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    Jerusalem
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    Jerusalem
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    Jerusalem
    Audiobook60 hours

    Jerusalem

    Written by Alan Moore

    Narrated by Simon Vance

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Fierce in its imagining and stupefying in its scope, Jerusalem is the tale of everything, told from a vanished gutter.

    In the epic novel Jerusalem, Alan Moore channels both the ecstatic visions of William Blake and the theoretical physics of Albert Einstein through the hardscrabble streets and alleys of his hometown of Northampton, UK. In the half a square mile of decay and demolition that was England's Saxon capital, eternity is loitering between the firetrap housing projects. Embedded in the grubby amber of the district's narrative among its saints, kings, prostitutes, and derelicts, a different kind of human time is happening, a soiled simultaneity that does not differentiate between the petrol-colored puddles and the fractured dreams of those who navigate them.

    Employing, a kaleidoscope of literary forms and styles that ranges from brutal social realism to extravagant children's fantasy, from the modern stage drama to the extremes of science fiction, Jerusalem's dizzyingly rich cast of characters includes the living, the dead, the celestial, and the infernal in an intricately woven tapestry that presents a vision of an absolute and timeless human reality in all of its exquisite, comical, and heartbreaking splendor.

    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 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. They discuss English as a visionary language from John Bunyan to James Joyce, hold forth on the illusion of mortality post-Einstein, and insist upon the meanest slum as Blake's eternal holy city.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books Audio
    Release dateSep 13, 2016
    ISBN9781501932151
    Unavailable
    Jerusalem
    Author

    Alan Moore

    Alan Moore is an Architecture Modeling Specialist at The MathWorks. He has extensive experience in the development of real-time and object-oriented methodologies and their application. Alan was co-chair of the OMG's Real-time Analysis and Design Working Group and served as the language architect during the development of SysML.

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    Reviews for Jerusalem

    4/5

    85 ratings9 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I’ve read this novel three times now. Alan Moore is probably my favorite writer. Don’t let it’s size intimidate you. Pretend your reading a series that has been collected into a single volume. It’s not light reading but I feel it’s well worth the time and effort. It’s pure art. Oh, and Simon Vance delivers a perfect reading here.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Moore could have used some editor with authority enough to make him cut out unnecessary parts, and also remind him to hold back on the descriptions a bit. We don't need to know what every outlandish or utterly mundane experience reminded him of. There might be a story here but it doesn't need more than 300 pages to be told. Most of the book is just the sort of filler that feels important for the author but not for anyone else.

      I suspect that even as a magical ritual the result was lacking, given his self-insert characters reaction in the end. I think the reason it ended as a whimper is because he might have become aware of the conflict between his own huge ego, self-insert character and ambitious goal, and the message of the book that we don't have a free will and that nothing is new. Such a deflating message probably kill most of the magic power he might have hoped for.

      Speaking of conflicts and contradictions, Moore have the same problem here as in comics such as Watchmen. He wants to speak for the poor and humanity, but his view of both the poor and humans in general is very dark. It reminds me a lot of the sort of rationalization that are common among people with his political leaning, that they imagine that they care about people, but in reality it is more about resentment. The problem with that as an author is that the reader never is given much reason to care about the characters and the world become very cold and loveless.

      All that said, it is still an interesting read at times and something truly unique. It gives both a insight in how Moore wants to be seen and also - if I am not mistaken - an insight in his struggle with the work. The most interesting part is when he is trying to criticize some local politician while at the same time sticking to the idea that we lack any free will and any responsibility. Maybe there was some magic here after all, that made Moore get a glimpse of himself and experience a bit of transformation as a result.

      There is also a very charming and relatable character in Benedict Perrit, which I enjoyed. Maybe the only character who didn't seem to struggle with a deep depression, but it might also just be his OCD ticks to laugh at everything.

      Anyway, this is a book for people who don't want books to end.
    • 4/5
      It's becoming a personal tradition to undertake a winter brick challenge. Around the time of the shortest days I'll try and distract myself and semi-hibernate with a book that's either very long or otherwise forbidding by it's reputation.
      This one fulfilled these requirements: it's very long and complex. The first third is many short views from individual lives lived in Northampton at different times. There's a connection with William Blake, Jerusalem and Angels but this only becomes clear (er) in the second third. Some other readers on this site didn't make it this far, but the vision and philosophy makes it worth it.
      There are some emotional story pay-offs in the end of the last third but by that time they're a bit of an anti-climax. Alan Moore, the author of "Watchmen" and "V for Vendetta" graphic novels is to be applauded for his ambition, but he would have benefitted from a fiercer editor.
      Ground-hog day is over, now onward to lighter days.
    • 4/5
      This being from the mind of Alan Moore, there are no moralities dished out in regards to sex, God, culture, and politics, but there is, however, strong elements of graphic novels, fables, Anarchy, sexuality, lingual twists and reactions against boredom.

      Where language is concerned, Moore makes it clear from the start that this novel will take some turns, which he's not unleashed in graphic novels. If he did, it'd have been weird. For example this sentence:

      "On the street’s far side a gnome-like woman in a headscarf walked along beside the Upper Cross Street maisonettes with circulation-dodging fingers hooked about the handles of her plastic shopping bag."

      After reading this long book, you get into the lull of parts of the language; even though my own sentence there may seem contrived, I'll show what I mean: first, there's the re-use of some words, such as "effervesce", "scintillate", and "terpsichorean".

      Then, we have a completely different take on language:

      She concides to fellow the headvoice of her deportly salvia and triter murke her why beckento deylight, certing off betune the tries with their liminous feary-luc womencrustations, hymming washy thinks white mince have been a Bleatles’ camposition, jester keep her spillits up. She fictures hersylph in a beat on a raver with dangerin tease and murmurlate spies, which is a cheeryher propersituation dunder lunardecked asilent weirdlands which in surreality she caughtusly atemps to flinder path amist.

      Moore delves high and low, and yet manages to swerve throughout boredom and despair, as I felt it; there were a couple of times where I thought of giving up the book, but somewhere around page 50 I found the story about the angel to be utterly charming and beautiful:

      His circumstances were so wholly unbelievable he didn’t even have the wits to scream but took another step back with one hand clapped tight across his gaping maw. At the far edges of the figure’s epic mouth, also migrated up and to the left now, dimpled cracks of mingled Ivory Black and crimson crinkled into being as the pale, foot-long lips parted and the painted angel spoke. “Theis whille beye veery haerdt foure yew” it said, sounding concerned. The ‘is’ or the essential being of this coming while as, from your viewpoint, it apparently goes by will be a sudden and extreme veer in the pathway of your heart with things that you have heard concerning a fourth angle of existence causing difficulties to arise within your mortal life, that is concluded in a graveyard where the yew trees flourish, and this will be very hard for you. Ern understood this complicated message, understood that it was somehow all squeezed down into just seven mostly unfamiliar words that had unfolded and unpacked themselves inside his thoughts, like the unwrapping of a children’s paper puzzle or a Chinese poem. Even as he struggled to absorb the content bound in this exploded sentence, the mere noise of it unravelled him. It had a fullness and dimension to its sound, compared to a whole orchestra performing in a concert hall, such as the latter might have in comparison with a tin whistle blown inside an insulated cupboard. Every note of it seemed to be spiralling away in countless fainter and more distant repetitions, the same tones at an increasingly diminished scale until these split into a myriad still smaller echoes, eddying minuscule whirlwinds made of sound that spun off into the persistent background thunderclaps and disappeared. Now that it had completed that first startling quarter turn the table-sized face seemed almost to settle down into its new configuration. Only at its edges and around the mobile mouth and eyes were particles still creeping, dots of pigment skittering in little sand-slides round the fresco’s curvature and making small adjustments to accommodate the slight and natural movements of the figure’s head, the shift of gleam and shadow on its opening and closing lips.

      I most fervently felt I had to abandon the book when the stories around the children popped up, even though they weren't delved in mirth which most are; however, Moore is more intelligent than that, and it went to show that one did good with just pushing through it all.

      At times, I must confess, I skimmed part of the book, especially the chapters where poetry flailed and almost the entire chapter of made-up lingo is concerned. However, there are plenty of times where Moore's language itself filled me up, made me think of the book as a wholly new thing, akin to how Proust and Joyce turned shit on its head in their majestic tomes of weirdness, whispered clamour and wondrous tales of the everyday.

      For everyday this is, even though it's thinly veiled by different realities, sprawling through a lot of different dimensions; it's no wonder that Moore both mentions Wittgenstein and Einstein in this book, without wanting to sound clever. Or he could be. If he is, I think he's doing a shit job at it.

      Anyway, this book isn't all roses. I think it suffers some, from Moore having worked so much with writing massive and hugely influential graphic novels which all claim his language, and storytelling regime. I can believe—without actually knowing—that he really wanted to write this book without just escaping the graphic novel realm. He has the money to do fuck-all and just worship Glycon, but he made this, and we're the better for it.

      For now, it'll be a little while until I head into something like this again though, out of sheer exhaustion. The many forms and twists that this book took during its turn are enough to make a shy, bald, Buddhist reflect, and plan a mass murder. In a lot of good ways.
    • 4/5
      The child had woken before she could ask whether this meant that pigeons were all human ghosts, forms that dead people had gone into and become, or whether they somehow existed simultaneously in Heaven, where dead people go, and up amongst the rafters of the derelict barn in the neighbour’s yard at the same time.

      My friend Roger - who is reading this with me- related that sometimes one needs to go to encyclopedic ends to marshal the argument as to why some never leaves their home town. I countered that we here in Indiana lack a thousand years of human history. His point reigns regardless.

      Alan Moore explores his hometown Northampton over 1260 pages with a host of perspectives and a free play with temporality which was fascinating and yet left slightly unexplored. That was my chief issue with Jerusalem, so many ideas which were rather inviting and yet overlooked in favor of others.

      Two siblings Alma and Michael, artist and everyman respectively, dominate the narrative. It is this tandem approach - experience and expression which yields a direction to a world where the space-time continuum is an anthropomorphic characterization -- past-present-future are extant, simultaneous and sublime. This time business is a projection.

      Jerusalem is a brick of a novel, one which throws great arcs. Poverty is an issue employed as is Race. The midriff of the novel is dominated by a near death experience and the consequent insertion of a character into a shadowed dimension inhabited by the departed. These ghosts gather, a troupe of youngsters as the Dead Dead Gang which chronicle their own exploration and adventures in a series of children's books. Very Chums of Chance.

      The novels breaks out of its own form with a chapter on Lucia Joyce, one cast into a most Wakean argot. This is a wonder. Such music to admire, the triumph is reflected in a later piece where John Bunyan, John Clare, Samuel Beckett and Thomas Becket gather to eavesdrop on a family drama. It is a gimmick but an effective one. Something similar would be adequate for the novel as a whole.
    • 5/5
      This is simply too large and complex a book for me to write a meaningful review of, so I'm just going to say that it's a blast to read, and it's loaded—absolutely loaded—thematically, stylistically, and philosophically beyond anything I can recall reading anywhere else.
    • 5/5
      Probably as good as Joyce, very long but accessible to those who have patience. Does not need to be read in a single setting, so don't panic!
    • 5/5
      4 and a half stars. wow. also whew. a social, economic, literary, religious, and political history of Alan's hometown center (featuring his own family) across about two thousand years in time and various states of being. or you might say instead the work amply illustrates Alan's theory about the development of English as a visionary language. or maybe go with eschatology as the defining principle of the work, making it Alan's version of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. never mind, just read it. doesn't take as long as you'd think, it's massively entertaining, the characters are great, the ideas are flowing, the language is seductive, and it's like the theory of everything. Alan himself is played by the not-so-fictional character Alma Warren, an artist bent on saving the world through art. i'm deducting half a star, though, for the fifty pages of "Round the Bend" in James Joyce's mad daughter's PoV, which are just as brilliantly written as the rest of it but in high Joycean lingo, which about five pages would have proved out so we could move along (this may represent my own prejudices in terms of English litrachur.) really, though, the only problem is holding 1266 pp of book for a week (but i've got the bruises to prove it's not only possible, it's worth it).
    • 4/5
      Four stars for sheer effort (Moore's and my own). I recall hearing once that the way to survive an avalanche is to swim near the surface while it's moving so that you're not paralyzed by the weight of it at the end; this is the approach I recommend taking to this book. If, however, you like to savor a well-turned descriptive phrase, Jerusalem may last you the remainder of your mortal existence.