Voice of the Fire

by Alan Moore

Master storyteller Alan Moore (Watchmen) delivers twelve interconnected stories of lust, madness, and ectasy, all set in central England and spanning over six thousand years, the narratives 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 related 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, Moore travels through history, blending truth and conjecture, in a novel that is dazzling, moving, sometimes tragic, but always mesmerizing.

This edition presents Voice of the Fire for the first time in hardcover format, with full color illustrations by Jose Villarrubia.

Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Short Stories, Horror, Novels, Historical

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Alan Moore is an English writer most famous for his influential work in comics, including the acclaimed graphic novels Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell. He has also written a novel, Voice of the Fire, and performs "workings" (one-off performance art/spoken word pieces) with The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, some of which have been released on CD.

As a comics writer, Moore is notable for being one of the first writers to apply literary and formalist sensibilities to the mainstream of the medium. As well as including challenging subject matter and adult themes, he brings a wide range of influences to his work, from the literary–authors such as William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Anton Wilson and Iain Sinclair; New Wave science fiction writers such as Michael Moorcock; horror writers such as Clive Barker; to the cinematic–filmmakers such as Nicolas Roeg. Influences within comics include Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Kirby and Bryan Talbot.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Time and place: time passes, place remains… The passage of time alters the place… But the fire keeps burning.

Our Art concerns all that may change or move in life, but with their endless writ they seek to make life still, that soon it shall be suffocated, crushed beneath their manuscripts. For my part, I would sooner have the Fire. At least it dances. Passion is not strange to it.

So what's Voice of the Fire about?

It's about the vital message that the stiff lips of decapitated men still shape; the testament of black and spectral dogs written in piss across our bad dreams. It's about raising the dead to tell us what they know.

Throughout the six thousand years the magic of the place persists and Alan Moore opens dark pages of history and drags us through the circles of hell and darkness.
And fire has its own special place in human history.

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where to start with this incredible book?

I have just tried and failed three times to start this sentence. I sit here, drained after a day of university work, hard thinking and slow research and two pots of tea, drinking a gin and tonic and trying to recall the feeling of reading Moore's unbelievably ambitious novel. I guess I'll begin at the beginning (but not at Neil Gaiman's introduction, I'll save that for later).

The first chapter is incredibly hard to read, written in the first person from the perspective of a 4000BC 'idiot boy'. He speaks about the world around him, his people, his mother, his dreams, all in the absolute present tense in an extremely simple vocabulary that is hard to fathom for quite a few pages. I could liken it to trying to get in the mindset of a book like Trainspotting or A Clockwork Orange, but that would be doing this book an injustice (in my personal opinion, anyway). Once I had gotten over the initial difficulty, the power of Moore's writing took hold and swept me along with his lost boy, although I will admit to a certain amount of checking-how-many-pages-til-the-next-chapter-please. You should know that none of the stories Moore has chosen to tell the story of Northampton have happy endings, right off the bat, although this story probably has the most shocking ending of all, and if you make it through this one you'll be fine.

By the second chapter you're well and truly immersed in this world, but at least now you're behind the eyes of someone who can speak and think with clarity and cunning. One of the most fascinating things for me was the way Moore interpreted human interaction in a time before recorded history (we're at 2500BC now): there are no words for the number of things, and people will say something like 'as many houses burnt down as there are talons on an owl's foot'. In this time, from the perspective of a woman who's fallen on hard times and become a hardened criminal, the idiot boy's tale has become fable, myth, part of the religion of the area, and this is a theme that will crop up again and again, a thread running through the book that the reader can grasp onto. It was in this chapter that I noticed Moore's prose, the way that every sentence fits a rhythm and a beat, and could almost be read as poetry. It becomes mesmerising to the point where I almost stopped paying attention to the story being told as I let the words run through my head.

The first two chapters are much longer than any of the others, which is a way was disappointing to me. I've never much liked the short story format, because I feel like I just get inside a character when I have to start learning a new one. The long first chapters stabilised the book and got me so invested that it was a shock when the next ones were significantly shorter. Probably my least favourite chapter was 'Limping to Jerusalem'; something about the voice and the experiences of the protagonist of that one just didn't get through to me in the time. I particularly enjoyed the stories involving the practice of magic and ritual by women inciting the spirits of some of the characters we followed earlier on in the book.

I don't think I'm doing this justice at all. I can't even begin to explain how lyrical and mesmerising this book is, how incredible the history of the place is, how much you feel the connection to the land and its stories and its people and how much you feel how horrifying all that history is, weighing down on people. I felt so strongly about this book I had to create a new bookshelf for it.

The worst part for me was Neil Gaiman's introduction. That man really irritates me; does he do anything these days except write introductions to other people's wonderful and original work and pretend that he knew about them first? Maybe he's found his calling, though, and we won't have to put up with any more sophomoric adult urban fantasy books from him for a while. Either way, I could have done without his wanky prologue: 'Do not trust the tales, or the town, or even the man who tells the tales. Trust only the voice of the fire.'
Honestly.

Reasons I truly loved and engaged with this book:

Deep and fascinating history followed logically and mythologically through thousands of years. Essentially like One Day but on a massive, epic scale. And, you know, good.
The excellent character drawing and the unique and wonderful voices.
The feeling that there is more to life, to things, than just plain humanity. Black dogs, legs, heads, all these recurring themes that play around the crossroads of Northampton's history, witchcraft and Hob-men and angels and saints.
The fact that, in the end, Moore's first novel is unlike any other novel, ever. Something about his art up until then and the transformation of graphic novel writing into novel writing translates into something daring and unprecedented.

This is a rambling nonsensical review. I'm tired and drained, and I don't think I could ever have done this book justice, so I'll just post it as is. Posterity and all that.

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

To be entirely honest, I cannot truly describe this book. What themes it has is threaded so deftly and lost so deep in a massive mound of history and characterizations and the only thing that I can point at is the similarity of PLACE.

Northampton. Of course, I have to wonder about that, too when it came to the Crusades period, but it could very well have been there, too, considering.

So. Six thousand years of Northampton, perhaps. Short stories that are firmly placed not only in time and place but in VOICE. The cave boy's survival, discovery, and love are shocking not for the basic idea, but for the depth and complexity and the downright interesting diction. Moving forward through time, Moore shows just how much research he had put into all this, writing very careful historical fiction with all the feel, ugliness, and passion of the periods. Hundreds of years' hop every time, finding messages of deep magic, disillusionment, and terror, Moore is at his best.

Fun to note: Jerusalem shares almost every aspect of this novel. Amazing writing, nearly confounding, so RICH that it would take years to plumb its depths kind of writing. Voice of the Fire is slightly more accessible and really presages his later work.

But overall, there's only one word that describes either: Brilliant. (Even if I feel like I have no idea what I just read. ;) The journey through so many people is the thing.

[Paul Sánchez Keighley · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is this book, you ask? It is brilliant. It is terrible. It is a celebration of space over time. It is an historiographic metafictional odyssey through the ages. It is an orgy of mythos, magick and murder. It is sexy. It is depressing.

When you get down to it, it is a collection of short stories all set in the British town of Northampton at different points in time. We visit the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages - you get the gist - all the way up to the time of the book's penning in 1995. It is, in a way, a forensic analysis of the soul of a locus, an inquiry into how towns incorporate their happenings into their DNA. Past events mould future trends, facts become myths, people die but ideas remain, and the scars of history remain embedded on buildings and fields like the shorthand of a cosmic stenographer.

Each story in this book is told in a voice that reflects the vocabulary of the age, and they are all extraordinarily well written. It also has the ballsiest opening to a first novel I have ever seen: the first story, told from the POV of a simple-minded boy from the Stone Age, is written in a broken underdeveloped form of English that is part protean, part Joycean, with nary an abstract concept and words that have been broken down to their most essential components. These are the opening lines:

A-hind of hill, ways off to sun-set-down, is sky come like as fire, and walk I up in way of this, all hard of breath, where is grass colding on I's feet and wetting they.

It took me a while to realise that most of the stories are in fact historical and that the book is the mindspawn of deep and passionate research. Moore sits so snugly in the minds of his deranged heroes it just felt like it had to be fiction. But it's so much more than this or that; it is an ambitious interweaving of both to better explore the soul of Northampton, its myths, its vices, its cycles of violence.

But don't take my word for it. Here's how Alan Moore himself defines the book at a certain point in the book:

It's about the vital message that the stiff lips of decapitated men still shape; the testament of black and spectral dogs written in piss across our bad dreams. It's about raising the dead to tell us what they know. It is a bridge, a crossing point, a worn spot in the curtain between our world and the underworld, between the mortar and the myth, fact and fiction, a threadbare gauze no thicker than a page. It's about the powerful glossolalia of witches and their magical revision of the texts we live in.

This was a difficult read but painfully beautiful and I cannot say enough good things about it.

[Café de Tinta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Toda una sorpresa. Al ser historias distintas algunas me han gustado más que otras, pero en base puedo decir que es una pasada. Tengo ganas de comentarlo en el club de lectura!
Reseña completa: https://cafedetinta.com/2018/09/05/la...

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I deliberately re-read this as a follow-up to finishing Moore's amazing Jerusalem. I remember having enjoyed it, finding the first piece the most difficult (like pretty much everyone), and finding latter stories (like the witches, or the Knight's Templar installment) as really well done. Coming back to it now - 12 stories set in the same place (Northampton) and on the same day (presumably, certainly all in November) but separated by time (a range from 4000 BC to 1995 AD) - it seems like a "dry-run" for JERUSALEM, touching on some of the same points, hinting at things later expanded in that book (either conceptually or actually). Which does not make it any lesser of a work, just greater in reflection of a later, more personal, masterwork.

As the stories flow from one to the other, there's some nice recurrent imagery (fire, sacrificial murders, decapitated heads, sex, giant black dogs, a human leg) and themes (how religion evolves - and doesn't - to provide a safety net for conscious beings faced by the hopelessness of existence, and yet there are moments of dreams and visions of shared consciousness, how real people with real lives sift down through history to become iconic figures or folkloric references). As a summation for those who eschew long reviews: well worth the time of any adventurous reader.

So, as to the stories:

"Hob's Hog" (4000 BC) - deliberately designed to "keep the cunts out" (as Moore so memorably put it) is the story of a young, hunter-gatherer age man (who some reviewers identify as "mentally challenged" but I didn't see it) whose caring mother has just died, and who then finds himself cast out of his tribe (after he is forced to bury her) until he takes refuge, by invitation, in the garden of a local shaman - the invitation having come from the shaman's daughter. But all (really, all) is not what it seems....

The reason this is the most challenging piece here is the decision to underline the historical setting (the transition to livestock keeping and limited construction from simple hunter/gatherer status) by deliberately writing in a limited form - limited by something like a vocabulary of 100 words and a chopped sentence construction (the character is pre-literate - he doesn't trust "scratchings" - but not pre-verbal. Perhaps he is directly or indirectly neanderthal) and, this being first person narration, the only way we see anything else is through his eyes. Also, the main character makes no distinction in his narration between waking consciousness and a dreaming state (possibly in a stage between the breakdown of consciousness in the bicameral mind), doesn't understand lies/falsifications (to his detriment, as it turns out), has never eaten bread, and the lag time between perception and comprehension is longer than we are currently used to (when he is hungry, what he thinks are animals at a distance turn out to be shrubs or trees, while the "sky beasts" he mentions are obviously clouds). While this doesn't stop him from telling a joke (well-done) and possibly extrapolating a prehistoric version of the "light-bulb above the head" to symbolize an idea, the deliberately rigorous writing will prove off-putting to those who have never read Joyce or A CLOCKWORK ORANGE or RIDDLEY WALKER or anything more challenging than most standard genre fiction - so... as Moore said. I found it immersive, involving and fun (read other comments here for differing takes) - give yourself the benefit of the doubt and give it a try.

"The Cremation Fields" (2500 BC) - has an amoral (possibly sociopathic) young woman kill a fellow female she meets on the road, taking her identity and travel goal (to reunite with an estranged, dying father, a shaman at the "bridge on the river" - and claim her birthright). Arriving, and making the acquaintance of her "father", the cunning and materialistic woman decides that he must know the whereabouts of a vast treasure - but, as before, things are not what they seem, and secrets are not grasped...

"In The Drownings" (AD 43) - is a profoundly sad tale of a bird hunter in the swamps who dresses in a bizarre costume to catch his prey, while we piece together the damage done to his life and village by Roman troops.

"The Head Of Diocletion" (AD 290) - A treasury agent is sent by Rome to uncover whether or not coinage is being counterfeited in the remote village (that will eventually become Northampton), only to have his entire worldview overturned. A really good story!

"November Saints" (AD 1064) - a crippled nun agonizes through a time-collage of her varied punishments (religious), sufferings (at the hands of Viking depredation) and visions (resulting from the uncovering of a holy secret under the church).

"Limping To Jerusalem" (AD 1100) - A lord (returned from the crusades and designing a new, "problematic" round cathedral to the dismay of many in his church), ruminates on the hideous sights he saw in the Middle East, including a run in with the fledgling Knights Templar and exposure to their ultimate secret (which influenced the new cathedral's design, as well as his personal faith and worldview). An excellent piece whose theme also nicely echoes "The Head Of Diocletion."

"Confession Of A Mask" (AD 1607) - A peculiar narrator, in a peculiar situation (any more would be telling) ruminates on life, death, rebellion, his personal past and his eventual position in things... even as he is (unsurprisingly) joined by another neighbor. Excellent: morbid, witty and humorous!

"Angelic Language" (AD 1618) - A judge (who's son once befriended noted sorcerer John Dee) travels by coach with a mother & daughter of the lower classes, at least one of whom (if not both) he hopes to bed. But in attempting to secure this assignation, he find that things, once again, are not all that they seem (but are they ever?). This is probably the closest the book comes to a straight up horror story (if my inference from the ending is correct and the family name is not "Deane" but closer to "Bean" or "Cleek"). A nice call back to "Hob's Hog" as a horse seen from a coach is mistaken for a large black dog...or was it a mistake, really?

"Partners In Knitting" (AD 1705) - two women are accused and convicted of witchcraft, whereupon one vehemently confesses the all of it, even as they are burned alive at the pyre. An excellent story (would love to run it on PSEUDOPOD.org) full of real human emotion, great period detail and interesting suppositions about demonology, "evil" spirit beings and an early glimpse of how time/creation might work (later expanded and detailed in JERUSALEM).

"The Sun Looks Pale Upon The Wall" (AD 1841) - John Clare, rural England's greatest nature poet, lives his confused life in his confused mind, slipping from memory and reflection to the present day and back again, as he thinks of his past long walk away from the asylum and his upcoming return to one. Honestly, I can't remember what I made of this when I first read it, but with JERUSALEM under my belt now, it's a bit easier to thread your way through the disordered, melancholy mind of Clare, with his talk of two wives, his walk, etc. His "madness" seems to have "unstuck" him in time as well, as he visits/interacts with or observes events from earlier stories. Quite good.

"I Travel In Suspenders" (AD 1931) - A chatty, charming serial bigamist (with impulse control issues following a head wound in WWI) explains himself and his involvement in a murder in this extremely well written segment. The voice writing is top-notch (at Alan Bennett levels of monologue craft - which is the highest honor I can confer) as we are successively seduced by, then begin to mistrust, then feel almost sorry for our "confessing" main character who thinks he understands everything but barely understands himself.

"Phipps' Fire Escape" (AD 1995) - In which, in a postmodern flourish of meta-narrative, Alan Moore himself reflects on the preceding work, his reasons for attempting it, its connection to personal history, what he hoped to accomplish (while noting recurrences that he hadn't intended) and it's irrationality as an attempted occult ritual to seal the book and send it on its way as an evocation of Northampton, his home. And from here, you need only take a small step to set you on the road to JERUSALEM....

ADDENDUM: I listened to the 25th anniversary audiobook of this during a long drive to and back from Florida. Each chapter is voiced by a different reader - Alan Moore reading the final chapter, of course - and it's quite a wonderful thing. The reading aloud also helps the comprehensibility of the first, long chapter (written in a difficult, prehistoric, limited voice) as its easier to "drop into the groove" and understand the voice. The extra audio production includes ambient sounds (not my favorite approach, as they're singular and tied to a text event - so "sounds of crows" when crows appear, "jail cell door creaks and rattles" when prisoner is sent back to his cell - but then again, they're mixed very low and not intrusive) and ambient "music" (which is essentially drone-like and used as bridging and to underline shifts in consciousness - very nice). Truth to tell, a class act all the way around, with some excellent readings.

[Lee Broderick · Rating 5 out of 5]

'A-hind of hill, ways off to sun-set-down, is sky come like as fire, and walk I up in way of this, all hard of breath, where is grass colding on I’s feet and wetting they.'

It's a brave thing to begin your debut novel in the first-person voice of a child with developmental issues. A child that cannot distinguish dreams from reality; that cannot understand how to lie; that is incapable of looking after himself. It's a braver thing too when that's not the focus of the novel.

Alan Moore is often mentioned as one of the most highly regarded British writers working today and yet this remains his only novel. Like Neil Gaiman, he had worked almost exclusively as a comic-book writer until 1996. Both released their debut novels in that year ( Neverwhere for Gaiman - Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch doesn't count here since it was co-authored with Terry Pratchett and it was Pratchett that did most of the writing) but whereas Gaiman grew a reputation as a Fantasy novelist, this remains Moore's only novel to date.

Moore's both a proud Englishman and a keen occultist so it should be no surprise that both of those influences weigh heavily on this text. His subject is his home town, Northampton, and his metaphor is fire. As a metaphor, it's a useful one, with many associations - bright, warming, comforting, Signal, destructive, transformative. Here, it's all of those things - sometimes at the same time. Mostly though, it's the latter; Moore paints a dynamic landscape, always changing: the coming of agriculture, of metals, of Romans, Vikings, Normans... all have their place in Moore's narrative.

Where authors such as Edward Rutherfurd emphasise the continuity of a place in their historical works by following different generations of the same family, often in the middle of sweeping epochs, Moore structures his tale by always casting different, unrelated, individuals in every chapter and each personal story often occurs at the time of wider social change (the first chapters take the structure of the changes listed above). A sense of more gradual change, happening alongside the more obvious but superficial changes already mentioned is hinted at by the developing language used in each chapter. With each written from the first-person perspective of a different character, always in the present tense, the author builds from the Mesolithic simpleton quoted at the beginning of this review, in the first chapter, through successive generations of changing language - words change, develop, some disappear and others appear. You sense that the words are not just a means for expressing ideas but things which have a life of their own - separate from the people and inhabiting their own time-scale.

The characters and their stories re-appear in the tales of others. This might be why some GoodReads users have classified the book as fantasy, for my own part though, I prefer to see the book as straight historical fiction: the reappearance of characters and their happenings occur only in dreams and at times of madness and the characters who see them perceive them only in this context. That seems reasonable to me; it's clearly a manifestation of Moore's beliefs in the occult (hinted at more blatantly in a chapter featuring John Dee as an off-screen presence) but it's not fantastical per se. We know that they are ancient people and events - the protagonists do not and do not try to interpret them in this way. They're just dreams. The only other fantastic element is the monologue of the dead but, again, there is no interaction between the dead and the living - so in this sense it may be seen as the same situation reversed.

These lives (from the historic period onwards, all protagonists and events, save authorly embellishment, did occur), these tales, are points, glittering and flowing as they are pulled around and down through a vortex. Like in Cloud Atlas that structure is sign-posted by the author, whereas that felt patronising though, here I felt it merely honest: there was nothing of the smug reveal about it but rather the smile of a friend as he says 'you've caught me'. Why? Because of what lies at the heart of the vortex.

'Comitted to a present-day first-person narrative, there seems no other option save a personal appearance, which in turn demands a strictly documentary approach'

Such an ending could easily be egotistical but instead it's deftly handled and a perfect fit. As the author seeks inspiration to finish his book we pound the streets of Northampton with him - and we know it. The town comes alive for us both as it is and as it has been. Ultimately though, this final reveal is shown as the curtain, for this novel isn't about Northampton or even England - the star of the show isn't even the characters, it's history. History, as Moore says in this chapter, burns hot.

Gaiman wrote an introduction in this edition in which he states that this final chapter is already the perfect introduction to the book and I can see his point - the chapters could be read in almost any order but why go against the hot tide of history?

[Wes Hazard · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece of voice, a vivid evocation of place, and a damn good piece of storytelling, this book is rewarding on every level, plain and simple. Moore drapes himself in 12 different personae (well 11 really, the final section is autobiographical...though, as he's careful to note, still fiction) beginning in 4500 BC and leading up to the present day, all of them inhabitants of or visitors to Northampton England. Some of these characters are based on historical figures, others are total fabrications, all of them are very real for the reader. Moore accomplishes this by thoroughly inhabiting the main character in each section. Never do you feel that you're reading the work of a 20th century author conjecturing what a Roman centurion or a knight of the crusades might have thought, rather you feel that you're privy to the actual internal monologues of those characters. Fools, sociopaths, prostitutes, nobles, nuns and insane poets all get their due though perhaps the most important character is Northampton itself. It's a delight to see an event described in the stone age grow into a local legend, eventually to be referenced as an almost forgotten nursery rhyme thousands of years later. In looking at these characters and this locale Moore is able to sketch and comment on the very growth of human civilization. We see a few pawns vividly and from there we get a hint of the elaborate chess game (battles, blunders, triumphs, losses and all) that we've had to play against our own nature in order move from stone agers trying to forge a path and make a home in a world they don't understand to modern day urbanites trying to do much the same. Everyone will enjoy some of the chapters more than others, but none of them fails and all are compelling. Moore has done something special here.

[Joseph Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been obsessed w/ Alan Moore this past year.

He weaves tales like a true grand-master, lucid and surging with both evocation and invocation.

Voice of the Fire is a prequel to Jerusalem, which, in my opinion, is somewhere near the top of the top-shelf of books written in the English Language. I wrote about it here:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

And, much Like Bach’s Crab Canon, whether played backwards or forwards, in this novel, you are in for something that widens the shore of what you think is possible in art. Voice of the Fire is similar in that it's like a palindrome, but not. You get 12 short stories that echo each other in unexpected ways over the gulf of 6000 years. What starts to emerge is a weird puzzle that becomes mystifying as it opens itself up in its imaginative breadth.

The savage voices that Moore allows in his head are rich with humanity’s underbelly, forming the strange dots that connect history as it sloughs it’s skin from one incarnation to the next. One of interesting literary devices in this book, like in Jerusalem, is the cast of non-fiction players that get woven throughout the narrative with Moore’s genius for embellishment.

In the last chapter, which takes place in 1995, Moore himself is a central character. He winds through the streets of Northampton, where the story takes place and where Moore has always lived. The strange lives of the city and its inhabitants, warts and all, get superimposed onto one another... creating a sort of animism. The effect reads like a nod to something ancient, stranger than fiction. A nod to the mushroom-eating, antlered shaman staring at their fires and cave-paintings, wondering about the formation of language, permanent settlements, art, religion, song and story, warfare. A holistic entwining of that distant past with our present and future. Central to the novel are the echoes of myth and lore, adding patina to the blurry lines between objective reality and the subjective narratives that build the structure of our day-to-day lives.

Rather than try to encapsulate the overarching themes of this book, I'll let Moore do it concisely in his own words. As he narrates himself in the final chapter:

‘So what's this book about, then?’
It's about the vital message that the stiff lips of decapitated men still shape; the testament of black and spectral dogs written in the piss across our bad dreams. It's about raising the dead to tell us what they know. It is a bridge, a crossing point, a worn spot in the curtain between our world and the underworld, between the mortar and the myth, fact and fiction, a threadbare gauze no thicker than a page. It's about the powerful glossolalia of witches and their magical revision of the texts we live in. None of this is speakable…"

And so much more….

[Luis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Se queda en 2,5 estrellas...y porque es Alan Moore. Ida de olla absoluta del bueno de Alan contando historias desde la prehistoria hasta 1995 ubicadas en su zona natal de Northampton, Inglaterra. Curioso el primer capítulo situado temporalmente en la prehistoria, donde el lenguaje intenta asimilar la mente de los hombres prehistóricas, simple e irracional. Todas las historias tienen algún tipo de crimen relacionado, como nexo común. Aún así, yo no he logrado conectar con el libro y no lo he abandonado por respeto a Alan. Prefiero de todas de todas la versión de Alan Moore en cómic, en especial su (adorada y admirada por mí) etapa en Swamp Thing. Una pena.

[Xavi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una interesante colección de relatos ubicados en diferentes épocas de la ciudad de Northhampton, cuna del escritor. A mi me ha gustado mucho la mezcla entre la diversidad de estilos pero con algunos. https://dreamsofelvex.blogspot.com/20...

[Jean Ra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Me da cierta rabia acabar esta lectura con cierto alivio, como que se acabó un viaje algo pesado y que menos mal que ya puedo poner el pié en el andén y hacer transbordo a otro tren.

Aparte del interés inherente en la propia obra, también deseaba testar qué gusto tiene Alan Moore como narrador de novelas y, en caso que la experiencia fuese gratificante, asaltar la grandiosa Jerusalén, su mastodonte de más de mil páginas. Y es que La voz del fuego, si mal no tengo entendido, es una especie de 'estudio', el ensayo antes de embarcar el gran retablo que es esa novela que este año publicó creo que Minotauro.

En su aventura como novelista, Moore desea circular al lado de los grandes modernistas, particularmente de Beckett y Joyce. Si en el Ulises accedemos a un sólo día en la vida de Leopold Bloom, y sólo en ese día recibimos los ecos de toda la historia de la humanidad, en ésta Moore se propone abarcar seis mil años de historia y se ciñe a Northampton, su ciudad natal, como medida del universo, muestrario de las grandes turbulencias de la historia y de las pasiones humanas. Muerte, brujería, venta ambulante de ligas, guerras religiosas y hogueras, muchas hogueras. El fuego aparece en todos los relatos, siempre que como catalizador que transforma el rumbo del relato. A veces es, como en el relato de las brujas, obviamente aparece en el clímax; en otras como antorcha y símbolo del vislumbramiento de un dato clave.

En cada uno de los doce relatos hallamos a personajes arrollados por las creencias religiosas o las supersticiones religiosas. Hay brujas quemadas en el siglo XVIII, un deficiente mental primitivo que es víctima de un rito, conspiradores católicos contra autoridades protestantes, una cabeza que habla... Moore realiza una investigación histórica portentosa y despliega un ejercicio de imaginación sumamente amplio.

También es una especie de estudio de la 'magia'. Como bien comenta Moore en cierta entrevista, la magia es aquello que ocurre y que la racionalidad no es capaz de explicar. En el primer relato, el del primitivo disminuido, todo le resulta maravilloso, incluso la aparición de ciertos animales que él llama cerdos. Conforme evoluciona el raciocinio, la magia pierde poder. En el penúltimo, que ocurre en 1930, un vendedor de ligas ya domina el mundo que le rodea. El último cuento es un ensayo dónde Moore revela los "trucos" que le llevaron a idear las diferentes secciones de La voz del fuego y de dónde sacó ciertos detalles, como ahora la aparición de perros negros o la proliferación de pies defectuosos y zapatos. Resulta que en Northampton la industria zapatera fue sumamente pujante.

Ahora bien si bien cada capítulo tiene un estilo particular, recurre a una variedad notoria de máscaras, escenarios y contextos históricos, la carne del relato no me convence. En muchas ocasiones me dio la sensación que Moore estira demasiado los relatos y los alarga por el simple hecho de maximizar lo mínimo y adoptar los ropajes de un Samuel Beckett novelista. Detalles, cláusulas, maticaciones y otras hierbas que en verdad no tienen otro objetivo que ralentizar la marcha. A excepción de los dos últimos, en la mayoría me aburrí, nada me dijeron y por mucho que pueda alabar su técnica, su contenido me es indiferente e incluso algo fatigoso. Ya sabes que todo derivará en algún giro "sorprendente", alguien que mata a otro, una traición, o lo que sea, poco importa.

Sin duda me debo haber pedido algún detalle importante o no lo he leído en el momento indicado, el caso es que si bien en la estructura y composición se le podría dar un notable, en la carne de sus relatos le doy un suspenso. Que no me esperen en su Jerusalén.

[Joshua · Rating 2 out of 5]

Alan Moore is one of my favorite writers. His work on Watchmen, Swamp Thing, Superman, The League of Extraordinary Gentleman and many others have shaped my comic book reading tastes ever since I was a kid. To me Alan Moore is a magician of the field, figuratively and literally, a master of his craft able to spin wonderful tales with such finesse that you'll wonder through all the smokes and mirrors if his work is indeed magic. I guess what I'm trying to say in my long-winded way, is that I was very excited to read Voice of the Fire , the first book written by Alan Moore back in 1996.

I read a lot, hell I majored like many book lovers in literature so I've been studying books for most of my adult life, and the one thing I've learned from my experience as a lover of books is that there are just some stories, some works of fiction that I'll never get. Sadly, Voice of the Fire is one of those books. I can appreciate the lyricism of the writing, the expert craftsmanship behind it, but I just don't understand the point of it all, like I've read over 300 pages of an author just writing what was in his read, regardless if it works as a narrative.

So in the end, I must only give this book 2 stars because I can't consider it a fun or successful read, I can't even begin to tell you what I read. All I know is that I studied this book for a week and yet know less than before I started. Perhaps that's what the real message of Voices of the Fire is, the blending of reality and fiction, of myth and fact, and in the end, sometimes it's impossible to know whats true and what isn't, what makes sense and what doesn't.

[Sergi Oset · Rating 5 out of 5]

No sé dónde leí que el señor Moore invoca y evoca la magia y el pasado en este libro. Estoy totalmente de acuerdo con dicha afirmación. La lectura de “La voz del fuego” ha resultado toda una maravilla y un descubrimiento.


“La voz del fuego” es una novela fix-up compuesta por doce relatos en que diversos personajes van apareciendo mediante recuerdos, en sueños, en el proceso de delirios y alucinaciones o en experiencias cercanas a la muerte (o tras ella). El escenario se sitúa un condado de Inglaterra y abarca épocas tan pretéritas como el 4000 a. C. hasta el 1995 de nuestros días. Se trata de una empresa temeraria que Moore lleva a buen puerto y que borda en cada uno de los relatos. Las piezas básicas son los mitos, la memoria colectiva, la muerte, el trascender y la (perra) vida. Elementos con los que nos descubre mapas, ya sea sobre el espacio físico que habitamos, en el inframundo, en los tatuajes de la piel del chamán o en puentes y encrucijadas bajo los que se entierran los sacrificios humanos y que conectan a personajes con experiencias repetidas a través del tiempo y del espacio.


Los personajes de Moore parecen ser figuras de su propio tarot particular: el perro cancerbero, el chamán, la bruja, el asesino, la embustera, el desengañado, la víctima del rito, el juez, el reo, el pescador, el ahorcado, el loco o el mujeriego. Personajes que se aparecen, se enquistan y desdoblan según le conviene en aldeas, ante iglesias de planta circular o en granjas apartadas. Lo gracioso es que tienen un origen en la historia, el folclore o la leyenda del territorio.


Como decía, la prosa del autor está llena de magia evocadora en un sentido aterrador, pagano, siniestro e inquietante. “Puerco y cenizo”, el primer relato, y también, “El sol luce pálido en el muro”, exigen de un plus de predisposición por parte del lector por el uso del lenguaje tan especial y adaptado a la historia que teje Moore. En parte, creo, es como si nos retara para comprobar si queremos continuar adelante. No pone las cosas fáciles (en especial en el primer cuento), aunque, una vez adaptados a su voz es imposible substraerse a cada nuevo descubrimiento que conlleva pasar una nueva página.


Quizá, “La salida de incendios de Phipps”, el relato que cierra el libro, en el que Moore es quién nos habla y quién revela sus intenciones y sus fuentes es el que me resultó menos apetecible, aunque paradójicamente, fuera escrito con la intención de ofrecer más luz al origen de la concepción de todos los anteriores.


De lo mejorcito que llevo leído este año.

[Variaciones Enrojo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reseña de Maese ABL en su blog:
http://llauna.blogspot.com.es/2011/12...

“[El libro va] acerca del mensaje vital que los labios quietos de los hombres decapitados aún pronuncian; acerca del testamento que los perros negros y espectrales escriben en orín a través de nuestras pesadillas. Acerca de alzar a los muertos para que nos cuenten lo que saben. Se trata de un puente, un cruce de caminos, un lugar desgastado en la cortina que existe entre nuestro mundo y el inframundo, entre el mortero y el mito, la realidad y la ficción, una gasa raída no más gruesa que una página. Trata sobre los poderosos cánticos repetitivos y sin sentido de las brujas y su revisión mágica de los textos en los que vivimos. Nada de esto puede explicarse.”

Son éstas las palabras con las que Alan Moore describe su primera novela, “La Voz del Fuego”, que comenzó a gestarse a principios de los 90 y se publicó en 1996. En medio, le dio tiempo de convertirse en mago, y aunque de telón de fondo están algunos temas relacionados con ello, no es la magia una premisa fundamental en el texto. El libro habla de su apego al territorio donde nació, esa obsesión que particularmente siente, pero que en su compromiso de autor canaliza como un recurso para describir a la humanidad a través de un lugar. Northampton, la ciudad donde ha vivido toda la vida, es por tanto su elección, porque es la que mejor conoce.

Para empezar esta obra, Moore partió de un intenso estudio histórico de la localidad inglesa. La Historia se le plantea como una ficción que se revisa y se reinterpreta continuamente por las épocas; por lo tanto los territorios concebidos de cualquier forma son siempre subjetivos. Sin embargo, aunque no se trate de una verdad absoluta, Moore como persona ha de habitar la Historia, pues inevitablemente él es un individuo perteneciente a ella en un tiempo, y ha de encontrar una teoría que le ayude a ubicar su vida particular. La operación que idea es la de trazar él mismo su propio mapa para instalarse en él. Su mapa, su lenguaje, serán las palabras, la narración. Por primera vez en su carrera, no cuenta con la ayuda de la imagen para la escritura, como así ha sido las veces atrás, sólo dispone de palabras para conjugarlas en el lenguaje.


(Reseña completa en http://llauna.blogspot.com.es/2011/12... )

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

If one were to postulate that a book that has an introduction by Neil Gaiman is a work of genius and a mind-bending and expanding experience, then this book would be one data point that confirms the hypothesis.

It is hard to know how to classify this book. It is as if Cormac McCarthy set about to write a work of existentialism. The style can certainly make one think of Cormac -- the use of just-the-right word for whatever time period he is writing about (any century), the structure of sentences, the way that even the scenery is made to have an aliveness, the absolutely unmediated rawness of real life, ... -- but's it's more than that. It's like with Cormac that Alan Moore is not just a master at the USE of language, but it is as if he OWNS language.

The book consists of several short stories, starting back around 6000 B.C. and ending in recent times. At the start, the reader is put in the position of thinking about what it would have been like to be living during the age of the spawning of consciousness, the dawn of consciousness, wherein one has only a primitive notion of what a "self" is, where dream and awake states run together to make "reality" even more confusing, whereh shadows are "spirits," and where humanity has not yet evolved a good theory of mind to predict the behavior of other humans, and so on. It was enough to hook me. And, as we progress through the centuries, Moore keeps it interesting.

In the end, he lets us know his thinking behind these stories. I'll not give that away. But, I will say, again without offering any spoilers, that this book could make you wonder whether history is in some sense alive. The technically correct way of talking about the unfolding of events is to say that history is contingent: what happens is contingent on what came before. But, what if it's more than that? What if history is itself a living thing, with its "own" conscious?

Now I'm rambling, so I'll just end with: great book!

[Mitch · Rating 1 out of 5]

This novel, by the man who brought you the Watchmen comic, is below par.

It's a series of human stories threaded through time and loosely linked, all taking place in a single location. The novel is heavy on dark atmosphere (rasping black crows, inky blots of dark gutter water, skeletal trees, etc.) and very dark themes. (Multiple violent, imaginative murders, etc.)

It was so dark that every time I started a new linked story, my mind raced ahead to find the dark ending and so anticipated several evils before they arrived...the story was still struggling along spewing more uneasy atmosphere.

The very first entry was a reader's obstacle course. The author wanted to write it from a prehistoric man's viewpoint, so he altered English grammar, spellings and meanings to the point where any reader would have to slow down and decipher what s/he was reading. From the very first sentence, progress was halting and piecemeal.

The middle stories were just too dark for me, containing as they did severed heads, cut throats, dismembered legs, some torture, immolation, etc.

The final story descended into poetic babbling, basically. I was left wondering if the author wrote it while using drugs.

If all that sounds appealing to you, as I am sure it probably does to a select few, then by all means have at it. Otherwise, you have been warned!

[Squire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alan Moore's first foray into fiction is a lewd, primal, profane distillation of the magic and vitality of Northampton through the masks of twelve distinct characters over a period of 6000 years. Twelve masks that are really worn by the same person, each discovering the flame of passion about the world around them, centered on the area of Alan Moore's youth.

Beginning with a mentally challenged paleolithic nomad youth abandoned by his tribe after the death of his mother in 4000 BC (speaking in a hard to decipher language) and ending with the author of the book in 1995, Moore brilliantly blends historical with fictive characters to weave a tapestry of myth and language that is not without its difficulties, but is generous in its ultimate rewards.

My favorite of the twelve stories is "Confessions of a Mask 1607" which envisions a conspirator in the Gunpowder plot of 1605 speaking with the newly executed Captain Pouch of the Midland Revolt as both impaled skulls hang on the North Gate. But all the stories are terrific.

His idea of the cyclic nature of time is explored more fully in Jerusalem, his second novel; but all of the twelve characters being the same person in another go-around in life is interesting to say the least.

[Fugo Feedback]

El problema con este libro es que en un principio lo quise leer íntegramente en inglés pero el primer capítulo me inhibió por su lenguaje bárbaro y lo dejé. Ahora lo tengo también en castellano pero todavía no junté el valor para reconocer mi fracaso como anglo-lector que prefiere mamar leche adulterada en la lengua materna.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've had this book on my shelf since 1996, when a friend tracked down a copy (this was when it was available only in the UK) and gave it to me for my birthday, knowing how much of a fan of Alan Moore I was/am. Yet I allowed nearly 15 years to pass before finally sitting down to read it. Though I can't say I regret this (it's not like I've been reading crap not worth my time this last decade and a half), I am eminently happy now to have finally read it.

More a collection of stories than a novel, but still a novel inasmuch as the stories are all linked by their common setting, Northampton, and by sharing some of the same characters (despite the stories being set in vastly different time periods), Voice of the Fire is an ambitious book in its themes and use of language. The first story in particular, which was written in a neolithic dialect invented by Moore, was even more challenging than Burgess's A Clockwork Orange , which at least had the advantage of being written grammatically, albeit with generous amounts of Nadsat slang thrown in. Subsequent stories were much easier to read, though Moore's use of language remained poetic--and period-appropriate--throughout. And in terms of themes, its link to history, and certain macabre recurring elements (those being fire, shagfoals {or black dog ghosts}, injured legs, and beheadings), Voice of the Fire is right at home among several of Moore's other, comic book work--particularly Swamp Thing, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, etc. Several of the characters in Voice of the Fire are clearly authentic historical personages, though I knew of only a few of them (John Clare, for instance, who is a favorite subject of Moore's pal and fellow author Iain Sinclair) before reading the book--but this fact lends additional gravity to the book. Moore has capitalized on the connections between his characters (beyond their sharing of Northampton as their mutual home) to create a novel that is much more than the sum of its disparate parts. All in all, Voice of the Fire is exactly as impressive as I expected it would be, and I'm looking forward to reading Moore's next novel, Jerusalem, as soon as he finishes it.

And now, for memory-jogging purposes down the line, below is a list of each story and its basic "plot" (for lack of a better word, since few of the stories have true plots in the traditional sense):

1. "Hob's Hog. 4000 BC." A neolithic boy is expelled from his tribe and is taken in by a girl who lives with another tribe's Hob-man (or magician/wizard/shaman, take your pick).

2. "The Cremation Fields. 2500 BC." A wanderer murders a woman (who was traveling to see her father, a Hob-man, for the first time since she was a child) and impersonates her with the hopes of stealing the Hob-man's riches buried in tunnels beneath the village.

3. "In the Drownings. Post AD 43." A fisherman tells the story of the disappearance of his first wife and family.

4. "The Head of Diocletian. Post AD 290." A representative of the Roman Empire searches for a ring of counterfeiters.

5. "November Saints. AD 1064." Alfgiva, a beggar (who shortly thereafter becomes a nun), witnesses the discovery of the tomb of Saint Ragener.

6. "Limping to Jerusalem. Post AD 1100." Simon de Senlis, Earl of Northampton, builds The Holy Sepulchre at the behest of the Knights Templar, whom he met during the First Crusade.

7. "Confessions of a Mask. AD 1607." The severed head of Francis Tresham, a conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, narrates his story from atop a pike outside Northampton. He is later joined by the head of John Reynolds, a.k.a. Captain Pouch, who led the Midlands food riots (which was against Tresham's family) that same year.

8. "Angel Language. AD 1618." Augustus Nicholls, a lecherous judge, arranges a tryst between himself and a young widow, for the night before he is to condemn a thief to death. A Moore regular, Dr. John Dee, also figures in this story.

9. "Partners in Knitting. AD 1705." Elinor Shaw and her lover, Mary Phillips, are condemned as witches and burned at the stake.

10. "The Sun Looks Pale Upon the Wall. AD 1841." Poet John Clare's diary, detailing his escape from the lunatic asylum Fair Mead House, High Beech, and his journey back to his "second" wife and family, in Northampton.

11. "I Travel in Suspenders. AD 1931." The trial of the infamous murderer Alfred Rouse, as viewed by Alf himself (who was a bit deluded as to the assumed outcome).

12. "Phipps' Fire Escape. AD 1995." An up-to-the-moment metafictional report by Alan Moore himself, commenting on the themes of the novel and the linkages among the various stories as well as his own life (and the lives of those in his family), as he attempts to provide the book with a suitable denouement.

[Nicolas · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dans ce roman-mosaïque, l'auteur nous fait vivre l'histoire de Northampton à travers les destins, globalement tragiques, de personnages de toutes les époques : un hominien, un seigneur du temps des croisades, un poète fou, seront certains de nos guides dans cette visite qui ne manque pas d'ambition. On suivra chacun de ces personnages dans des nouvelles invariablement racontées à la première personne, pour nous faire voir à chaque fois leur chute et, quand on a de la chance, leur mort. Du coup, évidement, le récit a un ton assez sombre, et les personnages sont rarement les vainqueurs de l'histoire, même l'auteur qui raconte le dernier récit.
Ce qui m'attriste avec cette histoire, c'est justement que, du premier au dernier, les récits sont invariablement difficiles d'accès (avec toutefois une difficulté spéciale pour le premier et le dernier) : les personnages sont souvent incohérents, la trame temporelle est assez souvent maltraitée (voir carrément déchirée, comme dans ce récit où - un peu à la manière du chapitre de Watchmen racontant comment le Dr Manhattan est apparu - on voit trois personnes d'époques différentes mourir simultanément).
En fait, je me doutais déjà que Moore était un scénariste adepte des cabrioles scénaristiques. Mais j'ignorais qu'il jouerait à ce point avec les différents niveaux de réalité du récit, et qu'en plus il faisait de l'art pour l'art et n'hésitait pas à rendre son récit totalement illisible pour la beauté d'une idée ... qui n'aurait pas forcément dû être exploitée.
Et comme chaque fois, ce maniérisme m'exaspère, parce qu'il rend l'histoire inaccessible. J'ai bien compris qu'il exploitait le mauvais côté de l'histoire de sa ville. Mais franchement, tout cela m'a paru un peu forcé, quand bien même ce livre est le fruit d'une époque (1995, ça a déjà 20 ans !) où la ville devait semblait bien sordide.
Ca ne change pas grand chose à mon avis sur ce roman, qui n'aurait peut-être pas dû sortir, et rester une oeuvre pour initiés, ou fans complétistes de l'auteur, ce qui n'est certainement pas mon cas.

[Chrissie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alan Moore may be best known for his comic book writing, "Watchmen" and "V for Vendetta" most notably, but his only
published "novel" (no comics in it) has always seemed like his ultimate tour de force.

"Voice of the Fire" is really like no other novel and you'll not hear people praising it as they do "Watchmen". Within
this book, however, is some of Moore's most magical, breathtaking, and awe-inspiring writing. It all takes place in the
same locale in Great Britain's Midlands (near Birmingham, the urban basis for Tolkien's actual two towers), an area
rich with history and deep resonance for many writers. Also nearby is Shakespeare's hometown of Stratford. Moore
tells his tale in this area, but takes us through different time periods of the town of Northhampton, where Moore
makes his home.

Each chapter corresponds to a different era in Northhampton, so is told in different incarnations of English. From a
"primitive" voice in 4000 B.C. in the first chapter up to the year 1995 A.D., the last chapter. Each chapter holds one
in the sway of a knowledge and a depth that is equal parts wonder, magic, and beauty.

Of course, this book is for readers who enjoy the most unusual and eccentric parts of Moore's uncanny imagination.
Moore captures something wholly unique and rich, like an early Black Sabbath album, that can only have come from
the Black Country of England's Midlands.

[Gabo deOz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Es una obra bastante difícil de leer, para poder acabarla nos tiene que pillar con muchas ganas. En mi caso gané interés a medida que iba leyendo cada uno de los capítulos, aunque ninguno se relaciona con el anterior, todos narran la vida de la ciudad de Northampton en diferentes épocas.

El primer capítulo es muy extraño. Alan Moore quería desligarse de los juicios de valor que podía tener la gente sobre su obra. La historia narra la vida de un joven (Un chico estúpido, un poco primitivo y con un lenguaje muy básico) que pertenece a una tribu nómada, después de la muerte de su madre tiene que bajar por una montaña, hasta encontrar una chica que vive con una especie de hombre muy viejo y con un nivel de espiritualidad superior. Se habla de la dualidad del mundo de los vivos y muertos, los sacrificios, la magia, los espíritus, las brujas y lo oculto. Una historia que gira alrededor del fuego. Con esa dosis de política, sexo y con un poco de gore que caracteriza a Alan Moore.

Hay todo tipo de historias por ejemplo una vagabunda suplanta a una chica heredera de un hombre sabio e intenta apropiarse de todas sus riquezas o un hombre con muchas esposas que intenta vivir su mentira. La evolución de la cultura a través de los tiempos con sus ritos y leyendas, los hornos metalúrgicos, etc.

Es la primera novela de Alan Moore, un libro interesante que combina todo tipo de estilos para reflejar de forma libre, lo que se vivía en esas épocas.

[Joana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up because it's Alan Moore, and it's so much of him here on the way he tells a story and delivers a concept, and truly this book does such interesting things with storytelling and writing, so I feel this book is written for people who love the written word - the clear difference and style in writing moving from time to time, really from the beginning the English of the cavemen was so weird to read (which I had to do outloud a lot of the time), but different ways of speak repeated through the chapters, and that was interesting to see!!!
Now on the other hand, the plot most times didn't do it for me much, at least not all the times... though I really liked the themes that surround that different times, to have that line through it, but yeah, not doing too much for me... and then there's the thing about the portrayal of women and how they feel exploited at times - which I should have expected from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but I love that series so much, that I overlook it there...
So yeah, I'm still giving it four stars, because it was still an interesting read, but it's not a super strong four stars...

[Angela Slatter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing writing; first chapter is a bit turgid and hard to get through, but it's worth sticking with it.

[Facundo Melillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cerca del comienzo del poema "January" del poeta inglés John Clare (también conocido como 'The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet'), se encuentran los siguientes versos:

Or old Moore’s annual prophecies
Of flooded fields and clouded skies;
Whose Almanac’s thumb’d pages swarm
With frost and snow, and many a storm,
And wisdom, gossip’d from the stars,
Of politics and bloody wars.

En aquellas palabras evocadas en 1827 se prefigura lo que, en 1996, Alan Moore llevaría a la literatura en su primer intento de abarcar la historia de su ciudad natal: Northampton. El centro exacto de Inglaterra y, según Moore, del propio mundo.

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.”

Durante las primeras páginas de este libro se narran las vivencias de un infante con retraso mental y dificultades para distinguir los sueños de la realidad. Habla un inglés primitivo, siempre en present perfect tense y desconoce de muchas palabras. Al final de ese relato hay una visión: la cabeza de un soldado romano, un padre que perdió a su familia en una invasión, las últimas brujas quemadas en la hoguera, el juez Augustine Nicolls, Francis Tresham, Simon de Senlis, John Clare y todos los acontecimientos que hicieron a la ciudad. Desde sus cimientos como aldea de distintas tribus pre-célticas hasta imponente ciudad de la post guerra que es hoy. Las cenizas de todos los fuegos que se alzaron en la colina de la bestia resuenan una y otra vez por las páginas. Todas las voces que contribuyeron a la historia geográfica del lugar están presentes. Es así, Voice of the Fire, un viaje histórico que reconstruye desde la ficción los cimientos de lugar especial del que no se habla tanto como uno esperaría.

Así como el "Ulysses" de James Joyce es un recorrido por Dublin de parte de un enamorado de su ciudad natal o "Adán Buenosayres" de Leopoldo Marechal, Moore hace lo propio con su primera novela. Así como Jorge Luis Borges hace en "Historia universal de la infamia", Marcel Schwob en "Vies imaginaires" o Rudyard Kipling en "Puck of Pook's Hill", Moore reconstruye la historia desde los hechos fantásticos para volverla propia.

"Although the fire is dead, these cinders are its voice"

[Newton Nitro · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Voz do Fogo (Voice of Fire ) – Alan Moore | O Fogo INCONTROLÁVEL da HISTÓRIA! | NITROLEITURAS #resenha
Me preparando para o OUTUBRO FESTIVAL DOIDIMAIS MOORIANO do JERUSALÉM, porque as 1.200 páginas do tijolão do Alan Moore devem me consumir o mês inteiro, resolvi ler A Voz do Fogo, romance de 1995, a primeira incursão do mago de Northampton e monstro sagrado dos quadrinhos na literatura “séria” (odeio esse termo, mas fazer o quê?

Como JERUSALÉM é uma espécie de continuação ou apoteose do que o Moore fez em A VOZ DO FOGO, essa leitura vai me ajudar a entrar no misterioso e fascinante “headspace” do mago de Northampton!

E vamo que vamo!

A Voz do Fogo (Voice of Fire) – Alan Moore | Top Shelf, 350 páginas, 2004 (1ª ed. 1996) | Nota 4 em 5 | Lido de 2.10.2016 a 5.10.2016, no original em inglês!voice-of-the-fire-front-cover

SINOPSE

Em doze histórias, Voz do Fogo narra a vida de extraordinários personagens que viveram na mesma região da Inglaterra durante 6 mil anos de história. Jovens bruxas, velhos guerreiros, poetas loucos e cabeças falantes pintam a história de Northampton com uma paleta sombria e estonteante.

A voz de Alan Moore, como o fogo, queima, transforma. Chama à realidade de um mundo onde nada permanece igual apesar de seus habitantes-personagens caminharem para um mesmo e inexorável destino. O fogo da voz percorre quase 5 mil anos, queimando sempre no mesmo local. Está presente em cada capítulo, interligando-os em uma teia cuja aranha – o teclado do autor – mostra as presas ao final para queimar as mãos e a alma de seu criador e de todos aqueles que se aventuram a se aproximar dele. ‘A Voz do Fogo’ não se cala nunca. Apenas queima, sem dor.

Em doze assombrosos contos intercalados que convergem para uma única voz fomentada por cumplicidades, traições, assassínios, torturas, perversões sexuais, pesadelos, vinganças, fantasmas, escatologias, humor negro e toda sorte de augúrios, às vezes surreal e sempre corrosivamente macabro, Moore envereda pelo lado arcano das mitologias, cultos e rituais pagãos, misticismo, religião e influências lovecraftianas sem prescindir dos contextos políticos e históricos característicos.

RESENHA

Um dos temas mais recorrentes em todas as obras de Alan Moore é a definição de HISTÓRIA. O que é esse troço que chamamos de história? Como criamos, destruímos, remodelamos e reinventamos as narrativas que definem a realidade.

Porque a realidade nada mais é que uma história que nossos cérebros contam para as nossas consciências. Histórias que são absolutamente maleáveis, etéreas, passíveis de serem moldadas, reiventadas, reconstruídas, ao sabor do vento, do desejos dos poderosos ou pelas próprias forças do Caos Organizado que compõe a Natureza. Ou seja, a HISTÓRIA é tão bruxuleante, perigosa, fascinante quanto o FOGO.

Doideira não? Pois A VOZ DO FOGO faz isso na gente, deixa a gente pensando sobre como concebemos o mundo através das narrativas que construímos, e como o mundo muda quando se muda a narrativa, os conceitos usados para defini-lo.

Isso e muito mais, é claro, o Moore é um escritor de camadas infinitas, um ocultista de uma tradição antiga e futurista ao mesmo tempo.

[Fred · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book took me a LONG time to get into. I tried to read it once about 5 years ago, and only got into the 2nd or third story before I lost interest in it. Partly this is because the first story is very long (compared to the rest of the ones in the book), and extremely difficult to read. It's written in the manner of a brain-damaged adult living 3000 years ago, so I had to work hard to keep up with the tone and stream of consciousness style.

When I came back to this book in May, I fell into the same problems. It had been so long that I re-read it again from the beginning, and once I was able to trudge through those first couple stories, the rest of the book became much more interesting, and enjoyable. It definitely floundered again about 2/3 through, but the finishing stories made up for that, with the finale being an amazing culmination. Alan Moore writes about himself, and says "just because this is fiction, doesn't mean it shouldn't be true", or something very similar.

A great work for fans of his, and I believe Neil Gaiman said it best in the introduction: "You measure a circle starting anywhere". Pick this book up, and randomly start with one of the stories in the middle. Keep randomly picking one until you've read them all, the storylines are intertwined, but not so much that you need to have seen the previous ones in order to make sense of it, and the allusions will build as you recognize characters and scenes from one to the other.

[Pandem Buckner · Rating 1 out of 5]

As big a fan as I am of Alan Moore's comics, I thought reading his novel would be just as thrilling an experience.

It wasn't.

To be honest, I couldn't even make it through the book's first section.

The story is ambitious - telling the history of a place from pre-historic times to the present through a series of vignettes that occurred on the site - and really, it should have been a great book. But in his ambition, Alan Moore overreached with the first part of the book.

The first vignette, if a section over a hundred pages long deserves that name, is told from the viewpoint of a, well, I'm going to say "caveman" because I can't currently be arsed to look up the exact genus. That alone is difficult, but Mr. Moore felt fit somehow to make this character a mentally-challenged caveman. While I think writing from the perspective of the mentally-challenged could certainly stand to be done more in literature, doing it with a mentally-challenged caveman who heavily overuses the word "glean" made the first section such a slog that I just couldn't make it. Trying to start again later made the slog no less arduous, and I gave up again.

Alan Moore wins for making me give up on a book.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alan Moore describes "Voice of the Fire" as a novel but it really reads as a series of stories or novellas with thematic and geographic relationships. Starting in 4000 BC with nomads near what would become Northampton England and concluding in Northampton with a nonfiction narrative in 1995 it tells a number of dark, violent, supernatural, and perverse tales.

I was bother quite a bit by the 8 point serif type used. Very hard to read when tired. Cheap of them really.

Also not especially a fan of the experience of reading in a style meant to characterize the thinking of a teenager with mental difficulties in 4000 BC. That story was still very interesting but unpleasant to read.

All in all I really liked this. I am a great admirer of Moore and, for that matter, of anyone who can remain an artist of such quality while embracing dark and sexually perverse subject matter. Too many of us perverts are unimpressive writers and the talented ones too often hide their perversity.