I recall references made about this book as ‘an opulent mythology for those without a pot to piss in’ to ‘the labyrinthine streets and pages of Jerusalem tread ghosts that sing of wealth, poverty and our threadbare millennium’.
Sometimes the discourse turns to English as a visionary language from Bunyan to Joyce, holding forth on the illusion of mortality post-Einstein and insist upon the meanest slum as Blake’s eternal holy city. This holds true for the way Alan Moore channels the extraordinary, ecstatic visions of hard scrabble streets and alleys of his hometown in Northampton, UK, a half a square mile of decay and demolition that was England’s Saxon capital. Embedded in the grubby amber of the district’s narrative among its saints, kings, prostitutes and derelicts, a different kind of human time is happening…a soiled simultaneity that doesn’t differentiate between the petrol-coloured puddles as well as, the fractured dreams of those who navigate them. Welcome to the wonderful world-craft of Alan Moore where in his pages lurk demons from the second century Book of Iobit and where angels with golden blood reduce fate to a snooker tournament.
Ghosts, vagrants and prostitutes rub shoulders with Olivier Cromwell, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce’s tragic daughter Lucia, and Buffalo Bill, among others. Brilliance collides with bafflement in this almost visionary tale of recovered memories, art and madness. Somewhere in this sprawling behemoth is a book struggling to get out, with a run of more than 600,000 words its longer than the bible. The plot is simple enough. We open with Alma Warren, an eccentric artist whose brother, Michael once nearly chocked on a cough lozenge, miraculously came back to life. Many years later, a knock on the noggin allows him to access memories of what happened when he was between life and death. He worries that he’s going mad, a tradition in his family going back at least- as far as his great-great-grandfather Ernest Vernall. Alma uses Michael’s hallucinations or memories as the inspiration for a series of paintings, and on the night of the private viewing, various lives converge en route to the gallery in Northampton’s district of Boroughs.
There is a heroin addicted prostitute looking for a client, a middle-aged poetaster still living with his mother, a predatory monster, a bewitched boy, a compromised council official, someone who works with refugees and a car crash. Some chapters deal deliciously with the countercultural history of Northampton with a surprising load of hymnology, plus ghosts often intersecting across centuries. Finally, there are chapters associated with what happened to Michael Warren in his betwixt time in which “builders” play “trilliards” with human souls in a metaphysical pool hall, with the final chapter bringing us back to Alma’s exhibition, where the titles of the paintings correspond to the titles of chapters in another of the criss-crossing found throughout the novel.
There is much here that’s magnificent but Jerusalem is a novel in which everything is said at least twice. Perhaps some critics were on the nose, noting needless tautology, with nouns chained to adjectives like prisoners in far away prisons. The author has no control of “less is more” mantra and one has to know when more should be more, and Moore, the author does not. For this reviewer, in spite of the graphic novel form, when it is good, it is great. The section where Michael emerges into “upstairs” introducing the most beguiling part of the mythology, the “Dead-Dead-Gang,” a kind of supernatural equivalent to Conan Doyle‘s Baker Street Irregulars, it works. The political anger is still evident in the book despite the very real abuses born out of anti-Semitism, born out of racism, sexism and homophobia with MPs and leaders who are female, Jewish, black or gay- there are none that are poor.
All in all, JERUSALEM contains a great many inventive and instructive cosmologies. Its an experience like no other. It took the author six years to write these incredible 1000 pages, in a way the history of England born of rebellion and social insurrection. Its a love affair with hand-granade fragments on thoughts about art and fashion, mischief and hymns, rolled up in a whimsy of nonsense- playful nonsense, shot through with macabre horror and its own ability to laugh at itself.
