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Book notes - Illuminations, by Alan Moore
I just finished Illuminations by Alan Moore a few nights ago - well, I'm counting it as finished though strictly speaking I didn't finish every one of the stories. There are 9 in total, ranging enormously in size from a few pages (And at the Last, Just to be Done with Silence) to a novella (What we can Know About Thunderman). Short stories rarely work for me unless they're very well crafted, which I didn't feel was the case here. So read these comments with the caveat that I'm probably not the right audience. In passing, you'll get that he likes story titles that are long, and rarely reveal anything obvious about the story.
Some of the setups and / or backgrounds of the stories were interesting - indeed, the situation of the first one, Hypothetical Lizard, was quite compelling, and this made a good first section to tackle. But after that things became very uneven. Also, in most cases I wasn't sure what the central point of the story was - several seemed to be kind of writer's exercises given a topic, and I never got the feeling that there was much commitment driving them. So each time I was left with the question, "what's he trying to say here?" and in almost all the cases I couldn't really answer that.
Alan Moore, judging by the bio blurb, works mostly with comics / graphic novels, and after checking out his entry in Wiki, it's clear that he is highly accomplished in that field. So maybe he's seeking to branch out into more prose forms? The novella (Thunderman) is explicitly about the world of comics and, I suppose, is based on his experience of that world. Sadly this made it (for me, at least) rather impenetrable as a tale, and I gave up after a few sections of that one as it didn't really seem to be saying anything other than some probably witty and apposite allusions to real figures in the comic book world.
Alan Moore comes over as having a very British style of writing and humour, even when the stories are not in Britain (like Thunderman) or indeed on planet Earth at all (like Hypothetical Lizard). One of the tales (Location, Location, Location) is a retelling of the biblical book of Revelation in which all the events take place in or in the sky above Bedford, with the understanding that that is also where the Garden of Eden was located, But unlike some other British humour authors in the speculative field (eg Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams) I never got the sense that there was something serious behind the wit.
Who would like it? Well, I have to confess I'm not sure! The stories are of such varied length that you couldn't imagine someone reading them through on a journey, as you'd never be sure what time to commit to it. And most of them are quite demanding in terms of getting to grips with a very alien setting in one way or another. So it would be hard to recommend the book to a newbie SFF reader. These two factors combine so that you start to wonder if it's worth engaging with the oddity of setting for (in some cases) a very short story, Probably you'd have to be someone who is already a fan of his, and wants to devour some longer prose as well as comic strips.