...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.
Jerusalem is dense, both in terms of physical size (nearly 1300 pages), as well as for the ideas it contains. It is a modern attempt to emulate James Joyce, and as a result it may vie with Ulysses as the best book no one has ever read, even though it probably should be. I found the experience at times draining and difficult, but in the end felt rewarded for my effort and attention. Mr. Moore’s prose is rich and complicated and at times ponderous. Once you slip into the rhythm of it, it is also poetic, insightful, and beautiful.
Don’t expect subtlety; Moore is an angry old man who writes like an angry young man. Jerusalem is a love song for a vanished neighborhood, and a battle cry for an embattled class left behind by centuries of powermongers and tyrants and corporations and New Labour. It took a decade to write this book, but it feels uncannily well-timed for this Brexit year ... although Jerusalem is a very strange text – maybe unfinished by its very nature, frequently weighed down with self-importance – Jerusalem soars high on the wings of the author’s psychedelic imagination. His bighearted passion for his people, his city, and the whole monstrous endeavor of the human condition is infectious.
Somewhere in this sprawling behemoth, this teeming leviathan, this pythonic mammoth of a novel there is a very good – even visionary – book struggling to get out ... There is much here that is magnificent, but the problem lies in the language. Beckett’s most famous play was purportedly described as one in which nothing happened, twice; Jerusalem is a novel in which everything is said at least twice ... Pity, because when it is good, it is very good.
...it is the common man whom Moore celebrates most. He hoists the underclass on his shoulders and elevates them to heroes, in all their swearing, spitting, bantering, fornicating glory ... Unquestionably Jerusalem is Moore’s most ambitious statement yet — his War and Peace, his Ulysses. The prose scintillates throughout, a traffic jam of hooting dialect and vernacular trundling nose-to-tail with pantechnicons of pop culture allusion. Exploring a single town’s psychogeography with a passionate forensic intensity, Moore makes the parochial universal, the mundane sublime and the temporal never-ending.
Moore detests the corporate franchising of his work, however, and after finishing his occult series Promethea in 2005, he largely moved away from illustrated storytelling, spending the subsequent decade crafting Jerusalem, a massive prose narrative...it’s a sweeping three-volume epic centering on a vast struggle between light and darkness that includes a quest to destroy a cursed Ring of Power that threatens to doom the world ... Each of Jerusalem’s chapters offers a vignette centering on one of the Boroughs’ many diverse inhabitants, including humans, angels, demons, and time-traveling ghosts; the characters’ lives intersect in space and time (and other higher dimensions), forming an intricate web of narrative interconnections ...his novel is a metatextual ritual that aspires to overturn the fundamental economic mythology built into the social fabric of late capitalism — yet the author displays a wistful humility concerning his project’s ultimate efficacy.
I’m still thinking about this fascinating mess of a book and its countless allusions ... A cacophony of material that doesn’t always coalesce perfectly but that, fittingly, creates what one character describes as 'an apocalyptic narrative that speaks the language of the poor.' And the mad. And the sad. And the frustrated, the lonely, the lost.
Fans of Moore's information-dense comics, particularly From Hell or Promethea, may have an advantage in penetrating this narrative's ever-shifting perspectives. Hard-core fans, who know something of Moore's occult preoccupations, are also likely to be intrigued by some of the novel's aspects. For those unfamiliar with his work, though, Jerusalem may offer a challenge at turns frustrating and rewarding -- a novel that refuses to fit neatly into any classification other than the unclassifiable.
At the end of the tale, the sheer scope of the voyage is breathtaking, but not without some perils along the path. A few of the sections are more challenging and inaccessible than others ... Yet, in the end, the whole scope of the ambitious work overrides the minor concerns that a few sections veer off into a corner, a bit. It is the corners of the text, in fact, that are often the most enjoyable. The explosion of text, like a bomb going off in the form of a novel, is a magnificent experience, and by the end, the reader will have seen a vision of the universe not unlike the sort of books that become holy, in time, in their way.
It’s Moore’s Ulysses, his Dhalgren, his doorstopper engaging with grandiose themes and experimental styles. Which marks this as a mightily ambitious novel in both scope and style, but which can also lead to an occasionally uneven experience. Is it a bold work? Yes, and a singular one, for better or for worse ... I found large chunks of it to be breathtaking in their scope; I found many of the passages, especially those in its first part when characters wrestled with mortality, to be incredibly moving...But it’s also unwieldy in places.
In many ways, Jerusalem feels like the apotheosis of Moore's entire body of work ... At its core, Jerusalem feels like Moore's attempt to give Northamptonshire its own Finnegans Wake...like Finnegans Wake, Moore's novel is a work of profound imagination whose pages offer no compromises in the name of reader comfort. As with Joyce's masterpiece, more people will likely say they've read the entire novel than actually have.
