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Title: Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore, Jose Villarrubia, Neil Gaiman ISBN: 1-891830-44-9 Publisher: Top Shelf Productions Pub. Date: January, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.25 (12 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The White Heat of Life
Comment: In "Postscript to The Name of the Rose," Umberto Eco notes that so many diverse cultures have invested the rose with significance for so many centuries, that as a symbol, it has become practically void of meaning. But what is the metaphoric weight of a single flower to that of one of the four elements? In the course of Voice of the Fire, the element's true nature proves to be ever-evasive yet constantly radiant, at times even brilliant.
Originally published in 1996 in the UK, comics writer Alan Moore's first novel has recently been given its American debut by Top Shelf. Forsaking a continual narrative and spanning some 6000 years, the novel consists of twelve chapters, all of which are set in or around the English city of Northampton during the month of November. As Northampton has been Moore's hometown for the duration of his life, and November the month of his birth, Voice of the Fire can be taken as a piece of "site-specific" writing in which Moore seeks to get a firmer grasp on the history of the city and his own life. He goes about this psychogeographical experiment by delving into the strata of local legend and history from 4000 BCE to 1995, picking up uncanny details and strange connections along the way.
The origins of this unusual novel most certainly lie in Moore's 1994 decision to become a magician (think Aleister Crowley or Austin Osman Spare), and Voice of the Fire is one of his first works to directly reflect the impact of that choice. Although it is impossible to summarize Moore's complex beliefs in a single statement, it is useful to note that for Moore, magic is a way to explore questions about the nature of creativity: What is happening to the artist when he is creating art? What kind of sources are being tapped into during the act of creation? Questions like these are at the heart of the novel, and Moore explores them with his usual ingenuity.
However, since the history of magic and witchcraft is also the history of secrecy and persecution, the novel presents an array of characters trying to understand both their experiences with the supernatural as well as the reactions of the people around them. The encounters range from the comparably mundane to the utterly fantastic - from a fisherman who discovers that the whole population of his village has disappeared without a trace, to witches who conjure up imps to do their bidding.
Voice of the Fire aligns itself with Moore's other magical "works" of the period, particularly his performances with the grandiosely named The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theater of Marvels. As he makes evident through these works, the essential assumption behind magic is that an overlay of meaningful symbolism can be assigned to the world. These symbols in turn can be used to build up a conceptual structure which somehow yields results that couldn't be reached as easily (or at all) by other means. Like religion, philosophy, and other systems of thought, magic tries to strike a balance between so-called reality and its kaleidoscopic distortions. But the thing that seems to separate magic (or at least certain types of magical thinking) from most other models of thought is its willingness to revise its foundations and practices. Magic revels in the complexities of human experience, and doesn't consider all that ragtag data in the back of our heads as a nuisance. Rather, magic welcomes the distortions and paradoxes that form such a considerable part of the human consciousness, and tries to turn these notions into something truly worthwhile.
By telling twelve tales centered around the element of fire, Moore has embraced the myriad potential meanings it evokes in the reader's imagination. After all, it's just the matter of a jump-cut from the fire beneath a cauldron to the burning pyre of a witch hunt, or from the purifying white light of Pentecost to the tormenting flames of hell. Indeed, this contrary pairing of the extreme states of purification and torment seems to be something that Moore is aiming at in Voice of the Fire: to relay in prose the white heat of life.
As a nice touch, the Top Shelf edition of Voice of the Fire includes thirteen color plates by digital artist José Villarrubia. His illustrations further the novel's atmosphere, as well as avoid the two major pitfalls of book illustration. First, the use of artwork is not excessive, and thus doesn't shift the reader's attention away from the novel itself. And second, Villarrubia's images do not attempt to subvert the reader's imagination by somehow presenting a more "authoritative" visualization of Moore's suggestive prose.
Rating: 5
Summary: This book is a work of magic
Comment: I think that Rebecca Scott explains the book best in her greenmanreview.com review. Here is an excerpt:
"If Voice of the Fire has a protagonist, it must be Northampton itself, because this is the story of the formation of the mythology of that place. It is a geological study of the strata of the collective unconscious of the area. Each of its twelve chapters is the first-person story of an individual who crystallized into the forming stones in the hill of tales, whose bodies fed its grass and trees. Their histories wind through that of the land, bringing us closer and closer to the present day.
Each of the chapters includes a full-color plate, a photographic character portrait by Jose Villarrubia (who contributed to the very fine graphic novel Veils). These glow softly, and have a painterly quality about them that makes even the grimmest a gem. Yet this is a text novel, not a graphic novel, and the words are the things. Very fine words they are, too: "Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world." The language is vivid, graphic (sometimes too graphic for someone who reads while eating). Each chapter, each story, has a distinct voice, radically different from the others...
This book is a work of magic ... If you let it, it will work a change in your consciousness ... So come, climb this hill of tales in the night of myth, draw close to the flames, listen to the voice of the fire, and let it work its spell in you." -- Rebecca Scott, GreenManReview.com
Rating: 5
Summary: a disturbing, stunning, even heartrending meditation
Comment: These reviews I found would express what I think better than I can.
"Part mythic cycle, part fictional history of Moore's hometown, part collection of fireside ghost stories, Voice of the Fire is as clever and well-crafted as Moore's other genre experiments, and by taking his dialogue out of word-balloons and panel arrangements, it gives his limitless literary ambition room to stretch out into new and fascinating forms." -- Tasha Robinson, The Onion
"[Voice of the Fire] blends witchcraft, savagery, subjectivity, and the darkness that lies within each of us. The resulting narrative is a meditation on the twisting annals of history, the supernatural world between life and death, and the oft-thin line between fantasy and reality." -- Lloyd Babbit, MetroPulse.com
By summoning up the voices of the dead and burned, Moore stakes his claim as a grand magician and, unlike his colleague in Oz, he invites us to look at him behind his curtain of fire. Now singing, now screaming, he signals his message through the flames." -- Adam White, Indyworld.com
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Title: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 2 (Comic) by Alan Moore ISBN: 1401201172 Publisher: DC Comics Pub. Date: 01 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Promethea (Book 1) by Alan Moore, Mick Gray, J. H. Williams III ISBN: 1563896672 Publisher: DC Comics Pub. Date: 01 July, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: FROM HELL by Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell ISBN: 0958578346 Publisher: Eddie Campbell Comics Pub. Date: April, 2000 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Endless Nights (The Sandman, Book 11) by Neil Gaiman ISBN: 1401200893 Publisher: DC Comics Pub. Date: 17 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore by George Khoury, Alan Moore ISBN: 1893905241 Publisher: Twomorrows Publishing Pub. Date: July, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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