Jerusalem

This is a massive contemporary novel which upends all the rules of contemporary straight-ahead prose. Alan Moore’s "Jerusalem," published in 2016, is a highly experimental work, with each chapter told from a different character’s point of view, jumping around chronologically to visit times as long past as the early Middle Ages and as far distant as the projected end of the universe. In these ways it resembles quite a few modern novels.

But its prose is a marvelous tangle of description, simile, and wordplay.

Let’s begin with a feature that may well be off-putting for many readers—the obsessive specification of the exact streets and landmarks among which the action takes place: the grubby precinct of London which Moore refers to as “The Boroughs.” A map is provided in the endpapers of the book.

Here’s a typical paragraph:

He gestured drunkenly around them as they reached the bottom of the rough trapezium of hunched-up ground called Castle Hill, where it joined what was left of Fitzroy Street. This last was now a broadened driveway leading down into the shoebox stack of ’Sixties housing where the feudal corridors of Moat Street, Fort Street and the rest once stood. It terminated in a claustrophobic dead-end car park, block accommodation closing in on two sides while the black untidy hedges representing a last desperate stand of Boroughs wilderness, spilled over on a third.

You can follow the action along on the map if you wish, but it doesn’t add a great deal to understanding the novel. Moore specifies street names when a character goes for a walk, including each and every turn. No one ever just walks down a generic street. This pattern is the one thing that annoyed me about his prose because it is so repetitious and mostly irrelevant. But it’s all of a piece with his desire to embed his fantastically baroque story in a thickly woven web of specific detail. His style reminds me of those Medieval illuminated manuscripts in which a text is ornamented with scrolls, flowers, and fantastic beasts crowding all the margins and other spaces into which something decorative can be inserted.

Note how it’s not just a driveway, but a “broadened driveway; not a simple parking lot, but “a claustrophobic dead-end car park.” The vast majority of nouns are modified, often multiply: adjectives and adverbs abound.

For the right sort of reader, the densely ornamented prose is not a forbidding dark hedge, but a maze of wonders. His writing flows nicely, even though reading some of his sentences aloud requires two or more breaths.

He scatters metaphors and similes in profusion throughout the text. For instance, consider the next paragraph:

When this meagre estate had first gone up in Mick and Alma’s early teenage years the cul-d-sac had been a bruising mockery of a children’s playground, with a scaled down maze of blue brick in its centre, built apparently for feeble minded leprechauns, and the autistic cubist’s notion of a concrete horse that grazed eternally nearby, too hard-edged and uncomfortable for any child to straddle, with its eyes an empty hole bored through its temples. Even that, more like the abstract statue of a playground than an actual place, had been less awful than this date-rape opportunity and likely dogging hotspot, with its hasty skim of tarmac spread like cheap, stale caviar across the pink pedestrian tiles beneath, the bumpy lanes and flagstone closes under that. Only the gutter margins where the strata peeled back into sunburn tatters gave away the layers of human time compressed below, ring markings on the long-felled tree stump of the Boroughs. From downhill beyond the car park and the no-frills tombstones of its sheltering apartment blocks there came the mournful shunt and grumble of a goods train with its yelp and mutter rolling up the valley’s sides from the criss-cross self-harm scars of the rail tracks at its bottom.

He piles one figure of speech atop another, explores them in detail, indulges in word-play and creates prose that resembles less a walk along a path than a complex ballet with the reader bewildered in its center. Nothing much “happens” for long stretches, but the verbal action is relentless.

In the world of Jerusalem the images of the dead are often accompanied by a string of after-images trailing and fading out behind them. Time after time Moore comes up with a new simile for this effect, clearly delighting in displaying his fertile imagination. The idea never “goes without saying.”

Many readers will find this sort of thing off-putting; but if, like me, you find it delightful, there’s plenty of it: the novel is 1,262 pages long.

So exquisitely mundane is most of the early narrative that the moments of fantasy leap out shockingly from the page, and even after these have accumulated for hundreds of pages it is stunning to find ourselves halfway through the novel plunged into an extraordinarily detailed and original afterlife world where most of the characters are “dead.”

Much of the subject matter is grim, threatening, haunting (in both figurative and literal senses); but the prose is exuberant, playful, often amusing. Whereas most modern fiction pares away tedious description to immerse us in the action, Moore immerses us in the funhouse of his prose where we’re sometimes in danger of losing track of the plot altogether. In this book the point is in the telling, more than in the tale.

Moore plays all kinds of linguistic games, writing in varied styles including Victorian gothic, Chandleresque hardboiled detective, and the sort of experimental punning mish-mash that makes up James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake in a chapter that embodies the tale of the author’s mad daughter, Lucia:

Awake, Lucia gets up wi’ the wry sing of de light. She is a puzzle, shore enearth, as all the Nurzis and the D’actors would afform, but nibber a cross word these days, deepindig on her mendication and on every workin’ grimpill’s progress.

I count at least ten puns or other sorts of wordplay in these two sentences alone which open the chapter allusively titled “Round the Bend.” It goes on like that for 48 dense pages.

One chapter is written entirely in verse, beginning thus:

Den wakes beneath the windswept porch alone
On bone-hard slab rubbed smooth by Sunday feet
Where afternoon light leans, fatigued and spent,
Ground to which he feels no entitlement
Nor any purchase on the sullen street;
Unpeels his chill grey cheek from chill grey stone

Then orients himself in time and space.

The desire to be oriented in time and space is constantly challenged. Although the novel is structured something like a mystery, there is no culminating Big Reveal. One major hanging plot thread never gets wrapped up at all. The last chapter brings together many scenes and characters earlier touched on, but not in a way that explains everything.

Moore is best known as a writer for DC superhero comic books and as author of the similarly playful historical fantasy The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the graphic novel, much better than the awful movie). But this is his masterpiece: dazzling, diverting, and utterly delightful.

During the ten years it took Alan Moore to complete his highly anticipated second novel, Jerusalem, he stoked expectations by comparing it to James Joyce’s Ulysses, adding that it would be too long and confusing for anyone to read. He was half right. Jerusalem is a masterwork: audacious, entertaining, witty, concerned with big ideas, self-deprecating and kaleidoscopic, a carton full of Fabergé eggs. Douglas Wolk of the New York Times justifiably adds “sometimes maddening.” Readers unprepared for these riches may run screaming from what they perceive as a disorienting cacophony.

Before you decide whether to lift the lid on this thing, let’s cover a few basics. You should know that Jerusalem has very little to do with the Middle Eastern city. The title refers to an unofficial English national anthem of the same name, based on a poem by William Blake from early in the Industrial Revolution: “And was Jerusalem builded here/Among these dark Satanic Mills?” Moore’s Jerusalem is primarily set in the Boroughs, an impoverished working class community of Northampton, England.

Secondly, any honest review of his novel must deal with certain elephants in the room. The hardcover version of Jerusalem tips the scales at 3 ¾ lb., an intimidating 600,000+ words, more than twice the length of Ulysses and supposedly even longer than the Bible. (A bookstand angled at 30° protects tome and reader from spinal injury.)

But its physical bulk pales in comparison to the risk of awkward literary weight. Moore is a man who got married in a peacock-blue suit. His finger rings amount to a set of digital armor. Can he be garrulous, overly free with modifiers? Of course he can.

“Inside him, underneath the white-cake-icing of his hair, there were bordello churches where through one door surged the wide Atlantic and in through another came a tumbling circus funfair burst of clowns and tigers, girls with plumes and lovely lettering on the rides, a shimmering flood of sounds and images, of lightning chalk impressions dashed off by a feverish saloon caricaturist, melodrama vignettes fierce with meaning acted out beyond his eyelids’ plush pink safety curtain, all the world with all its shining marble hours, its lichen centuries and fanny-sucking moments all at once, his every waking second constantly exploded to a thousand years of incident and fanfare, an eternal conflagration of the senses where stood Snowy Vernall, wide-eyed and unflinching at the bright carnival heart of his own endless fire.”

Moore’s previous novel, Voice of the Fire, begins in the mind of a brain-damaged, Stone Age Briton and achieves modern English only in the final pages. Now comes Jerusalem, promising Ulysses. Chapters range in style from the young adult novel to a 50-page immersion in Finnegan’s Wake voiced by Joyce’s mentally ill daughter Lucia, and a faux Samuel Beckett play. [Reader suffers panic attack]

It’s not that tough, honestly. The sailing is easy until page 884. There are so many inducements to persevere. Consider how, following the sugar-coated haze of Book Two’s “The Riddle of the Choking Child”, Moore snaps readers to attention at the opening of Book Three. A statue of the Archangel Michael atop the Northampton Guild Hall introduces himself;

“Always now and always here and always me: that’s what it’s like for you.

“Now always and here always and me always: this is what it’s like for me.

“Now. Here. Me.”

Could blaring trumpets improve on this effect? I. Think. Not.

Literary weight is also about content. Once again, Jerusalem delivers by the truckload. At one level this is a wistful love letter to beleaguered Northampton, Moore’s lifelong home. We walk the dilapidated streets of the Boroughs over and over again as they appear through the eyes of narrators spanning 1200 years. We’re to imagine them all as simultaneously present in a space-time that is, was, and always will be complete from Big Bang to universal heat death. In this, he’s playing off ideas current in theoretical physics. Time travel books, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five notably excepted, often concern themselves with the dangers of altering history. Here, history cannot change and Moore focuses on a different set of implications. If we are embedded in a universe where the experience of unfolding time is an illusion, what now is life? and death? Free will vanishes; we may fuss and fret but outcomes are already determined as surely as they are for any fictional being. What happens to ambition? To the tempering influences of shame, guilt and blame? Although we’re shown the pain inflicted by miscreant behavior and the associated lingering resentments, Moore avoids framing up a battle of Good v Evil. What happens, happens. Is there any ultimate justice? Based on what? (His tentative answer to this strikes me as shaky.) Taken together, he’s presenting his understanding of the limits and bounds of human awareness reflected in the mirror of Northampton, even as the landmarks of its lore and his own fond memories are demolished by forces he’s less than pleased to call progress.

Jerusalem could have been fatally ponderous. Some expositions do teeter at the brink of excess but this is forgivable. Moore takes his far-flung subject matters seriously and, unlike Joyce, tries to help us keep up. Whenever possible, the mood is light. Here Moore’s alter ego Alma, an artist who has achieved minor celebrity in Northampton, is out for a walk on a cold and frosty morning;

“A skinny boy in modern hair and spectacles stops in his tracks and gapes at her incredulously, face contorting in a rubbery cartoon expression which, if he were not so youthful, might be taken for a paralysing stroke. Remembering she hasn’t bothered putting on her knickers, Alma glances down to make sure that the zipper on her jeans is still intact then realises that the thunderstruck young man is an admirer. He tells her she’s Alma Warren, which she’s always grateful for. One of these days, when she’s gone wandering from the home, she’ll need that information.”

And then there’s Jerusalem’s other elephant: a ghost mammoth commandeered from the Pleistocene to carry the urchins of the Dead Dead Gang on a galumphing dash along the eternal corridor of imagination to the moment when one of their number is due to be restored to waking life in the Boroughs. Whew, just in time, precisely as readers will have suspected from their rarified vantage point, no other outcome being possible.

So, at the end of the day who is Jerusalem’s audience? Readers who feel imprisoned by their own understandings. Readers with the double vision to enjoy the dance of language on a page and also in the conceptual realm that floats above it. If you belong to both groups, cobble together a bookstand, grab a notepad, and dig in. The text abounds with pop cultural references. You can enjoy Jerusalem without Cliff Notes; your great-grandchildren will find it as obscure as Ulysses. Students of English Literature should roll up their sleeves as well. A first read can but glimpse in passing a few of the roads not taken, i.e. research opportunities. There are generations of them. Select yours now, while the low hanging fruit is plentiful.

Book One - The Boroughs is the best read of the three books. If you read this a chapter a day, and think of individual storytellers having an "adventure" traveling from points A to B, you'll have no problem. The chapters don't always relate to tell a linear story.

Book Two - Mansoul, is where you start to have problems. Choking on a cough drop, a young boy is dead before his time, and joins the Dead Dead Gang to try to return to s!) his own time and place. It takes over 400 pages to get there.

Book Three - Vernall's Inquest, is where you'll lose interest. I dare anyone to read the chapter "Round the Bend" and tell me you could get through it. The chapter starts out with "Awake, Lucia gets up wi' the wry sing of de light". It's cute, but after a page or two of these types of sentences, it gets frustrating, and when there's nearly another 50 pages of it, you get angry. I tried three times to get through the first couple of pages, and finally I gave up and moved to the next chapter. Yes, I understand that Lucia is in an insane asylum, but I got the point in the first paragraph... don't make me read an entire chapter (nearly 50 pages) of a character that isn't needed in the book (spoiler alert, I think she dies in the last sentence of the chapter anyway), filled with dialogue I can't understand without concentrating as if I was taking a college final. And it gets worse... a chapter told entirely in poetry, a 40+ page chapter in which only one sentence is used, another chapter which is one long run-on sentence. The entire Book 3 is an exercise in which Moore gets showy with a "look how I can tell a story now" feeling, and I couldn't go on. Less is sometimes "Moore" Alan.

Chapters are told from different viewpoints, and from different characters. Is it worth 1,266 pages and $35? Well, it's not for everybody, but I'm glad I got through it. I'll never read it again, but maybe somebody at the used book store will enjoy it more than I did.

Epic in scope, I'm about half-way through and can only say wow. Just wow. His prose is polished to the point of perfection and his imagery is vivid. It's evoking a sense of both loss and joy inside of me; rekindling memories of my own childhood haunts in my small town, tied to a metaphysical and fantastical rendering. I'm reading a true classic of my time and I imagine I feel like a reader did reading a Dickens' novel the year it was written or stumbling upon Frank Herbert's Dune in 1965. It's a labor of love, but one that will influence me for the rest of my life and those that choose to embark down the cobblestone and back alleys of Moore's brilliant imagination will be moved. Some might think it pretentious and it probably is, but it's got the imagination and literary chops to back it up. Immerse yourself in its beauty. 5 stars!

Huge book that needed a HUGE red pen and an editor with some vision. Alan Moore is great with pithy comic book dialogue and story arcs, but this P.O.S. is shockingly awful. Read the Kindle sample. if you can sludge through the terrible, terrible purple prose, you're in a for a boring, mind-numbing 6 months of carrying this cinder block of a book around. A cinder block describes it's size, weight and literary value.

I will be reading this extraordinary novel for the rest of my life. Joyce and Becket are named here as comparable writers but has anyone said the book has the ability to grip you and hold you and never fully let you go like DICKENS. THIS IS EITHER PRE-MODERN OR POST-MODERN OR BOTH. It's unclassifiable and that's one of its many strengths. Dickens with an extra-dimension of speculative science, mysticism and something which can only be called 'the Moore effect'. Get your copy now. You'll be reading it and loving it for the rest of your life.

As with the review above, I'm merely halfway through "Jerusalem " . It's a dense , irradiated muffin of a book although the scope is both epic and intimate. Moore's characters are more "real" then people I actually know...that sounds daft I know but take a chance on this experience, read this book with an open mind....you may not regret it.

This book is Rubbish from the first page to the last. It has no sense, no value, nothing to offer the humble and serious reader. The author played a wicked joke. Insulting and idiotic. Do I have to give a star? It does not rate one. I always thought that every novel deserved a readers respect but this one is void of any importance. Don't waste your time nor your money. Aside from all else, it's bulky and cumbersome. I'd recommend you burn it in your fireplace this winter.

Go to the library, check it out, gasp, this is unreadable. Return. No harm done to your wallet. I love Alan Moore. Comics is his medium. Writing a novel, not so much. This book is unreadable.

I tried to love this book. Over the course of a month I tried. Through 1100 pages I tried. I'd switch to another book for a week and then I'd pick it back up and try. The reality is, this book just becomes pointless after 1000 pages. It probably was pointless long before book #3. I enjoyed book #1. I enjoyed book #2. After the first chapter of book #3 I was ready to label this a soon to be classic. But after that moment the book falls to pieces. It's too random, to disjointed, too long, too pointless. Moore needed someone to tell him to shut up. Someone needed to tell him, if you're going to write a 1000+ page book it'll eventually have to lead to something. That is my ultimate criticism of this book and the reason I fell out of love with it so suddenly. It goes nowhere. There's no denouement. There's no deus ex machina. It just goes on and on and on and on and on. If there's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, why follow it? Moore may be a genius. This book may ultimately become a classic. But in the end, every book ought to have a purpose. Every book should lead you somewhere. In the end, this book is just the equivalent of some random person talking your ear off about absolutely nothing of any significance 8 hours a day for 3 weeks straight. Are some of the stories great? Sure, but it doesn't make up for the mindless dribble that essentially makes up 95% of the story.