I Hear a New World by Alan Moore

Alan Moore returns to Long London with the same appetite for occult history, linguistic excess and unruly invention that shaped The Great When.

Set in 1958, I Hear a New World finds Dennis Knuckleyard older, marginally steadier, and determined to leave his earlier adventures in the Great When behind him. This, of course, proves impossible. A key smuggled from that other London reawakens forces Dennis barely understands, drawing him back into a world of magical danger, criminal intrigue and historical absurdity.

The premise is rich in Moore’s preferred materials: hidden cities, working-class London, literary arcana, pop-cultural ghosts and the porous border between fantasy and social history. Dennis remains a wonderfully ungainly protagonist, less heroic than persistently dragged into significance. His awkwardness, bad judgement and decency make him a useful guide through a novel that might otherwise collapse under the weight of its own invention. Grace Shilling, too, gives the book emotional shape, particularly as her own movement through Long London complicates Dennis’s desire to rescue or protect her.

Moore’s 1958 is not only a historical setting but a pressure chamber. The city is shifting under the force of immigration, music, post-war redevelopment, racial tension and the fading certainty of empire. The Notting Hill riots, the rise of new pop sounds and the presence of figures such as Joe Meek are folded into the fantasy rather than placed beside it. At his best, Moore suggests that the strange city beneath London is not an escape from history, but an exaggerated form of it.

The prose is often dazzling. Moore can produce descriptions that feel both grotesque and exact, giving impossible beings a texture the reader can almost touch. His sentences swagger, mutate and pile image upon image with the confidence of a writer who has no interest in restraint for its own sake. This freedom is part of the pleasure of the book. It is also its most obvious risk. There are stretches where the density becomes tiring, where the historical references feel less integrated than displayed, and where the forward motion of the plot slows beneath the weight of digression.

That imbalance may well divide readers. Those who want a lean fantasy thriller may find I Hear a New World frustratingly ornate. The novel’s structure can feel lumpy, with long build-ups and periods in which Dennis seems to avoid the very story he is meant to inhabit. Some revelations land with less force than their preparation suggests. Yet to judge the book only by conventional pacing would miss the peculiar nature of Moore’s project. The Long London series is not just telling an adventure story. It is building a mythic counter-history of the city, where jokes, nightmares, forgotten artists, occult symbols and political violence jostle for space.

I Hear a New World may not have the freshness of The Great When, and it sometimes strains under the pressure of Moore’s own cleverness. Even so, it remains a formidable act of imagination. Its best passages are funny, unsettling and strangely beautiful, and its world has a grimy magnetism few writers could sustain. For readers already invested in Long London, this second volume deepens the architecture. Moore has written a crowded, uneven and frequently brilliant novel about a city that refuses to stay in one world, and a man who cannot quite escape the one that chose him.

Reviewer: Chris Reed

Bloomsbury