Voice of the Fire [Paperback]

Alan Moore (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Top Shelf Productions (2004)
• ASIN: B001EO41VA
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars England's burning, December 27, 2001

By 

andrew pothecary (Tokyo Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Voice of the Fire (Paperback)

This book's characters face down disappointments, corruptions, madness and dreams in a series of short stories - which all take place in a short radius in central England but are spaced over 6000 years (not 5000 as it says on the cover) until the present day. What can I say - one of the best books to travel through the history of England. Dark, bitter, loving, and embedded in the earth below and burning with the fire above. Passages of brilliant prose will linger - no, just stay - with you. Ideas bounce around the confines of the book, ignited by the fires it tells of. From inventing a language in the first chapter (in which Moore imagines an English language of 6000 years ago, using a vocabulary of few words) to passages that make you realise just how rich the language can be (and infrequently is) you get the sense that Moore is in control and really working at this book. Stand-outs: that first chapter, a Roman facing both the loss of Empire and the savagery of the locals, a Crusader facing his own madness and the madness of his faith - and, in one of the most beautiful descriptive texts I know, the burning at the stake of two "witches" in love.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is a work of magic, February 26, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Voice Of The Fire (Hardcover)

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

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Novel concept, June 30, 2006

By 

J. Downey (Western Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Voice Of The Fire (Hardcover)

Alan Moore's first prose novel, which combusted onto the scene some ten years ago now, still has yet to receive much attention. This occurrence is strange, but understandable. The book, to give a brief overview, is a collection of twelve short stories taking place in twelve different time periods (stretching from 4,000BC to AD1995), all sharing the same setting of the central area of England that eventually becomes Northampton.

Moore, who is so famous I can trust to odds that you know the top three or four works he's most famous for, as revolutionized the comics industry in terms of storytelling, style, and tone time and again. And yet Voice of the Fire remains low on Amazon.com's list of books sold, its decade in the 84,450s list include the English Teacher's Book of Instant Word Games and a certainly captivating Dictionary of Financial Terms.

This, inasmuch as concerns what the public is fed through the New York Times Best Seller List, is unsurprising. Moore's book begins with a 40+ paged chapter about a Neolithic cave-boy's exile from his hunter-gatherer tribe. An emotional and moving story to be sure...if you can make it to the end. The story is told in the first person, using what Moore estimates to be less than five hundred words--his creative attempt at mimicking Neolithic speech and thought.

If you're wondering what to expect from the story: expect fire. And blood. Horror. Nightmares. And more fire besides. Be it ancient, Roman, Norman, or modern, Northampton has never been a very safe place to live, an issue Moore addresses personally as the protagonist in the final chapter, written in a stream-of-consciousness style.

Expect a smorgasbord of writing styles. Moore takes the driver's seat with his characters, and with a Dickens-esque talent to create new personalities the reader sees this single geographical area from such varied points of view as a murderess who plots to get rich quick, a Roman agent come to find a local money counterfeiter, and even a disembodied head upon a gate. Many of the novel's characters are based off of actual historical figures, giving the whole work a cryptic echo that weaves in an out of the story. This echo, this voice of the fire, is the most captivating part of the book, and for which reason I obnoxiously give this book its 5-star rating. Learning history is fun. Learning history within the context of history--even if it is fiction--is perhaps one of the most thought-provoking experiences one can have with a book.

I recommend this book to any reader who has an interest in history or anthropology. For writers, read this if you want to study up on character development or telling first-person stories in a myriad of ways. Moore fans, just read this; he's done it again.