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The Great When, by Alan Moore
The Great When, by Alan Moore, is another book passed on to me by our local bookseller.
So, I enjoyed this one rather more than the other Alan Moore he passed on to me (the short story collection Illuminations). It was definitely on the weirder side of the spectrum, and definitely a very long undertaking, but kept going with a good pace and I was never inclined to abandon it or anything like that. And I think one would classify this as more definitely fantasy rather than SF, whereas Illuminations was a bit of both.
Alan Moore is, of course, much better known as a writer of graphic novels, and The Great When felt extraordinarily visual, as though he had drafted it originally in graphic form and then converted it to text. So the descriptions of London (both the post-WW2 actual London and the parallel magical one) are extremely dense with description. Indeed, the actual plot is rather thin and could have been dealt with in a novella or such like, but I don't think anyone would read this for the plot. You'd read it because of the setting and the descriptions thereof. It reminded me in places of Where's Wally - not in the sense that you're trying to find someone, but rather in that there's a constant sense of studying the content very closely just to try and spot everything that's there.
The plot, in a nutshell, is like this. The protagonist, a rather geeky adolescent who works in a bookshop in an unprepossessing part of east London, gets accidentally caught up with an artefact from the alternative London. The two are never supposed to overlap and it's widely understood that Bad Things will happen if they get too close. That all happens quite early on; the rest of the book is devoted to undoing the damage which has been done. It's kind of hard to describe the later parts, as they're quite intricately depicted and depend successively on each other. There isn't really a grand resolution of the problem - more an acceptance that the protagonist has seen and experienced what he has, and even if he shouldn't really have done so, what's past is past and has to be lived with. It's possible to imagine Moore writing other books based on the same concept, but I rather think he won't, and will be satisfied with what he has done in this book.
Who would like it? I don't think it would be a good introduction to fantasy for someone who has never read any before. On the other hand, if someone has read a fair bit of fantasy of different flavours, then this would be an interesting addition. Fans of Alan Moore's graphic works would, I think, find a lot more to enjoy and recognise in The Great When than Illuminations, and I'd definitely recommend it to them - provided they were willing to commit to a lengthy read!