Before we get to any of that, however, let's start with the fact that the book is absolutely gorgeous. This is a sumptuous, lush book. Its cover, a green-tinged photo of Moore staring out at the reader through the smoke of the almost certainly not tobacco cigarette in his hand, is augmented by a bellyband proclaiming the title. The edges of the pages are inked black, giving the exterior a sleek elegance. Inside is similarly well-designed, save for a frustrating decision to use a cod-comics lettering font for chapter headers. Still, it's one of the nicest physical objects of a book I've laid hands on this year.
That bit of geekery aside, the book itself. It is, to be clear, a biography. It is not Gary Spencer Millidge's (very excellent) Alan Moore: Storyteller, nor George Khoury's The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore. The former is an overview of Moore's work; the latter an extended interview. This, however, is an attempt to grapple with Alan Moore the man. This obviously involves a lot of looking at his work, but mainly in terms of how it explains his evolving career.
This is, to be sure, an interesting subject. Moore's career, after all, is a fascinating litany of brilliance and idiosyncrasy. First of all, there's the somewhat puzzling matter of him worshipping a snake puppet. Second, there's the stark litany of fairly explosive feuds he's had with various people. Third, there's the fact that his life is simply full of idiosyncratic and extreme beliefs, positions, and courses of action, most of which are backed up by complex and nuanced explanations.
Complicating Parkin's task is the fact that, up until the very end of the writing process, Moore wasn't participating in the biography. Moore was shown what was at the time intended to be the final draft, and was impressed enough to both give a charming blurb ("In Magic Words Lance Parkin has crafted a biography that is insightful, scrupulously fair-minded and often very funny - a considerable achievement given its unrelentingly grim, unreasonable, and annoying subject. Belongs on the shelf of any halfway decent criminal profiler.") and what Parkin has described as the most wonkish Alan Moore interview ever, as it consisted of no questions regarding well-trod subject matter, and instead consisting entirely of issues like sorting out Grant Morrison's claim that Moore had written him a threatening letter in response to Morrison's unsolicited submission of a Kid Marvelman script (Moore says it never happened, and Parkin backs the claim up with a Dez Skinn interview) and why Moore decided to do his ABC work as a work-for-hire such that he doesn't own Tom Strong or Promethea (still unclear, actually, though I have my speculations for a few years from now).
For the most part the distance Moore kept from the book helps Parkin. Moore is uniquely well-suited to this approach - he's given a large number of interviews, and is one of the best interview subjects around, prone to lengthy answers that are in equal parts witty and informative (there's a lovely and deliciously throwaway joke in which he describes "a five-or-six page strip about Darth Vader," a joke that is hilarious to a vanishingly small number of people). But it means that Magic Words is breathtakingly well-researched. (The footnotes in the final version aren't numbered, but the draft Parkin sent me in June had 1046) It also means that Parkin gives plenty of weight to Moore's critics. Moore requested that Parkin not bother his family or friends, and so the only interviews Parkin did for the bulk of the book were with people who had fallen out with Moore. This doesn't make the book a hit piece - it's obviously not, since Moore endorsed it in the end. But it means that Parkin's take on Moore is fair-minded. The book is not a hagiography just as much as it's not a hit piece. Parkin's deep love of the subject matter shows through, and he's clearly broadly speaking on Moore's side.
Particularly impressive, given Parkin's limited access to Moore himself, are the early chapters, which provide tremendous detail about Moore's pre-professional life. Parkin somehow got ahold of some properly astonishing sources; his tracking down of Jeremy Seabrook's The Unprivileged, a sociological study of Moore's area of Northampton written by Moore's first-form French teacher, is the sort of thing that makes other scholars drool with envy. The casualness with which he describes the plot of Another Suburban Romance, meanwhile, is the Moore scholar equivalent of a mic drop. So thorough is Parkin's account that, reading the book, one does not realize that this section deals with a wildly less well documented phase of Moore's life.
All of this is bound up in the neat, well-organized package of Parkin's overall insights into Moore and his life. The book does not advance any sort of singular argument, but Parkin is deftly deductive, frequently grabbing bits of information from two or three sources and making a solid and compelling stab at explaining how it all fits together. The result is a detailed portrait of Alan Moore that is sympathetic, thorough, and yet put at enough of a remove to invite further engagement and discussion. Magic Words is in no way the definitive book on Alan Moore. But this is a good thing. Parkin believes, with good reason, that Moore has a real chance of being a writer who is still talked about centuries from now. It would undermine this claim horribly if Parkin had the last word. Rather than being definitive, Magic Words is something far more wonderful: essential.