Employing a kaleidoscope of literary forms and styles that ranges from brutal social realism to extravagant children’s fantasy, from the modern stage drama to the extremes of science fiction, Jerusalem’s cast of characters includes the living, the dead, the celestial, and the infernal in an intricately woven tapestry that presents a vision of an absolute and timeless human reality in all of its exquisite, comical, and heartbreaking splendor.
...you're going to ask yourself that one, all-important question when it comes to Really Big Goddamn Books: Do I need to read this one? Yes, you do ... Inasmuch as anyone ever has to read anything, you have to read Jerusalem. People are going to say a lot of things about it — that it's massive (obviously), that it's brilliant (it is), that it's beautiful and maddening and sweet and stupid all in equal measure (true, true, true and true) ... awesome. Amazing. Lyrical and beautiful.
Moore has divided Jerusalem into three main sections, and each could stand alone as a novel unto itself, yet together they form something extraordinary ... Moore’s own prose is always lively and rarely orthodox. He can evoke mirth and dread in equal measure ... The prose sparkles at every turn, but that’s not to say it’s without flaws. Some entire chapters, particularly in the middle Mansoul section, struck me as wholly soporific. Moore also demonstrates an affinity for overwriting ... The imagination Alan Moore displays here and the countless joys and surprises he evokes make Jerusalem a massive literary achievement for our time — and maybe for all times simultaneously.
Brilliant and sometimes maddening ... Books this forbiddingly steep need to be entertaining in multiple ways to make them worth the climb, and Moore keeps lobbing treats to urge his readers onward ... The only way to endure Jerusalem is to surrender to its excesses — its compulsion to outdo any challenger in its lushness of language, grandness of scope, sheer monomaniacal duration — and confess it really is as ingenious as it purports to be. What redeems the relentless spectacle, though, is that it’s in the service of a passionate argument. Behind all the formalism and eccentric virtuosity, there’s personal history from a writer who has rarely put himself into his own fiction before.
