Voice of the Fire

Most comics readers have heard of Alan Moore, and EVERYONE working in comics has been influenced by him. So when he released his first prose novel several years ago (1995?) I bought a British import and read it in a few days. Devoured it. Savoured every concrescence manifesting through the man's words. Loved it.And then the book went out of print...Until Top Shelf brought it back! (yesh)Watchmen? From Hell? Tom Strong? Swamp Thing? A Small Killing? Halo Jones? Naw, it's different from all of them. Here's a quote from a current Moore interview: "I'd like to think that if I've shown anything, it's that comics are the medium of almost inexhaustible possibilities, that there have been...there are great comics yet to be written. There are things to be done with this medium that have not been done, that people maybe haven't even dreamed about trying. And, if I've had any benign influence upon comics, I would hope that it would be along those lines; that anything is possible if you approach the material in the right way. You can do some extraordinary things with a mixture of words and pictures. It's just a matter of being diligent enough and perceptive enough and working hard enough, continually honing your talent until it's sharp enough to do the job that you require."He does the same thing with prose, pushing the medium in surprising directions. The closest literary equivalent I know of is 'Ulysses' - but that takes place in one day. 'Voice of the Fire' covers a few thousand years. Both are equally dulcet and disquieting. It's a book worth owning. And rereading.

I think that Rebecca Scott explains the book best in her greenmanreview.com review. Here is an excerpt:"If Voice of the Fire has a protagonist, it must be Northampton itself, because this is the story of the formation of the mythology of that place. It is a geological study of the strata of the collective unconscious of the area. Each of its twelve chapters is the first-person story of an individual who crystallized into the forming stones in the hill of tales, whose bodies fed its grass and trees. Their histories wind through that of the land, bringing us closer and closer to the present day. Each of the chapters includes a full-color plate, a photographic character portrait by Jose Villarrubia (who contributed to the very fine graphic novel Veils). These glow softly, and have a painterly quality about them that makes even the grimmest a gem. Yet this is a text novel, not a graphic novel, and the words are the things. Very fine words they are, too: "Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world." The language is vivid, graphic (sometimes too graphic for someone who reads while eating). Each chapter, each story, has a distinct voice, radically different from the others...This book is a work of magic ... If you let it, it will work a change in your consciousness ... So come, climb this hill of tales in the night of myth, draw close to the flames, listen to the voice of the fire, and let it work its spell in you." -- Rebecca Scott, GreenManReview.com

These reviews I found would express what I think better than I can. "Part mythic cycle, part fictional history of Moore's hometown, part collection of fireside ghost stories, Voice of the Fire is as clever and well-crafted as Moore's other genre experiments, and by taking his dialogue out of word-balloons and panel arrangements, it gives his limitless literary ambition room to stretch out into new and fascinating forms." -- Tasha Robinson, The Onion "[Voice of the Fire] blends witchcraft, savagery, subjectivity, and the darkness that lies within each of us. The resulting narrative is a meditation on the twisting annals of history, the supernatural world between life and death, and the oft-thin line between fantasy and reality." -- Lloyd Babbit, MetroPulse.com By summoning up the voices of the dead and burned, Moore stakes his claim as a grand magician and, unlike his colleague in Oz, he invites us to look at him behind his curtain of fire. Now singing, now screaming, he signals his message through the flames." -- Adam White, Indyworld.com

This book's characters face down disappointments, corruptions, madness and dreams in a series of short stories - which all take place in a short radius in central England but are spaced over 6000 years (not 5000 as it says on the cover) until the present day. What can I say - one of the best books to travel through the history of England. Dark, bitter, loving, and embedded in the earth below and burning with the fire above. Passages of brilliant prose will linger - no, just stay - with you. Ideas bounce around the confines of the book, ignited by the fires it tells of. From inventing a language in the first chapter (in which Moore imagines an English language of 6000 years ago, using a vocabulary of few words) to passages that make you realise just how rich the language can be (and infrequently is) you get the sense that Moore is in control and really working at this book. Stand-outs: that first chapter, a Roman facing both the loss of Empire and the savagery of the locals, a Crusader facing his own madness and the madness of his faith - and, in one of the most beautiful descriptive texts I know, the burning at the stake of two "witches" in love.