Jerusalem

Warry, seriously, everywhere's Jerusalem, everywhere trampled or run down. If Einstein's right, then space and time are all one thing and it's, I dunno, a big glass football, an American one like a Rugby ball, with the big bang at one end and the big crunch or whatever at the other. And the moments in between, the moments making up our lives, they're there forever. Nothing's moving. Nothing's changing, like a reel of film with all the frames fixed in their place and motionless till the projector beam of our awareness plays across them, and then Charlie Chaplin doffs his bowler hat and gets the girl. And when our films, our lives, when they come to an end I don't see that there's anywhere for consciousness to go but back to the beginning. Everybody is on endless replay. Every moment is forever, and if that's true every miserable wretch is one of the immortals. Every clearance area is the eternal golden city.

If that opening quote feels long, imagine the nearly thirteen hundred pages of smallish type – some sections nearly inscrutable, as in a forty-nine page Joyceian pastiche Willoware tutshe es teaterring upendy blink o' sirenter, shadeysides detert wordpie inlaitylike avshe diredent attopt tefinedoubt wattirs neme motbe beforshe luts hom stickies grirt she-lully oppor – that it takes to slog through to this rather mundane thesis. Along the way, there were dazzling moments in which I truly delighted, but more often, I was frustrated by the size and weight of the thing, and every repetition and every unnecessary word had me mentally excising this wordpie into something more manageable. (Note: I was unsurprised to learn that the audiobook of this is sixty hours long, and although I wasn't really keeping track, I know this took me more than forty eyeball-straining hours to read.) I am too mulish to abandon a book unfinished (and especially one that ranked high on some year-end best of 2016 lists), but I am not better off for having finished Jerusalem; I am left dissatisfied and frustrated and full of humbug. Bah.

Jerusalem is divided into three books (and I will admit that it might have improved my experience if I had been reading the edition that is actually divided into three physical volumes instead of the elbow-straining brick that I struggled with), and my favourite by far was the first: all action is centered on the Burroughs neighbourhood of Northampton (from where the author, Alan Moore, hails); a downscale half-mile square that sits at the very center of England. As each chapter of this first book relates a story from a different era of the Burroughs' long history – going back as far as the nine century and featuring a monk on a heavenly quest – I was charmed by the weight of history; as a Canadian, it's mindbending to think of growing up in a permanent settlement that has been in place for millennia. Despite being annoyed by every character naming every street and landmark they passed on their interminable peregrinations, I thought I was getting the point of the book; the layers of human history that build a fourth dimension of time into settings. The action of the first book ends with Mick Warren describing to his sister Alma – an avant-garde artist, and essentially Alan Moore in horrifying drag – about the dream/near-death experience he had as a three-year old when he was choking on a cough drop, the details of which had suddenly come back to him. The second book is a straightforward, linear narrative of Mick's encounter with the afterlife (full of ghosts, demons, and heavenly angles [not a typo]). The third book picks up a year after the first and primarily concerns an exhibition of the paintings that Alma has made of Mick's experience, and ends with Mick attending the show and closely examining all thirty-five works of art, each of which is named the same as each of the thirty-five chapters in the book, and each of which is a visual summary of the chapter for which its named. This circle-jerkular ouroboros-wankery just got plain boring as I was finally nearing the end of this too-long book and was forced to relive and reinterpret every single chapter that had felt too long in the first place.

As for the writing, Moore stretched every noun out with a simile or a string of adjectives, every idea is laden with metaphor, and sometimes I found the bonkersness of it totally engaging:

Reading cosmos from left to right, from bang to crunch, from germ to worm to glinting cyborg and beyond, the woven tapestry unpicks itself, reorganises into new designs. The marbling of cloud changes its colour. Leaning closer like impassive doctors, mottled planet-meat is visible, exposed, a skin of circumstance pinned back in plump and larded folds. The worms grow backbones and the newts sprout feathers. Bus routes alter and post offices are closed. Perfectly ripe, the scab lifts from the knee intact, reveals a waxy pinkness underneath.

And then sometimes his style ground me down, and especially when I was mentally estimating how much shorter this book could have been if Moore had just gotten to the point. In the second book – featuring the Dead Dead Gang of ghost children who help Mick in his afterworld journey – John can't be mentioned without also calling him “tall and handsome” every time; Phyllis, the gang leader, wears a string of dead rabbits around her neck that is noted nearly every time she's mentioned; I get it. I was most annoyed by this in a chapter about an eighteen month old who travels to the end of time in “the Upstairs” on her grandfather's shoulders, and Moore goes to annoying literary contortions to avoid referring to them as simply May and Snowy. The following is from one (page-length) paragraph about their journey:

Running pink caterpillar fingers through the locks of her gerontic charger as though grooming him for nits, the sombre cherub muses...the infant and her bronco ancestor trot...the deceased toddler approaches...the unnerving pediatric sybil turns with wonderment to her intrigued grandparent...the gaunt patriarch sees...the baby remounts her famously deranged and silver-crested relative and they continue with their world's end picaresque.

Bah. On another note, I will grant that Alan Moore is a giant in the comic book world, but this felt unnecessarily snide:

At age thirteen, David's idea of heaven was somewhere that comics were acclaimed and readily available, perhaps with dozens of big budget movies featuring his favourite obscure costumed characters. Now that he's in his fifties and his paradise is all around him he finds it depressing. Concepts and ideas meant for the children of some forty years ago: is that the best that the twenty-first century has got to offer? When all this extraordinary stuff is happening everywhere, are Stan Lee's post-war fantasies of white neurotic middle-class American empowerment really the most adequate response?

And on another note, I appreciate that Moore wanted to pack in everything about the history of the Burroughs and Northampton, but I couldn't get excited about the insertion of the history lessons about Oliver Cromwell and Phillip Dodderidge and their connections to the area. Even worse, I hated the economics lessons that were meant to teach me about the evils of capitalism from the origins of minting English coins and the birth of the Industrial Revolution (both centered in Northampton) to the collapse of Enron. And I get that this book is partly a love-letter to the Burroughs and that Moore is trying to preserve in amber the last of the old neighbourhood before it's revitalised right out of existence, and I get that there's something metaphorically interesting about its position at the very heart of England, but its decline, even after all that's written here, feels like little more than a local issue for council meetings.

The Burroughs is the middle bit of England's structure. It's the knot what 'olds the cloth together, if yer like. And back when everybody sort of understood that, understood it in their 'earts, then even when the times wiz bad, they still got that structure, that cloth, like a safety-net they could fall back on. But there come a time – I reckon it was back araynd the First World War meself – when all that started changin'. People started to forget abayt the things that 'ad been so important to 'em fifty years before. There weren't so certain abayt God, or King, or country, and they started pulling dayn the Burroughs, lettin' it fall into disrepair. Can yer see what I'm gettin' at? It wiz the centre of the land, of England's structure, and they let it come to bits.

So, in the big picture, Jerusalem illustrates the view that existence is like a glass football, our actions are predetermined, and we are doomed to relive them over and over again. In the closeup, this plays out over millennia in the history of people and places, and inevitably, there will be winners and losers. And what's Moore's role? 

Sooner or later all the people and the places that we loved are finished, and the only way to keep them safe is art. That's what art's for. It rescues everything from time.

Bah. Thirteen hundred repetitive and circular pages to get me there – despite some real gems in the dross – wasn't worth the effort. Three stars would feel like the polite minimum to give to the passion project of a literary giant, but I just didn't like Jerusalem; two thoroughly subjective stars it will be.