Alan Moore is famous for his groundbreaking work in comics: Watchmen (1986–’87) which fundamentally transformed mainstream comic literature in the 1980s, and many of Moore’s other titles — V for Vendetta (1988–’89), Batman: The Killing Joke (1988), From Hell (1989–’96), and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999–) — have become cultural landmarks. 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 (“longer than the Bible,” Moore quips) divided into three volumes, which was released in 2016 by Liverlight Publishing.
Out now comes a beautiful paperback edition of Alan Moore's Jerusalem, in which he pens a grandiose tome about his hometown of Northampton, employing an extremely wide variety of styles, including a poem and a play, channeling both the ecstatic visions of William Blake and the theoretical physics of Albert Einstein .
Combining elements of historical and suprnatural fiction and drawing on a range of writing styles, the author describes it as a work of "genetic mythology". Fierce in its imagining and stupefying in its scope, Jerusalem is the tale of everything, told from a vanished gutter. In these pages lurk demons from the second-century Book of Tobit and angels with golden blood who reduce fate to a snooker tournament. Vagrants, prostitutes, and ghosts rub shoulders with Oliver Cromwell, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce’s tragic daughter Lucia, and Buffalo Bill, among many others. There is a conversation in the thunderstruck dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, childbirth on the cobblestones of Lambeth Walk, an estranged couple sitting all night on the cold steps of a Gothic church front, and an infant choking on a cough drop for eleven chapters. An art exhibition is in preparation, and above the world a naked old man and a beautiful dead baby race along the Attics of the Breath toward the heat death of the universe.
An opulent working class mythology for those without a pot to piss in, through the labyrinthine streets and pages of Jerusalem tread ghosts that sing of wealth, poverty, and our threadbare millennium. in these pages spin a metatextual ritual that aspires to overturn the fundamental economic mythology built into the social fabric of late capitalism. In an era when the working classes are portrayed as hopeless victims or demonised as thugs and idiots, while all the while being urged on to greater extremes of racism and xenophobia by the popular media, Jerusalem rejects the portrayal of limited horizons and the glamorisation of poverty that Moore sees in TV shows like Shameless in favour of a work that grants dignity and profundity to life at the bottom of the economic shitheap,
Yet another masterpiece from my favourite visionary, who continues to plant seeds in us, so we may grow and understand. beyond the dark satanic mills of our ordinary oppressed existences, we are all already living in the shining, eternal city of Jerusalem. Alan Moore is one of the few Writers capable of illuminating the exterior/interior of our Lives, for that I am truly grateful, this book by the way. is much easier than Ulysses and funnier too, though must add when I originally read got lost a bit, but that is often the way with me. Seek this tome out nevertheless, I strongly recommend.
Get it here : amzn.to/2CX9toI
"A master storyteller taking the voices of the dead as his own'" - Neil Gaiman
"He saw, as through a fog, the grave mistake he'd made. He'd been so anxious for success and validation that he'd come to think you weren't really a writer unless you were a succesful one. He knew, in this unprecedeted patch of clarity, that the idea was nonsense. Look at William Blake, ignored and without recognition until years after his death, regarded as a lunatic or fool by his conpeporaries. Yet Benedict felt sure that Blake, in his three-score-and-ten, had never a moments doubt that he was a true artist. Ben's own problem, looked at in this new and brutal light, was a simple failure of nerve."-Alan Moore, Jerusalem
Link to earlier posts of mine on Alan Moore :-
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2018/03/alan-moore-on-art-and-magic.html
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2013/11/happy-60th-alan-moore-181113-dont-let.html?m=0
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