By: Alan Moore Publisher: Top Shelf Productions Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 304 Publication Date: July 01, 2009 Studio: Top Shelf Productions
Product Description: In a story full of lust, madness, and ecstasy, we meet twelve distinctive characters that lived in the same region of central England over the span of six thousand years. Their narratives are woven together in patterns of recurring events, strange traditions, and uncanny visions. First, a cave-boy loses his mother, falls in love, and learns a deadly lesson. He is followed by an extraordinary cast of characters: a murderess who impersonates her victim, a fisherman who believes he has become a different species, a Roman emissary who realizes the bitter truth about the Empire, a crippled nun who is healed miraculously by a disturbing apparition, an old crusader whose faith is destroyed by witnessing the ultimate relic, two witches, lovers, who burn at the stake. Each interconnected tale traces a path in a journey of discovery of the secrets of the land. In the tradition of Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, Schwob's Imaginary Lives, and Borges' A Universal History of Infamy, Alan Moore (Watchmen, From Hell, Lost Girls) travels through history blending truth and conjecture, in a novel that is dazzling, moving, sometimes tragic, but always mesmerizing. Now available in paperback for the first time in America! With an Introduction by Neil Gaiman, a signature of full-color plates by Jose Villarrubia, and a cover design by Chip Kidd.
"The Vital Message That Dead Men's Lips Still Speak" ^ Whenever an admired comic book writer makes the crossover from comics to novels I usually leap at the chance to see how the writer acquits himself. To varying degrees I've never been disappointed, and such is the case with Alan Moore's novel "Voice of the Fire". Moore is a fantastic writer, not just in terms of storytelling, but also in how he arranges words on a page to accurately simulate the characters that speak through him. The novel, speaking through the men and women who have occupied the same stretch of England over thousands of years, is a masterful effort. Each section is spoken in the diction that resembles just how the narrator would have talked in that time period, from the jaunty ebullience of the bigamist in the 1930's to the jaded crusader in the 1100's, and even the decapitated head in 1607. I am not the first reviewer to comment on the difficulty of the first chapter's narrator, a half-witted man-child cast from his tribe after the death of his mother. Moore expertly constructs a point of view using a vocabulary of about 40 words or so, but even I found it difficult to slog through (I kept hoping I would unlock a rhythm much as I did in Faulkner's "Sound and the Fury" but I didn't). The advice offered by the writer of the introduction, a writer by the name of Neil Gaiman, is that it's not necessary to start at the beginning. Once you begin to understand the the dark forces that have permeated the whole of human history, you just might be intrigued enough to see how murder and religion came to be joined together.
"Here is clever deep enough to drown in." ^ I just finished this last night - what an intellectual workout. I don't recall feeling this spent upon completing a novel since I read Moby-Dick (Dover Giant Thrift Editions), and that was almost twenty years ago. If you're coming to this thinking, "I'm in the mood for a little light reading - I think I'll try the novel by that comic book guy," you've come to the wrong place.
VOICE OF THE FIRE is first and foremost a work of experimental fiction. If you're familiar with Alan Moore, you'll know that whether he's working in comics, prose, or performance art, he's all about pushing boundaries, and VOICE OF THE FIRE continues in this tradition. This is wonderful, but presents a tremendous stumbling block in the book's first chapter, "Hob's Hog". If you've read anything about the novel, you probably know that "Hob's Hog" is narrated by a mentally challenged Neolithic boy with a vocabulary of about 400 words. It's extremely challenging, but it's not quite as difficult as it sounds, especially since there are some pretty good resources on the net to help you puzzle it out (why, I'll bet you could find one just by looking at the by-line of this review!). The upside of this is that the rest of the book is (relatively speaking) plain sailing, although you still may want to do a little research on prehistoric Britain and the poet John Clare (the subject of one of the novel's later chapters) before diving in.
In conclusion, if you're intrigued by the experimental, the historical, or the places where beauty and terror meet, check this one out.
Also recommended:
A Clockwork Orange (1962) - Anthony Burgess Flowers for Algernon (1966) - Daniel Keyes 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - Arthur C. Clarke
Spellbinding! ^ I lucked upon this book thru a reccomendation of Amazon's (clever dudes). I am SO glad I bought it! The other 4-5 star reviews reflect my enchantment with the book. Each story is written in the 1st person, and Moore makes these people distinct and interesting.
The reviewer who lamented that the book lacks cohesion is either turned off by the subject matter or dark atmosphere of the stories, for the stories ARE connected in many ways. Like any other Moore work, this one will just get better and better with repeated readings. The connections will come out more clearly. This is, I believe, the mark of a brilliant piece of writing; layers of meaning from just a story well told to a complex web of images and meanings. This IS a very visual book.
For instance (NOT A SPOILER), in the "Partners in Knitting," it's revealed that the spectral black dogs, shagfoal, appear to humans at "places where things have a choice to them and where the veil between what is and what is not grows worn and threadbare, rending easily."
I immediately paged back to the previous story, "Angel Language", and sure enough, the pivot point in the narrator's destiny occurs just after he sees a shagfoal loping across the fields at speed with the coach. And he makes the choice himself. Later on, while he is in town he looks about for the animal he spotted, and I suppose the reader could now see that he could yet change his destiny. (But alas, no dog appeared.)
And two of the stories mirror each other with a real family coming before an imagined one, and an imagined one coming before a real one.
Being a history fan, I loved how Moore pulled in historic persons and places. I believe one of the reviewers complained about the lack of punctuation in "The Sun Looks Pale Upon The Wall"? Five minutes of Google will tell you that John Clare, the poet, wrote without punctuation in his early works. Moore isn't doing that to be "clever". He's making it real. And the mentally challanged cave boy? Sure the text is tough at first, but we're not talking beach-vacation-chick-lit book here. This novel expects you to use your brain. (Not that there's anything wrong with escapist reading sometimes, just don't criticize this work for not being something it was never meant to be.)
I am greatly looking forward to picking up this book again in a few months and putting some more puzzle pieces together...links Moore intended, and one I alone see. Thanks, Alan Moore!!!
never received item ^ I never received this item, would like to make a formal complaint and would like to receive my book.
an epochal masterwork ^ profoundly brilliant, a tour de force. If you are reading this review then you should probably read this book. unlikely to ever be widely popular for all of the obvious reasons and some a bit more obscure, bound to offend many- most of whom probably need to be offended anyway.
the chapter detailing the first crusade from first person perspective should be required reading for anybody who still uses the term to denote something positive, regardless of whether the climactic revelation is factual or historical or not.
whatever criticisms might be leveled against it, valid or otherwise, this is a masterpiece. i don't think i'll keep it in my house because i wouldn't want my children to read it (before they're ready).
Anything Goes Trivia
Last Kiss
Megaton Man
Trevor
