Old Moore's ripping yarns

Alan Moore's ambitious and soon-to-be-filmed comicbook novel traces the roots of the 20th century to Jack the Ripper

The English writer Alan Moore has just published one of the most ambitious, formally innovative and densely researched works of historical fiction of recent years. Its huge cast of characters includes the visionary likes of the three Williams - William Blake, William Morris and William Butler Yeats; its unorthodox speculations draw on scholarly works as diverse as Robert Graves's The White Goddess and Julian Jayne's Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, as well as on art-historical studies of Nicholas Hawskmoor and Walter Sickert, Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor and the classical historian Diodorus Siculus. Politically, it encompasses Gladstone's Irish policy, the Madhi uprisings and the French invasion of Indochina. It is, in short, just the kind of work that ought to rocket straight on to the Booker shortlist. Or it would do, if it were a novel. But it's not. It's a comic.

The English writer Alan Moore has just published one of the most ambitious, formally innovative and densely researched works of historical fiction of recent years. Its huge cast of characters includes the visionary likes of the three Williams - William Blake, William Morris and William Butler Yeats; its unorthodox speculations draw on scholarly works as diverse as Robert Graves's The White Goddess and Julian Jayne's Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, as well as on art-historical studies of Nicholas Hawskmoor and Walter Sickert, Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor and the classical historian Diodorus Siculus. Politically, it encompasses Gladstone's Irish policy, the Madhi uprisings and the French invasion of Indochina. It is, in short, just the kind of work that ought to rocket straight on to the Booker shortlist. Or it would do, if it were a novel. But it's not. It's a comic.

Worse still, From Hell is a comic about Jack the Ripper - very much an X-certificate horror comic, too, in which the drawings by Moore's collaborator Eddie Campbell boast abundant quantities of (historically accurate) coarse banter, plus many squalid copulations and more exotic forms of sexual congress, all topped off with at least one portrayal of Saucy Jack at his bloody work that is guaranteed to put you off your breakfast kipper.

To echo the immortal words uttered at the time of the Chatterley trial, it is absolutely not the kind of book you would wish your wife or servants to see (though it can be very acute on the relations of masters and servants, and on social class in general). But for those willing (a) to put aside their embarrassment about reading comics once past the age of puberty and (b) to suppress the misgiving that only anoraks and sad nutters can have any interest in the Whitechapel murders of 1888, From Hell may also hold some agreeable surprises.

One of them is its frank impatience with the usual thriller form. Moore plainly doesn't much care about the actual identity of Red Jack. Virtually from the outset, he makes it clear that his Ripper is going to be - why not? - the same man fingered in Stephen Knight's unhappily titled best-seller Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1976): Sir William Gull, surgeon and Freemason. In Moore's version, Gull is dispatched by Queen Victoria to dispose of four East End whores who are privy to a dangerous secret about a royal bastard. Gull exceeds his brief, both by murdering one extra prostitute and by transforming the whole procedure into a pagan ritual.

More importantly, the five Ripper murders serve Moore as a Hitchcockian McGuffin - an excuse for an action, something to snare our morbid interest and keep us gripped while he goes about his sneakier and more thought-provoking purposes. Chapter four, for example, consists of an extended lecture on the symbolic history of London from Trojan Brutus onwards, floridly delivered by Gull to his dim-witted coachman Netley as they make their occult progress around the capital, from Blake's grave in Bunhill Fields and Hawksmoor's Christ Church, Spitalfields, via Cleopatra's Needle and the Tower to St Paul's. By way of finale, Gull whips out a map, rules out a few lines to join up the sights they've seen, and bingo: a pentacle!

It may sound like Pevsner on magic mushrooms, and yet it's weirdly beguiling, as is the entire work, which has been appearing in 14 slim instalments over the last 10 years or so and has only just been gathered into a single volume. Hollywood took an interest very early on, and there were rumours that Ridley Scott was planning a crack at it, with Anthony Hopkins in the part of Gull. In the end, the project has fallen into the unexpected hands of the Hughes Brothers, the young African-American duo of Menace 2 Society and Dead Presidents notoriety. Filming began in Prague several weeks ago, with Nigel Hawthorne as Gull and Johnny Depp.

Intrigued, impressed, slightly baffled, I set out on a quest of my own, and, with a little help from his publisher, tracked Alan Moore down to his modest terraced house in Northampton. I was glad to have been forewarned as to his appearance. Draped in black, well over six feet tall, with feral eyes, unfashionably and unfeasibly long hair and beard, and fingers aswarm with silver scorpion rings, Moore looks like the kind of man who might have been thrown out of Black Sabbath for being too weird.

Well, he's certainly far from being the kind of chap to inspire the fond dreams of a Civil Service recruiting officer, but beneath that heavy-metal T-shirt beats a gentle heart; so, after accepting a cup of instant coffee (no hallucinations followed), I asked him what a nice Northampton lad like him was doing dabbling his fingers in ancient blood. "I thought I'd like to do a murder," he replies, spoiling the shock effect slightly by adding, "in literary terms, I mean. A murder sounded to me like an interesting human event, a little apocalypse. When it happens it must almost be like punching a hole through the skin of reality. You've stepped outside the social cocoon, you've done something which any culture in the world would regard as transgressive."

Well and good, but why the sorry old Ripper murders yet again? "Initially I didn't even think of the Ripper murders, because they seemed too played out. Oddly enough, one of the things that got me started was a joke, the title of a book by Douglas Adams - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. And I thought, that's an interesting phrase - what would it mean to solve a crime holistically? It would mean that you'd have to 'solve' not just the crime, but the whole world in which the crime took place.

"Then the Ripper centenary of 1988 came along; I read Stephen Knight's book and I saw that I could use it as a kind of core. I began to play with the idea that the 1880s were a sort of microcosm of what was to happen in the 20th century - scientifically, artistically, politically. So could you say that the Ripper murders were a microcosm of the 1880s? Could you make it seem - just poetically, I mean - that this was the seed event of the 20th century?"

The quick answer to which, for anyone caught up in the intricate workings of From Hell, would appear to be: yes, in an odd sort of way he could do that. If you want to see how, you'll have to shed your inhibitions about being caught reading a comic - either that or wait for the movie, about which Moore maintains a cautious, diplomatic policy of "I wish them well, but I know it's not going to be my book."

Moore has an abundance of other projects to hand. He's virtually a one-man foundry for the American comics industry, churning out the texts and storyboards for five different titles each month. He's well under way on his next epic, a feminist-friendly piece of erotica set in 1913. And he has another, all-absorbing pursuit, mention of which doesn't belong in this article - though I hasten to add, in case some latter-day Chief Inspector Abberline chances across this text, that it is quite legal, and doesn't involve the brutal murdering of prostitutes, or anything distasteful like that.

Honestly it doesn't.

'From Hell' is published by Knockabout Comics at £24.95