Alan Moore's second Long London volume gets a mixed review
Le Temps finds the follow-up to the pentalogy's opening book compact but confused, marking, in its critic's view, the first sign of strain in a major fantasist's work.
Alan Moore, known for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Watchmen, has published the second volume of his five-book Long London sequence. Reviewing it for Le Temps, the Swiss paper's books section describes the book as compact and confused, and says it shows, for the first time, the limits of an author it calls brilliant.
According to Le Temps, the opening scene is remarkable: a scene grounded at the meeting point of grim reality and strange fantasy, in which Atlas, a powerful draft horse hauling debris meant to fill a giant pit from which modern buildings will rise, slips and is dragged down into the mire that crushes him. A point of light then emerges from the muck and darkness, described as a Tinker Bell-like figure, which brings the crushed horse back to life and rides its skeleton toward oblivion. The reviewer calls this passage Alan Moore at the height of his art.
The rest of the book, Le Temps writes, is less grand. The review is titled, in its original headline, a reference to Moore showing signs of flagging with this installment, following the first Long London volume, which the paper had earlier covered under the heading "Londres dans l'ombre de Londres."
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
