture over these next few slapstick dystopian years. I’m just starting book three as I write this and, at least so far, my bizarre hypothesis seems to be holding up. [...]