Jerusalem

Alan Moore Jerusalem (2016)
I get the impression that Jerusalem is Alan Moore finishing off Big Numbers in so much as that it attempts to show how the big picture of human experience is recursive, and is therefore made up of a lot of similar smaller pictures. Except it seems he's changed his mind about free will since Big Numbers and is no longer convinced of there being such a thing. He did it better in Voice of the Fire, and he did it better because Voice of the Fire was snappier and made no assumptions about our willingness to hang onto its every last utterance.

Jerusalem is apparently over six-hundred thousand words, which places it in the category of being a book which many people will never finish; additionally, their reasons for bailing out will, in certain cases, be reduced to because it was too long and you're too thick by those who made it to the very end and have taken to advertising this victory with evangelical fervour. Some of the quality of this novel, as defined by both its admirers and its critics, will therefore be determined by volume alone, which I can't help feel may have been a deliberate attempt to place it beyond criticism; because, as we have established, the best records ever made were prog rock triple albums, and they were the best because they were the biggest and most complicated.

Oh well.

For the most part, Jerusalem isn't a difficult read, just a laboriously lengthy one, and slightly overwritten in places as though fearful of simplicity, perhaps equating straightforward descriptive prose with an inability to carry complex or otherwise florid information. The first of the three books into which the novel divides is mostly soap opera and the roughly psychogeographical mapping of a territory - specifically Northampton and its working class without presenting too much of a rose-tinted spectacle.

The public had an appetite for sadness and for sentiment, and what they saw as all the colour of the worse-off classes, but nobody liked the taste of squalor. The Inebriate went down a treat for just so long as he was hanging around a lamppost, talking to it like a pal. The skit was cut off long before he shit his trousers or went home and put his wife in the infirmary by belting her until she couldn't walk.

This first book introduces the idea which runs throughout the novel, namely that Northampton is the centre of the universe, or at least human civilisation, whilst shoehorning London and Lambeth into the picture presumably by virtue of association with Alan Moore's family history - because a lot of this is patently autobiographical. It's an engaging, even convincing idea, providing we're allowed to read it as allegory.

It should probably be noted for the benefit of transatlantic readers, or anyone else who remains uncertain of the facts, that Northampton actually isn't at the geographical centre of the country, despite that it would make for a pretty pattern if it were. The geographical centre is Fenny Drayton, some forty miles distant and much nearer to Coventry. I could rewrite the same novel about the importance of Coventry in terms of world history because that's where I'm from, broadly speaking. I grew up on the farm where they filmed Teletubbies, my mum's best friend married the brother of a Beatle, Hitler bombed Coventry, and my wife is related to Johnny Cash by marriage, so you can see how it all revolves around me.

Wooooooo…

Anyway, it's magical thinking which makes for an interesting foundation upon which to build an argument, but otherwise reads a little like an expression of virtues found in a failure to engage with the wider world. It's parochial, but I suppose that's the point. Snowy Vernall - the ancestral Atlas holding up this particular narrative globe and presumably Alan's great grandfather - is basically Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen, and Jerusalem is the story of the Moore dynasty and how it reached its peak in the wonderful person of our humble narrator.

Perhaps the only meaning that events had was the meaning that we brought to them, but even knowing this was probably the case, it frankly wasn't that much help. It didn't stop us chasing after meaning, scrabbling like ferrets for it through a maze of burrows in our thoughts and sometimes getting lost down in the dark.

I was bored by chapter ten, Hark! The Glad Sound!, and took to skimming. The characters simply aren't very interesting, and the weight of like as nots and persons who prefix every address with our becomes more and more aggravating, our Jack, our Percy, our Alma. It began to remind me of Alan Bennett, or conversations with certain professional northerners, specifically individuals whose smile always told me what they were thinking before even a word had been said: that it would be a rare pleasure for myself, evidently someone southern and of lesser substance, to bask in the radiance of such earthy wisdom, forged under t't circumstances more real than tha could ever comprehend, our Lawrence. Jerusalem began to remind me of conversations with my dad which weren't really conversations - a polite enquiry as to whether he'd been out on his motorbike met with a droning forty minute lecture on motorcycling, the state of the roads, and a blow by blow account of buying a new gasket from some bloke down in that London.

It picks up a little in book two before settling into the almost adventures of a ghostly version of the Famous Five, who time travel to various pivotal moments in the history of Northampton in order to have conversations about the global import of what they're looking at.

The third book opens in self-aware fashion by proposing that the reader has begun to lose interest, or has at least found some of the first book something of a plod, suggesting either that Moore is a good judge of his own work, or - more depressingly - that he purposefully wrote the first book as a plod and that the novel has been written as an endurance test. This is also the point at which he just comes right out and says it in the chapter A Cold and Frosty Morning with a day in the life of Alma, our thinly veiled author substitute. Alma has enjoyed more or less the same life as Moore but founded on art rather than comic books, inexplicably shares the same famous friends, and is subject to three media interviews a week. She shares Moore's preoccupations, and complete strangers routinely congratulate her on a painting they really liked - Lookpersons, The Murdering Limerick, or R for Revenge - or examples which feel at least as ludicrous as those I've invented here for the sake of a chuckle. It's all a bit Richard Stilgoe, all a bit pleased with itself, and the novel goes from being Adrian Mole…

Jake Butcher closed his eyes against the cruel wind that whistled over the paving slabs of the deserted shopping precinct. His cigarette dropped with a curse from his lips.

'Damn' he expectorated.

It was his last cigarette. He ground the forlorn fag under the sole of his trusty Doctor Marten's boot. He dug both fists into the womb-like pockets of his anorak, and with his remaining hand he adjusted the fastening on his Adidas sports bag.

Just then a sudden shaft of bright sunlight illuminated the windows of Tesco's. 'Christ,' said Jake to himself, 'those windows are the same yellow as in Van Gogh's sunflower painting!' Thus ruminating on art and culture, did Jake pass the time.

Quite soon a sudden clap of thunder announced itself. 'Christ,' said Jake, 'that thunder sounds like the cannons in the 1812 Symphony.'

He bitterly drew his anorak hood over his head, as raindrops like giant's tears fell on to the concrete wasteland. 'What am I doing here?' questioned Jake to himself. 'Why did I come?' he anguished. 'Where am I going?' he agonised. Just then a sudden rainbow appeared.

'Christ,' said Jake, 'that rainbow looks like...'

…to being - Huitzilopochtli help us - an arguably more poetic take on Grant Morrison's near-unreadable Supergods, all famous friends randomly encountered whilst contemplating the genesis of this or that particular idea what I had, and which was brilliant even though I say so myself, which I do.

Alma smiles now at the memory as she enters the bank. The critics and sometimes admirers who describe her as eccentric really haven't got the first idea.

Which isn't to say that there isn't some point to all of this.

Alma, who makes little distinction between internal and external reality, doesn't much care if the Destructor in her brother's vision is the awful supernatural force that he described it as, or if it's some hallucinatory and visionary metaphor. As Alma sees things, it's the metaphors that do all the most serious damage: Jews as rats, or car-thieves as hyenas. Asian countries as a line of dominoes that communist ideas could topple. Workers thinking of themselves as cogs in a machine, creationists imagining existence as a Swiss watch mechanism and then presupposing a white-haired and twinkle-eyed old clockmaker behind it all.

See, beyond all the self-mythologising, that's the core of what the book seems to be saying. Certainly it's something worth saying, but - as you will have noticed - here he's said it in a single paragraph, which begs the question of why this needed to be six-hundred thousand words, aside from some hypothetical need to make Supergods look like a pamphlet.

Ultimately, Jerusalem is a defence of the working class and those customarily on the receiving end of unfortunate metaphors. I approve on principle, although as an actual working class myself, I feel compelled to point out that many of us often experience a feeling of unease when free expression drama groups take to speaking up on our behalf, because they usually get it wrong through having missed certain details implicit in the term working. At the risk of engaging with an admittedly tiresome more downtrodden than thou dialogue, while it's nice that there are arts labs to put on plays about our sorry lot, maybe get back to me when you've done a couple of decades behind the till at Tesco or turning a fucking spigot on and off for eight hours a day.

She recalls the last time that she'd had Melinda Gebbie over for a memorable meal during which the expatriate American provided an unanswerable critique of Tracy Emin's work which Alma wishes that she'd said herself: 'My God, can you imagine being able to fit all the names of everybody you ever slept with in a tent?' Alma had gaped for a few moments and then soberly put forward her suggestion for capacious venues that might just about accommodate Melinda's list. The Parthenon, Westminster Abbey, China, Jupiter.

Oh my sides!

You should have been there!

It was hilarious!

Leaving aside that the Parthenon, Westminster Abbey, China, Jupiter, isn't a sentence, it's important to let people know you've had a lot of sexual intercourse, because that means that you're doing it, and that you're awesome, and that you're not saaaaaaad. The best people will always tell you that they've had a lot of sexual intercourse.

One of my closest friends died a virgin at the age of forty. You could have sewn his list in an Action Man tent, and he's dead!

What a loser! Ha ha!

I also like that this discussion about the pitiful state of contemporary art bravely flies in the face of popular opinion by daringly taking a pop at Traci Emin, the very opposite of an easy target.

I'm being sarcastic.

This one niggles on a more personal level, regardless of my agreeing with what Moore has to say about contemporary art, because I knew Traci back in the day, and actually she was a pretty fucking great painter prior to reinvention as someone who doesn't make beds, and if we're going to argue by naming famous friends with all the reckless abandon of a Grant Morrison autobiography, then I don't see why I should be expected to hold back. I didn't know Traci in the sense of ending up named and shamed in the dreaded tent, and truthfully the woman could be a bit cunty at times - although usually in a very entertaining way - but at least you can have a laugh with Traci, and I prefer even her wankiest art to Melinda Gebbie's twee, whispy renditions of illustrations from community information posters of the seventies, even though she's clearly had a lot more sexual intercourse.

Therefore nyer.

Anyway, I couldn't be arsed to trudge through the James Joyce tribute. The first nine-hundred or so pages had failed to reward the effort taken to unscramble any of their more obtuse passages, so I skipped the not for thickies chapter and it could have been fucking amazing for all I know. I finally stalled completely at Eating Flowers, another serving of impenetrable overwritten gibberish immediately following on from The Steps of All Saints, a chapter written as a play which seems to suggest that whilst rape and incest may be terrible, they should be considered inconsequential evils in the great scheme of things, and that we need to get over it because existence is amazing, regardless.

That there's anything alive at all to interfere with its own children; that there's children; that there's sexual interference; that we can feel misery. The way I see it, on the whole there's not much to complain about. It's heaven. Even in a concentration camp or when you're getting beaten up and raped, even if it's an off day, it's still heaven.

I doubt whether this directly addresses those of Moore's critics who have noticed his repeated use of rape as a narrative pivot, but between this and the increasingly wearisome character of Alma, I found it difficult to shake off the idea that this might be Alan engaging in a little mansplaining. I realise he's not technically female, but maybe he slipped on a pair of the wife's knickers during some ghastly threesome or summink, so - you know - he's probably developed some very real and profound understanding of what it's like to have a fanny and that.

The most surprising revelation - at least for me - is that Moore simply isn't a particularly good writer; not to say that he's terrible, but I can't tell if he realises that he isn't writing a comic strip, and so he commits all manner of basic errors of both composition and judgement, not least being those aspirationally filmic non-sentences deployed in submission of dramatic lists. Portentous lists. Lists constituting the written equivalent of Brian Blessed enunciating Shakespeare through a digital delay. He additionally does a lot of that Adrian Mole thing to which I referred earlier, with characters engaged in some heart-warmingly working class activity whilst thinking about what Plato said in The Republic, effortfully segueing into a twenty page essay dissecting Plato's assertion.

Gay or not, the Knight's Templar clearly aren't the first people to think of folding money - Roman reckons that he can remember something about paper notes in seventh century China…

Yes, what do you think, Roman?

Given how Jerusalem is such a big one - sort of on the scale of a really massive penis* in the trousers of a mighty man who knows how to use it, and uses it a lot, if you know what I'm saying - I doubt it can have been subject to the same level of tidying up as either Voices of the Fire, or indeed almost every other novel ever published; but never mind. Just feel the girth.

Otherwise there you have it, and even without getting bogged down in Jerusalem as a hymn to how everything was nicer in the old days, back when everything was better than it is now; which is a viewpoint I can at least understand, even if I don't entirely agree.

Capitalism is certainly worse than it used to be, and I'd say the rest is most likely an illusion born of swifter, more efficient transmission of signals, meaning it's now much easier to drown in crap than has ever before been the case. On the other hand, it's now possible to be openly homosexual at school without having one's head stoved in on a daily basis, and the global horrors which once escaped our attention are now, if nothing else, at least widely known and understood. One of my stepson's classmates came out as transgender a couple of years ago. I think she was eleven at the time, and we're talking about a school of distinctly religious emphasis in Texas. A number of parents inevitably complained, and the school principal, one of the most overtly religious men I have ever met, told them to fuck off, albeit not with those actual words.

The notion that the past was better is essentially that what we didn't know didn't hurt us. It's just as insular as Jerusalem, a novel which places a single town at the heart of the map of the universe then throws away its own passport. If Quetzalcoatl taught us anything, it is that only change is permanent, and that very little is ever better or worse in the great scheme of things, only different - apart from the work of Alan Moore, which definitely used to be better.

*: Hampton is Cockney rhyming slang for penis, from Hampton Wick. On reflection, I'm actually surprised that Moore didn't write a whole fucking chapter exploring this particular parallel - the mighty penis of the north fertilising the globe with the spunk of destiny, our James Joyce, and so on and so forth. Maybe that's covered later on in the two-hundred pages I didn't read.