'Jerusalem': Alan Moore's 'Finnegan's Wake'!

By Alan Moore

Liveright.

1,280 pp. $35 nolead ends

nolead begins

Reviewed by Scott F. Andrews

I n 2013, 9-year-old Joshua Chamberlain wrote Alan Moore a letter. Joshua gushed about how much he enjoyed some of Moore's most celebrated comics, including

V for Vendetta

,

Watchmen

, and

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

.

"All in all you are the best writer in human history," Joshua wrote.

Moore not only sent back a lengthy response but also opted to feature Joshua's quote - and only Joshua's quote - on the back cover of his new novel, Jerusalem. It may have helped that Joshua hails from Moore's native Northamptonshire, England. "You confirm my suspicion," Moore replied, "that Northamptonshire is a county touched by the gods."

Indeed, the central premise of Jerusalem is that Moore's hometown of Northampton plays a pivotal role in an ongoing existential intrigue involving demons, "angles," gods, and ordinary human souls, both tormented and empowered.

The story follows generations of the Vernall family, chosen to safeguard the "boundaries and corners" between "the Upstairs and the Downstairs of existence," a "lowly post in the ethereal hierarchies," but an important one. This calling is often more curse than blessing for the Vernalls. Many within the family, generation after generation, have succumbed to mental instability and suffered its associated stigmas.

Well north of 1,200 pages, Jerusalem is not a casual investment of time. To call this novel sprawling would be woefully inadequate. The plot begins with the journey of a ninth-century monk and extends until literally the end of time. Along the way, we meet dozens of characters, historical and fictional, supernatural and mundane, including a freed American slave, a young Charlie Chaplin, an ancient Roman river monster, Oliver Cromwell, and the ghost of a woolly mammoth.

In many ways, Jerusalem feels like the apotheosis of Moore's entire body of work. It explores many themes from his earlier stories: outrage at the corruption and invasiveness of governments; the dehumanizing nature of poverty; the toll of violence, particularly sexual violence; the transcendent power of art; redemption through self-sacrifice; and many, many others.

Given Moore's reputation as one of the most relentlessly inventive comic-book writers of the last 30 years, it comes as no surprise that Jerusalem eschews the standard novel format. Moore incorporates the script for an absurdist play, a long-form poem, extended stream-of-consciousness passages, and a chapter primarily concerned with describing 36 paintings in painstaking detail. Like the time-agnostic afterlife that Moore describes, Jerusalem refuses to order events logically. As the novel itself notes in its final pages, it is a story in which "characters' appearances were spaced so widely in the narrative that this made any sense of cause, effect, or continuity impossible to grasp without a road map much too large to ever be unfolded."

At its core, Jerusalem feels like Moore's attempt to give Northamptonshire its own Finnegans Wake. The novel draws inspiration from Wake and alludes to it throughout. James Joyce's daughter Lucia appears as a character. She and certain others in the "higher dimensions" speak in Wake's signature mishmash of puns and portmanteau. In Jerusalem, Lucia is the focal point of a 50-page chapter written entirely in this style that is every bit as off-putting as Wake's infamous prose.

Jerusalem doesn't so much end as pause to catch its breath, with plenty else to say that Moore leaves unwritten. Again, 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.

Scott F. Andrews (@QuestVendor) is the Manayunk author of "The Guild Leader's Handbook" and is a featured contributor at BlizzardWatch.com.