W O R D S 1

The Alan Moore book, Voice of the Fire, is really shaping up to be a great book. As I get further into the book, lots of things are falling into place. It's almost as though there's an evolution of understanding that parallels the evolution of the characters. The book started with a character who was like some cro-magnon, pre-historic man who barely knew how to speak. It was a bit of a trial to understand at first, but now I'm feeling rewarded for my patience because, well, as I said, things are falling into place.

Aside from that though, his writing is sheer poetry. This is how he describes an old, over-weight woman living in 1618 (from the 8th chapter: "Angel Language"): "Her voice, dragged up through a surfeit of congestions, bubbles like a marsh." And later: "At this, the aged mountain made of fat swivels her head around towards the child in an usnettling fashion, with her neck so swollen that it does not seem to move, but only that her features have by some means swum across that doughy head to face another way." Gross. What an image! But so perfectly described.

Later, when talking through the voice of a lesbian witch living in 1705 (from chapter 9, "Partners in Knitting): "We are all, each of us, the stinging, bloody fragments of a God that was torn into pieces by the birth-wail of Eternity. When all the days are done, She who is Bride and Mother unto all of us shall gather every scrap of scattered being up into one place, where we shall know again what we knew at the start of things, before that dreadful sundering. All being is divided between that which is, or else that which is not. Of these the last is greater, and has more importance. To know thought is to be in another country. Everything is actual. Everything." Sounds like something a witch would say, huh? This entire chapter takes place as the witch is being burned at the stake, but all time moves in a sort of slow motion.

Earlier in this chapter, also talking through the same witch, he makes a pretty political statement about sexuality (and more specifically prostitution) and its oppression/repression: "How is it that the pleasant, simple thing of knobs in notches might provoke such scorn, and shame, and misery? Why must we take our being's sweetest part and make it yet another flint on which to gouge ourselves?"

Moore speaks about the devil, the "Black Faced Man," with such sympathy you feel a little blasphemous while reading. The experience has reminded me of when I read Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice. She made a very strong case for the Devil.

I'm curious to see how this book will end. So far, it is more and more engrossing, but I am in the last 65 pages or so, so I am hoping they'll continue an ascent of coolness.

Brian posted at 12:36 PM.