PotsandPlots

Plant With: Fiction, Urban Fantasy, Occult

Grows Into: Multi-facted tale about art, artists and London folklore.

Rating: 🌻🌻🌻 – Hardy Perennial (Out of 3 – check here for rating description)

Purchased Copy. Out now in paperback – Find it on bookshop.org (Affiliate Link).

The Review

I finished reading The Great When on the plane back from my holiday (on November 1st). I loved it, but I have really struggled to unpack why.

Sometimes reviewing acclaimed authors can seem like a waste of time. Who wants to know when some pleb with keyboard thinks about Kazuo Ishiguro? I don’t normally let that stop me.

It was with some trepidation that I opened The Great When. I was worried that this tale of the macabre and occult would be too wordy – too weird – for my tastes. It looked a bit like The City and The City a novel by China Mieville that was critically acclaimed and much admired, but left me cold and confused. (I’m not sure I ever made it to Un Lun Dun, which seems like another novel with similarities to The Great When)

I found Moore’s writing to be much more engaging. There are definitely some peculiar and mindbending passages in the book. Moore certainly is happy to use multiple long words when a few short ones might have done instead, but I found the book warm, funny, and filled with delightful description.

The book is set in London after the Second World War. Our main character is Dennis (with the unlikely surname of Knuckleyard), a teenager hapless enough to collapse from one calamity to the next.

Orphaned Dennis lives and works in a bookshop belonging to the terrifying Coffin Ada, who sends him on a errand to pick up a collection of occult titles that somebody is selling on. Dennis gets what he thinks is an excellent price for them, only to discover he’s purchased a book that doesn’t exist. One that puts a mark on his back from an Underworld the likes of which few have experienced. The price for the books may have been cheap, but the cost comes high.

The rest of the The Great When charts Dennis’ attempts to return a book that should not exist back from where it came. To do this he taps into a hidden side of London, both literal and metaphorical.

When reading, The Great When, I was struck by an overwhelming thought: “This is impressive.” Ideas fizzed off the page, complex language was woven to make an enaging narrative. I wanted to fall into the book and keep on going.

It’s a book steeped in London. Geography, history, psychology. It taps into the offbeat side of the city. Its art, its artists, its storytellers and the snippets of folklore that feed into its traditions and its rich history of the occult and its practitioners.

The novel’s characters are wonderful. Real people in somewhat unreal situations. It starts to do for London what N.K. Jemisin did for New York with her The City We Became. I loved both books.

The Great When is stuffed full of literary allusions and references. I’m sure many of them passed over my head. It’s the sort of book that bears repeated reading. I’ll definitely try to read this again before I read book 2, I Hear a New World, which is out in May 2026. The only problem with rereads is they make keeping up with the TBR pile even more difficult.

Whatever I end up doing, Moore’s “Long London” books are going to be high on my list of want-to-reads!