Brilliant and sometimes maddening, Jerusalem is Alan Moore's monumentally ambitious attempt to save his hometown, Northampton, England—not to rescue it from the slow economic catastrophe that's been gnawing at it for centuries, but to save it "the way that you save ships in bottles," by preserving its contours and details in art…Books this forbiddingly steep need to be entertaining in multiple ways to make them worth the climb, and Moore keeps lobbing treats to urge his readers onward: luscious turns of phrase, unexpected callbacks and internal links, philosophical digressions, Dad jokes, fantastical inventions…Behind all the formalism and eccentric virtuosity, there's personal history from a writer who has rarely put himself into his own fiction before: the family legends and tragedies that Moore has blown up to mythical size to preserve them from the void, and the streets and buildings, lost and soon to be lost, whose every cracked stone is holy to him. Northampton, Moore suggests, is the center of all meaning, because so is every other place.

★ 07/25/2016
Reviewed by Heidi MacDonald In this staggeringly imaginative second novel, Moore (Watchmen) bundles all his ruminations about space, time, life, and death into an immense interconnected narrative that spans all human existence within the streets of his native Northampton, U.K. Reading this sprawling collection of words and ideas isn’t an activity; it’s an experience. The book is divided into three parts, each 11 chapters long, with a prelude and “afterlude.” The bookends involve Alma Warren and her brother, Mick, who as a child choked on a cough drop and died, only to be revived; their inquiries into the mysteries of death provide a faint glimmer of plot. The first section crisscrosses Northampton with startling chapters that introduce sad ghosts who drift around town, have sex with each other, and seek nourishment in the form of strange plants known as Puck Hats. Living characters include Ern Vernall, who survives a sanity-ending encounter with a talking painting while trapped on scaffolding, and Alma and Mick’s grandmother, May, who grieves the death of her too-beautiful daughter and becomes a “deathmonger,” overseeing local funerals and births. The second section takes place entirely between Mick’s death and his revival, with a long adventure in an afterlife only Moore could have imagined. The third and most difficult part is written in a series of literary pastiches, including a Beckett-like play and an entire chapter written in a language invented by Lucia Joyce, the institutionalized daughter of James Joyce. Throughout, Moore conjures the specter of Joyce’s Dubliners, with dense paragraphs that go inside the minds of all the characters as they traipse about town. Some are stunningly aware of their location in Moore’s four-dimensional reality (Snowy Vernall, who experiences life as a constant state of déjà vu) and some painfully mired in a sordid now (mediocre middle-aged poet Benedict Perrit, who lives with his mother and finds inspiration only in the bottle). Moore’s love of allusions, both historical and literary, leads him to create a web of references that may prompt attentive readers—and not just the future term paper writers who will find this a gold mine—to read along with a highlighter in hand. It’s all a challenge to get through, and deliberately so, but bold readers who answer the call will be rewarded with unmatched writing that soars, chills, wallows, and ultimately describes a new cosmology. Challenges and all, Jerusalem ensures Moore’s place as one of the great masters of the English language. (Sept.)Heidi MacDonald is the graphic novels reviews editor for Publishers Weekly and editor-in-chief of the Beat, a news blog about comics.

"Moore’s prose is rich and complicated. . . .Once you slip into the rhythm of it, it is also poetic, insightful, and beautiful. . . .There are insights, revelations, and joys that would come from successive readings. It is possible that scholars will be picking this apart for years to come."

"For his latest work, Moore turns in a sprawling, million-word saga blending fantasy and historical fiction set roughly in the Northampton, England, neighborhood in which he grew up. . . . [Moore’s] fans will doubtless find much here to ponder and delight in."

"Jerusalem is Moore’s apotheosis, a fourth-dimensional symphony of his own beloved city. . . .A love song for a vanished neighborhood, and a battle cry for an embattled class left behind by centuries of powermongers and tyrants and corporations and New Labour. . . .Jerusalem soars high on the wings of the author’s psychedelic imagination. His bighearted passion for his people, his city, and the whole monstrous endeavor of the human condition is infectious. I’m not sure there’s a God, but I thank Her for Alan Moore."

"A magnificent, sprawling cosmic epic."

"A hymn to Northampton, a commemoration of the lost people and places of his childhood. . . . Epic in scope. . . . The novel has the immersive imaginative power of fable; it also deepens Moore’s career-long investigation into the kind of collapsed rationality that borders on genius and might, very easily, be misdiagnosed as madness."

"Epic in scope and phantasmagoric to its briny core. . . .The prose sparkles at every turn. . . . It’s a difficult book in all the right ways in that it brilliantly challenges us to confront what we think and know about the very fabric of existence. . . . A massive literary achievement for our time—and maybe for all times simultaneously."

"Brilliant…monumentally ambitious…Moore keeps lobbing treats to urge his readers onward: luscious turns of phrase, unexpected callbacks and internal links, philosophical digressions, Dad jokes, fantastical inventions…Passionate…Behind all the formalism and eccentric virtuosity, there’s personal history from a writer who has rarely put himself into his own fiction before."

"Unquestionably Jerusalem is Moore’s most ambitious statement yet — his War and Peace, his Ulysses. The prose scintillates throughout, a traffic jam of hooting dialect and vernacular trundling nose-to-tail with pantechnicons of pop culture allusion. Exploring a single town’s psychogeography with a passionate forensic intensity, Moore makes the parochial universal, the mundane sublime and the temporal never-ending."

"Rewarding—a novel that refuses to fit neatly into any classification other than the unclassifiable."

"Moore, you genius. . . .A testament to Moore’s skill at genre juggling, at cultivating a sense of awe at the universe’s frightening expanse and its beautiful mysteries."

★ 07/01/2016
This latest work by Moore (Watchmen; V for Vendetta; From Hell) is difficult to define by flimsy constraints such as genre. In fact, during a first read-through, it's hard to say what this literary behemoth is even about. Ten years in the making, it is, on one hand, a fictional history of Northampton, England, stretching out over millenia. On another hand, it is a story of siblings Michael and Alma Warren, their extended family, and how they and their ancestors shape the fortunes of the denizens of The Boroughs, the ghetto in which they live. But also, and more importantly, it is a story about everything: life, death, the afterlife, free will, famous Northamptonians (John Clare, Oliver Cromwell, Philip Doddridge) rubbing elbows with prostitutes and drug addicts over time and space. It is about how, no matter what happens in life, we all go to the same place when we die; how everything, literally everything, is determined by four angels playing a game of snooker. It is confusing, hilarious, sad, mind-blowing, poignant, frustrating, and one of the most beautiful books ever written. VERDICT More of a work of art than a novel, this book simply needs to be read.—Tyler Hixson, Library Journal

★ 2016-06-22
Mind-meld James Michener, Charles Dickens, and Stephen King and you'll approach the territory the endlessly inventive Moore stakes out in his most magnum of magna opera.Moore, the influential conjurer of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and other dark graphic masterpieces, seeks here to capture the gritty, sweaty demimonde of Northampton, England, between covers. It's the Northampton of the wrong side of the tracks, a place where it's necessary to ration the coins in one's pocket carefully, staying in of an evening so as not to have to "go through the humiliating pantomime of taking charity" from someone with not much more in the way of cash to spare. Alma Warren, her name the first words in the book, is just 5 years old when we meet her, thrust into a bewildering world among people who speak a language doomed in the face of globalism: "'E ain't gunner urcha," says her mother of a fellow cowled and masked like a "phantom burglar" (shades of V), "un 'e dun't see people very orften. Goo on in un say 'ello or else 'e'll think we're rude." In this gloomy milieu of wet cobblestone streets and decaying buildings, Alma and her kin and acquaintances serve as focal points and guides. Moore constructs a world seen from many different points of view, from wizened old masked men to reticent, fearful children and not much more confident adults in search of some measure of happiness, or at least a little sex ("He has more sperm in him than he knows what to do with and the planet circling about his axis seems to share the same promiscuous excitement"). Many storylines dance through Moore's pages as he walks through those humid streets, ranging among voices and moods, turning here to Joycean stream-of-consciousness and there to Eliot-ian poetry ("Their gait resembling the Lambeth Walk/While in the upper corners of the room/Are gruff, gesticulating little men"), but in the end forging a style unlike any other. Magisterial: an epic that outdoes Danielewski, Vollmann, Stephenson, and other worldbuilders in vision and depth.