Review: Jerusalem

Jerusalem by Alan Moore
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Members of the Vernall family have been charged – more accurately “named” – by heaven to tend to the “edges of creation.” And, in this massive, visions-of-the -holy-saturated, occasional masterpiece, Alan Moore shows us several generations of the clan as they spend their lives tending to the possible holiness of the Boroughs, a working class neighborhood of Northampton.

And that’s only book one. The subsequent two books – equally large – expand that same story into a kind of heaven that exists above and below the Boroughs and then into what it means to attempt art that examines the intersection of the holy and eternal with the everyday world we know.

In all, this is exhausting, but that’s not a bad thing. It has moments of real inspiration, brilliance perhaps, and it’s ambitious in ways hard to imagine from someone who has spent so much time in the world of commercial comic books – even if he did write the revolutionary Watchmen. There are certainly portions that could be cut; some are redundant and some demystify stronger parts. But the sheer weight of this is part of its excellence. Don’t pick this up unless you’re willing to risk weeks’ worth of obligation. Do pick it up if you’re willing to get lost in a book that’s trying to marry poetic madness to our seemingly ordinary contemporary world.

Moore takes the name of his book, one on which he is reported to have spent most of the last decade (and this at a time when, had he chosen, he could no doubt have continued in the far more lucrative work of creating graphic novels that Hollywood was lined up to film), from William Blake’s epic illuminated poem. Like Blake, his overarching goal is to trace the residue of the deep holy as it manifests itself in the world around him. Like Blake, Moore is attempting to write about the potential of vision – “four-fold vision” as Blake put it and as Moore quotes it in chapter 9 and elsewhere. The central idea of both Moore’s and Blake’s conception is the claim that our world isn’t fallen, that England or “Albion” isn’t mere ordinariness but one edge of heaven.

Blake looked at London and Moore at Northampton, but the point is the same. Each suggests that if we can push ourselves past a thick crust of contemporary culture – for Blake it was the rigidity of the scientific revolution, what he called “Newton’s night” and for Moore it’s the sheen of consumerism – we can see that Jerusalem herself, that emanation of heaven, sits on top of the streets and fallen people we walk past every day.

The first book is simply stunning. He takes one character after another, spins his or her life forward and back, and culminates in a moment of vision. There’s beauty in the ordinariness of the spurs to the visionary moment. One man sees “angles” in the upper reaches of a church. Another goes temporarily mad in the middle of his foundry work. Another sees a painting begin to speak. Another is moved by the beauty of an infant being pushed in a stroller by her mother. And one simply chokes on a throat lozenge.

There’s a structure to the method, but Moore is gifted enough that it, in the first book, it doesn’t become predictable. He brings each of his separate characters to life, only very slowly showing how their lives intersect, not simply in their moment but across the generations. We learn eventually that ghosts walk everywhere among us and that, to them, time is no more bewildering than distance or height. If we could see properly, we would understand that nothing ever ends. Or, to quote Blake again, we would realize that “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.”

The bulk of the second book turns on the mystical experience of three-year-old Mick Warren who, having choked on his throat lozenge and been pronounced dead, spends several chapters traipsing about a kind of heaven as part of a group of urchins calling themselves the Dead Dead Gang. In the course of his adventures, Mick sees the world from above and below, and as it was and will be. He experiences a series of visions that stamp him as a Vernall – as he indeed is from his mother’s side – and give him access to a mysticism the rest of us can only imagine.

Compared to the rest of the novel, this section is the least inspired. It’s disappointing – by comparison at least – to see the attempt at serious visionary work suddenly filtered through the eyes of a child. The opaque quality of revelation gives way to something more primary-colored. We even get a somewhat condescending exposition from the devil Asmodeus giving too much clarity to what the first book largely implies.

The third book turns mostly on the run-up to an art exhibit of work by Alma Warren, Mick’s sister, who has heard his stories from the mystical world. He forgot but briefly recalled them after an industrial accident. Her paintings chronicle them in some fashion.

I enjoyed the first book of the novel the most and appreciated but was glad to be finished with the second, but I find myself thinking about the third one most of all. In some ways, whether the novel is a success depends on how effective Alma’s work comes across. At one point in the final chapter, Alma explicitly worries that she might have failed, that she might – rather than capture a genuine mystical vision – have managed only a grand act of nostalgia. Blake may be the central inspiration here, but, striking as his work is, there is a sometimes conventional quality to its composition. As the character Handsome John puts it at one point when he is admiring one of Blake’s painting, “He drew like a baby.” Alma, working in papier mache and capturing a child’s adventures, risks some of the same.

Perhaps more broadly, an even greater indictment is that chapter after chapter is filtered through a single consciousness. Each is a distinct and limited focus even as the individual in question typically wins a visionary moment. It’s inspiring to see those different consciousnesses radiate out in the different chapters of the first book. By the third, the question is whether they knit together in full.

There are glances in what Alma accomplishes that gives a sense she has succeeded. As she proposes at one point, “Art saves things from time.” She suggests her project is “a glorious mythology of loss” and that she is attempting to understand, “The development of English as a visionary language” that has served the likes of John Bunyan, John Clare, William Blake, and James Joyce.

In one inspired passage that feeds into her work, we see the world from the point of view of the Builders, cosmic architects of human fate who use snooker cues as their tools. Two Builders get into a fight over the fate of young Mick and that explains how he dies temporarily and then later recovers his memories. When they fight at the start of the third book, one Builder reflects on his struggle with the other, “We know everything. He blacks my eye, and China’s great leap forward plunges it into an economic abyss. I collapse his nose, and Castro comes to power in Cuba. From my split lip dribbles structuralism, rock and roll and hovercrafts. We pick the golden clots before they are ready, and the Belgian Congo blooms with severed heads. Of course we stride among you, thigh deep in your politics and your mythology. We wade through the pink, map-scrap pebbles of your disintegrating Commonwealth. We march in a black tide on Washington. We juggle satellites and Francis Bacon. We are Builders”

A bit later from the same section, we get one of the boldest claims for the nature of art and its reflection of life: “We bomb Guernica just to create that painting.” That sort of visionary claim, in the very end, is the hope of the power in Alma’s work. She’s an artist who risks the nostalgic and the conventional, but she’s also someone who wants to play in the very furnace of creation.

The jury remains out on whether this is a satisfying culmination of the novel’s early promise. As I reflect on it, though, I think that uncertainty may be part of Moore’s ultimate goal. Some of this work remains as straightforward as the comic books of his childhood and early career. Some of it nevertheless aspires to be a 21st century Blake. As Alma says to the poet John Clare when she encounters him in a vision near the end, “We’re either all of us saints or none of us are.” There’s a good case for either of these, and that’s a central joy of this work that tries, and maybe succeeds, in seeing beyond the world we see every day.


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