Alan Moore's Illuminations is a truly mind-bending phenomenon

Any new work of fiction by Alan Moore is an event, of course, but even by the man’s own lofty standards, his new collection Illuminations (recently released by Bloomsbury India) is a truly mind-bending phenomenon. For newcomers to Moore’s style, it is a worthy introduction to his many gifts as a writer: matchless wit, a distinctive brand of dark humour, three-dimensional characters, a certain flair for capturing linguistic styles from different eras. For Moore fans, anybody familiar with his oeuvre, it’s a bit like a greatest hits package, all his familiar themes (organised religion, 60s-style horror, the hypocrisies of the comicbook industry) popping up in successive short stories.

The first story itself, ‘Hypothetical Lizard’ is a strange, twisty and ultimately circular short story that draws inspiration of a number of disparate sources: the medieval text A Thousand and One Nights is a clear well of inspiration, as is the thought experiment called ‘Schrodinger’s Cat’. The narrative follows a pair of sex workers (Rawra Chin and Foral Yatt) at a brothel (called, poignantly, ‘the House Without Clocks’) and their on-again, off-again relationship — a sprawling, hyper-stylized tale of stardom, ambition and revenge. Even the ‘intermediary figure’ chosen by Moore to tells us the story of these two is compelling; a girl named Som-Som who had undergone a barbaric procedure called ‘The Silencing’ prior to joining the House Without Clocks.

“Connecting the brain’s hemispheres there existed a single gristly thread, the thoroughfare by which the urgent neural messages of the preverbal and intuitive right lobe might pass to its more rational and active counterpart upon the left. In Som-Som, this delicate bridge would be destroyed, severed by a sharp knife, so as to permit no further communication between the two halves of the child’s psyche. (…) She awoke as two separate people, unspeaking strangers who shared the same skin without collaboration or conference.”

Despite her condition, Som-Som evolves to develop her own brand of comprehension, not to mention a distinctive style of conversation wherein she cannot tell whether the person in front of her has stopped talking. The auditory and vocal parts of her are not in communication with each other. As we discover through the course of ‘Hypothetical Lizard’, this has its own advantages and even offers her a kind of philosophical insight into the human condition. This is classic Alan Moore: his characters often do not choose their ‘abilities’ and in fact have to adapt to them in physical and metaphysical ways.

“Som-Som had nonetheless contrived to reach a plateau of understanding, an internal vantage point overlooking the vast sphere of human activity from which the Broken Mask had excluded her. This perspective afforded her certain insights that were at once acute and peculiar. She understood, for example, that quite apart from being a limitless ocean of fortune, the world was also a churning maelstrom of sex. Establishments such as the House Without Clocks were islands within that current, where people were washed ashore by the tides of need and loneliness.”

The grandmaster of the comics world

For the uninitiated, the 68-year-old Alan Moore is widely regarded as perhaps the greatest comics writer of all time. Books like From Hell, Watchmen and V for Vendetta are all comics landmarks, with the latter two having inspired movies and TV shows. My personal favourite The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the DC series he co-created with Kevin O’Neill, is a typically maximalist Alan Moore affair — his ironic gaze encompasses Victorian, Gothic and Modernist literature, spy novels, the pioneering science fiction works of Jules Verne and, of course, comics.

Over the years, Moore has not been shy about his disdain for the comicbook industry. Watchmen, of course, is his elaborate, virtuosic subversion of superhero comics tropes. He’s had revenue disputes with major publishers. He resented the clumsy adaptation attempts re: Watchmen through the mid-90s and early 2000s, culminating in a film version which Moore refused to be attached to (the film does not mention his name anywhere, crediting only Dave Gibbons, the artist on the book).

In Illuminations, too, the bulk of the 400-odd pages are devoted to a parodic novella called ‘What We Can Know About Thunderman’. It’s a bit rambling (I personally would have clipped 50 pages off it, as an editor) and occasionally loses control of its satirical voice. But for the most part, it is surreal, laugh-out-loud funny and painfully accurate in depicting the comicbook industry’s cartel-ish ways. It begins with a major comics executive sitting at a table full of writers, none of whom realize that the ‘frozen’ grin the man is sporting is, in fact, because of his death. It only gets weirder and more brutally funny from that point onwards. Sample this passage, where Moore presents a short and merciless life-summary for one ‘Sherman Glad’, a writer whose comics career was nuked after he tried to form…a union.

“A pulp science fiction writer moonlighting in comics, Sherman had created many of American’s best known and mostenduring characters, but then in 1965 had tried, with other scriptwriters, to form a union. Needless to say, Glad and those other old guys were immediately fired, replaced as writers by an eager swarm of youthful comic fans who, grateful to be living out their boyhood dreams, seemed unaware or unconcerned that they were putting previously lionised creators out of work. Out went the grizzled 1950s hipsters like James Flaver, Edward Hannigan, and Sherman Glad, who’d made ends meet by grinding out genre-specific paperback pornography.”

But Moore is also a comics romantic; whatever he might say about the industry, he loves the medium. And this genuine affection comes through in the novella, like in this passage about a young boy (and future comics executive) being drawn towards the new titles displayed in a local comicbook store.

“They were all so enticing, with their covers lit-up windows on to worlds ofblazing satisfaction. All the pictures and the colours printed so much better on the shiny cover paper than they did on the insides, so that each one became a longed-for jewel, with skies of beautifully graded cyan, capes like banners, ochre Kansas dust. He loved the arcane cover furniture, the little disc up at the top left where it said American and Thunderman, the large serrated stamp at the top right that meant the issue was approved of by the Comics Code Authority, the glorious logos hurtling with speed lines or in chiselled platinum on brooding violet cumulus. They had a glaze, a lustre that was metaphysical.”

What makes Illuminations click

Over and above its many obvious strengths, Illuminations works because it understands the value of retaining just the right amount of inscrutability throughout. Take ‘American Light: An Appreciation’, for example. This story is in the form of a critical essay on a 60s ‘Beat Generation’ writer Moore made up—it starts off as affectionate parody of Kerouac and co. But as you start getting into the essay itself you realise that Moore has another, secondary target: the highfalutin, self-consciously literary essay, which was also on the rise at around the same time (think Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion et al). By the end of the story, Moore has achieved the perfect convergence, both tonally and in terms of content. It really is a wickedly clever tale.

This inscrutability also extends to his characterisation in several places. In the first story ‘Hypothetical Lizard’, for instance, the former brothel worker Rawra Chin becomes a globally famous movie star. This is how Moore describes Chin’s impenetrable charisma:

“The common bond shared by all those who admired this charisma within Rawra Chin was that none of them could precisely identify it. It remained a mystery,concealed somewhere within the oddly disparate components of her broad and starkly decorated face, hovering at some imaginary point of focus between her hasty pencil-line of a mouth and her widely spaced eyes, overwhelmingly tangible, eternally ungraspable.”

In a way, Moore’s whole career has been spent describing the tension between the ‘overwhelmingly tangible’ and the ‘eternally ungraspable’. In Watchmen, the anti-hero Ozymandias is forever struggling to describe a world only he can truly see in all its horror. In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the ageless Orlando (from Virginia Woolf’s eponymous novel) is a kind of living representation of this concept—the other characters can see him and talk to him but they cannot grasp the depth of his vision, because they do not have the benefit of his hundreds of years of life.

Illuminations is a fine new entry to the bibliography of a modern-day master. While a couple of stories here could have used a stricter editor, this is a versatile and cerebral book on the whole.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.

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