Moore is a wizardly prose stylist whose sentences flow in a Joycean stream ... If you’re looking for a writer to ensorcell you in a saga of hard-boiled crime and surrealist horror, here is your magus.
A book with a keen sense of the uncanny, has a pleasant lightness ... Paced like the kind of adventure story at which Moore so excelled in his comics scripts, and written in an urbane voice rich with jokes and memorable names and turns of phrase. It’s a sort of reversal of Waugh or Wodehouse — the witty narration is retained but instead of a realistic novel about the marriageable upper classes, we have a monster-filled fantasy about a virginal working-class sad sack.
Both gothic and baroque ... There’s a delirious and generous campness to The Great When. Freed from the tyranny of the speech bubble, you sense Moore is really, really having fun.
His maximalist prose isn’t for everyone ... Ddging away from Ripper territory into a wider and more generous vision of what London was, is and may become.
Full-on psychogeologist mode, envisioning deep time – with its glowering, mesmerising violence – beneath the surface of everything that masquerades as the present day ... There are set-pieces involving self-stabbing giants which would be catnip for the makers of those mega-budget film adaptations Moore abhors; a romantic subplot too. Key characters reveal themselves as much younger than they initially seem. As narrative, it can at times be stop-start, opting too often for exposition and exegesis
Expansive and ambitious ... Readers seeking big ideas and colorful splashes of language will love exploring The Great When—and look forward to future entries in the Long London series.
Moore brings the rich detail and intricate plotting familiar to his fans to the first epic fantasy in his Long London series ... The worldbuilding is extraordinary and the plot is utterly gripping. Readers are sure to be sucked in.
