Voice of the fire

‘So what’s this book about, then?’

It’s about the vital message that the stiff lips of decapitated men still shape; the testament of black and spectral dogs written in piss across our bad dreams. It’s about raising the dead to tell us what they know. It is a bridge, a crossing-point, a worn spot in the curtain between our world and the underworld, between the mortar and the myth, fact and fiction, a threadbare gauze no thicker than a page. It’s about the powerful glossolalia of witches and their magical revision of the texts we live in.

None of this is speakable. Instead, deliberate and gecko-eyed evasion: ‘Well, it’s difficult to say until it’s finished.’

I had always been hesitant to read this book because it felt like I would be found wanting in my inability to appreciate a book by a writer I have grown up with. But once you get past the baffling, mind-altering first chapter, Voice of the Fire becomes a gravity-defying leap through time, a roller-coaster pummeling of one's intestines and cranial matter.And scattered among its passages of creeping revelations and slow-burn narratives are moments of pure farce and LOLity. I should have known. It's Alan Fuckin' Moore, after all.

I think, perhaps, too oft on women for my years. The maddening petticoated presence of them, every sweep and swish a brush-stroke on the sweltering canvas of my thoughts. Their sag and swell. Their damp and occult hinges where they open up like wicked, rose-silk Bibles, or their smocks, rime-marbled underneath the arms. Their ins and outs. Their backs. Their forths. Warm underhangs and shrew-skin purses, dewed with bitter gold. Imagined, they burn fierce and sputtering, singing, incandescent in my prick, my centre. I may close the lid upon this snuff-box filled with nymphs, yet in my dreams its clasp is broke and its contents not so quickly shut away.

Once, I believed that when I’d grown into a man and married, I’d be plagued no more by the incessant posturings and partyings of my bordello mind. I would no longer suffer the relentless elbow-cramping visitations of these succubi, that mapped the foam-splashed shorelines of my passion; penned their snail cartographies upon my sheets and clouded my good sense with humid, feverish distractions. So I hoped, but it was not to be. Though wed with an obliging wife whose cosy hole was made a velvet-curtained stage where to play out my lewdest skits, the tide of jiggling shadow-pictures did not ebb, but only boomed the louder in those bed-wrapped, warm-lapped latitudes upon the shores of sleep above the snore of spouse and cot-bug’s measured tick. Denied thus any hope of swift reprieve from satyriasis, I sought to slake my thirst for carnal novelty with whores and serving-maids. When this did little more than whet an appetite already swollen, I drew consolation from the thought that soon I should be old, the imprecations of John Thomas surely grown more faint and hopeless, easily ignored.

The brilliant first-time novel by the brilliant Alan Moore.

The story is told as a collection of twelve short stories, which start in the neolithic age and gradually approach today. The protagonist of the last chapter is Moore himself who rambles about this and that and about writing this book. The main character, though, is fire – and it's fire that connects each episode.

Interestingly, Moore tells each episode in a suitable language so that for instance the 19th-century story mimics the style of Bram Stoker, the 1931 story reads like Mickey Spillane, and so on. This is particularly impressive for the first story, which takes place in 4000 BC. Here, Moore has invented a proto-language that is difficult to get into at first, but manages in a strange way to illustrate the working of the early human mind. One example: “In bove of I is many sky-beasts, big and grey. Slow is they move, as they is with no strong in they.” This is powerful stuff!