Voice of the Fire

25th Anniversary Edition

By: Alan Moore

Narrated by: Maxine Peake, Jason Williamson, Toby Jones, Mark Gatiss, Alan Moore and multiple narrators

An epic audiobook in 12 parts.

Northampton. The center of England. Twelve extraordinary characters transport you through 6,000 years of astonishing history. As Alan Moore’s place-writing masterpiece reaches its 25th anniversary, New Perspectives brings this expansive work to life through twelve immersive audio journeys.

Violence, madness, lust, and ecstasy all weave together in patterns of recurring visions, restless apparitions, and gut-wrenching narrative that offer an unprecedented voice to one of the country’s most enigmatic regions. A prehistoric boy learns a deadly lesson, a murderess dresses up as her victim, a Roman emissary confronts an unbearable truth about the empire, two lovers burn at the stake for witchcraft, and a poet begins his doomed walk from one incarceration to another.

Blending history with wild imagination, this collection of remarkable tales submerge you in the power of language and unveil the deepest secrets hidden in the land. Spoken by an exceptional cast, from Maxine Peake to Sleaford Mods vocalist Jason Williamson, this is epic cinema for the ears, firmly rooted in the author’s home town of Northampton.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©1996 Alan Moore (P)2021 New Perspectives Theatre Company Ltd

A masterpiece revisited

Alan Moore is simply a genius with the written word. The greatest comic book writer of all time also delivers in pure prose.

Voicing my thoughts on Voice of the Fire

Starts off very difficult, but that's by design. some of the sfx in the audiobook feel like they might be a little too much? but overall a phenomenal fantastical journey through a slice of geography and history.

Voice of the Fire -- A Conjuring Through Chant

Alan Moore chants us into a trance with the Voice of the Fire and this audio production immerses you even deeper within its soundscapes of nature and atmospheric activity. The spoken voices give a mesmerizing performance of this masterful work. It is a work about how the world is perceived (often not very accurately) and how that perception is carried on and evolved or returned to in spiral like patterns over time. It is a work that uses language to show how language can be deceptive and powerful. I would recommend getting the printed version as well because Moore uses English in its more under-developed and somewhat unrecognizable form in the beginning sections. Seeing the words will help to decode what is happening in the early parts and once you've decoded a few of the words used (the "primitive" sections are spoken with animism-like metaphors and kennings, to describe things such as clouds or bodily functions), then you can more thoroughly enjoy what is being done to you the reader -- chanting you through the entrancing flames into a world of visions and dreams and ecstasy isomorphic to the linguistic cage of flickering false shapes that is our own. Underneath it all lie the necromanced simmering bones of human being.

Will invade your dreams.

Loved it. Great characters. Perfect voices given to them. Look deeper into the fire.

A great read, an even better listen

I'd loved reading this book but hearing it spoken was even better. So great to hear Alan Moore read the final chapter. Absolutely brilliant.

Quite an experience

Alan Moore considers himself a magician, and this book a spell. Be forewarned.

There’s an episode of Friends where after hearing Joey elaborate on the meaning of something being a “moo point” Rachel says “Am I going crazy or did that just make sense?”

I found myself asking the same question every time I picked up this book. Having always found Alan Moore to be a fascinating character but only sort of enjoying his graphic novels, I thought I’d give him another chance as a novelist and I am glad I did. Voice of the Fire presents an enticing and at times unnerving look at the way in which the stories we tell affect us and the world around us.

As an archaeologist I’ve spent a lot of time researching peoples relationships to their environments and I’ve never read fiction that explored that concept so deeply. People and places leave traces of themselves behind, we study the physical remains via archaeology, the records of them through history, but weaving it all together is this strange world of folklore, myth, and memory. This whole novel takes place in that third zone.

It’s grim - not a lot of joy in the stories themselves, but it’s all about the people caught in the matrix of memory and time. Not all the chapters are equal and at times Moore’s language borders on self-indulgence, but if you are the sort of person who thinks about these things (and if you’re considering this book you probably are), you may just find yourself asking “am I crazy or did that just make sense?”

Watch out for the shagfoals.

Grim, beautiful Alan Moore prose.

Grim, haunting and beautiful. Perfectly distilled Alan Moore in every possible way. If you like his work it’ll pull you in from the beginning.

Not my favorite Moore

I love Alan Moore's story telling and writing style but this book didn't stand out. Some of the stories were compelling and the underlying story of North Hampton is captivating. Nonetheless, this feels like a drafted attempt at what he accomplished with much better continuity through Jerusalem. I think this book just fails to finish what it started out and the final chapter seems self aware of that point, seeming more the end to an essay describing why each chapter was included rather than allowing them to stand on their own.

I would still recommend this book but only to people who are already Moore fans. After reading Jerusalem, it reads like a welcome addition to the later work but not much more. The book is not lazy or poorly written but overly ambitious and it just fell short of those lofty goals for me.

On the other hand, with the exception of a couple chapters, the performances are wonderful and the addition of sound effects adds significantly to the effect. However, there are a few points that feel a little over-engineered.

All in all, the brilliance of Alan Moore mostly comes through in this book but without the quality of story telling and consistency which he maintains both in Jerusalem and most of his comic books.

Alan Moore! What can you say!

Excellent. Yes there are some horrible hideous things here. I had to give it a break a few times. I like Alan Moore doing the last chapter. It brings it all together.

Production quality

Moore is an amazing writer AND narrator. Knowing nothing about Northampton in advance, I found the stories covering 6000 years of its history to be compelling, unique and written from a grim personal perspective on his city.