Some of the joy in this book lies in watching a master storyteller take the voices of the dead as his own: the nameless psychopathic girl who visits the town-tattooed Hob, with her stolen name and stolen band of copper, could be coiling through a bronze age detective story her come-uppance is another burning on another bonfire, one unexpected and cruel and appropriate. It is November, somewhere near the day that will come to be known as Guy Fawke’s Night, when, to this day, effigies are burned on bonfires while children watch. The shagfoal are here, huge black dogs that run in dreams and darkness, and the hair severed from the dead head of the woman beneath the bridge, and the foot of the boy’s mother protruding from her grave, and the final, heartbreaking bonfire. It is not the easiest of starting points, although it is a tour de force, and it sets up all the elements that will recur through the book. He will also tell his story in the most idiosyncratic narrative since Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (or, perhaps, Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing story “Pog”), using a tiny vocabulary, the present tense, and an inability to tell dreams from reality. When the book was published, in 1996, it made less impression on the world than it should have: it was a paperback original, which began, with no explanation, with the personal narrative of a half-witted man-child, at the end of the stone age – his mother has died, his nomadic tribe has abandoned him, he will face the evil and trickery of those smarter than he is (everyone is smarter than he is), and he will also discover love, and learn what a lie is, and the fate of the pig in the Hob-man’s hoghouse. It’s a carousel ride, not a race, a magical history tour, no more evolutionary than it is revolutionary, in which the only prizes are patterns and people and voices, severed heads and lamed feet, black dogs and crackling November flames which repeat like the suits of a deranged tarot deck. But the narrative, like the town, is only linear if you want it to be, and if you expect to get a prize for getting to the end you’ve already lost. If this were a linear narrative we would follow Northampton, voice by voice, head to head and heart to heart, from a stopping place in a pig pen for a half-witted youth, through Ham Town to a bustling medieval town to now. The best introduction is the final chapter of the book, written in a smoky room in November 1995 by Alan Moore in the voice of Alan Moore, dry and funny and much, much too smart for our own good, written in a room piled with the books he has used as research, written as a final act of magic and faith. It is not the best introduction to this book, of course. I am sitting in a room in the Netherlands, in an anachronistic Victorian castle, writing an introduction to a book called Voice of the Fire, by Alan Moore. It is a circle that will take you several miles and six thousand years. It is a circle made of black dogs and November fires, of dead feet and severed heads, of longing and loss and lust. The circle here is temporal, and the circle is geographical. One measures a circle starting anywhere, said Alan Moore, quoting Charles Fort, at the beginning of his exploration of Victorian society, From Hell.
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