Modern Age - Summer 2017 - 170

Modern Age

*

Summer 2017

upended and piss-perfumed sarcophagi that would replace the
tenant's back-wall badinage and summer doorstep idylls with
more vertical arrangements, thin-air isolation and the tension
rising with each number lit up in the climbing after-curfew lift, a
suicide's-eye view of what had been done to the territory around
them that was inescapable."
The characters inhabiting this beloved place-almost all of
them real, or real-ish-are not quite as memorable as the place
itself. The brother and sister at the book's heart, Mick and Alma
Warren, are mostly delightful company. Mick is a manual laborer
trying to understand the hallucinatory visions of a childhood
adventure in the afterlife that poured down onto him when an
industrial accident doused him in corrosive chemicals. He's an
observer, not an instigator, and so he's a stand-in for the audience. Alma, whose name picks her out as the Soul of the Burrows/
Boroughs, is our authorial stand-in. She's an abrasive pothead of
daunting physical monstrosity, and she's hilarious and lovable as
long as we're not inside her head.
The supporting cast is chosen to display the diversity of souls
who have passed through the Boroughs over the centuries. Moore
shows us the "deathmongers," who really existed back before
the NHS: women who attend funerals and births, ushering other
women's children into and out of this world. He shows us those
who feared the Boroughs-like an Edwardian actor who mimes,
for money, the drunken misery he'd spent his life escaping-and
those who found in it a refuge or a religious calling.
The second-best element of Moore's work is his prose style.
The novel sings when Moore speaks in his own curlicued, lurid,
often sardonic voice. At his best Moore is dazzled or chop licking,
a visionary and gourmand, a lover of the undefended and the
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Modern Age - Summer 2017

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Contents
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