And did those feet ...?
Jul. 4th, 2020 10:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustBack before Easter, I posted that I had started to read Alan Moore's Jerusalem. I finished it on the weekend of the solstice: three volumes, two and a half months.
That weekend's Guardian Review had a feature suggesting holiday reading, books that are in themselves a holiday because they take you somewhere else. It didn't mention Jerusalem, but that is absolutely what Jerusalem does: I spent lockdown in Northampton. Jerusalem is about life and death, time and free will, family and art and town planning and many other things, but above and beyond all else, it is about Northampton. Chapter after chapter follows a different viewpoint character as they walk - or cycle, or very rarely drive - around the Boroughs, the oldest part of Northampton. The dates of these perambulations vary from the earliest Saxon settlement to the present, the near future and eventually to the end of time. It seems at first as if you could spend a holiday following each route in turn, with the help of John Coulthart's elegant map, but it becomes clear that you would at times be tracing ghost roads, streets that are no longer there. Alan Moore took interviewer Dominic Wells on a walking tour of some key locations, including the grassy patch which was once his bedroom (and that of Michael, in the book): the lost streets are still standing in his memory, and in the book. I said in that earlier post "I feel slightly as if I should be making notes, drawing diagrams, following people's movements on the map (there is a very nice map) because paths cross from one section to another, and I'm probably missing connections...". It's true that there are days which are significant if only because they accommodate more than one chapter, and so permit characters to meet and interact (or to fail to meet, and glimpse each other in the distance); but that map would have to be four dimensional. John Coulthart's map includes buildings which never actually coexisted, but that's just a start: a complete map would layer era upon era, showing you the same place at different times. And you'd still need a way to include 'Upstairs', the Northampton of the afterlife ...
Part historical guide book, part philosophical treatise, Jerusalem is large, it contains multitudes. If time is just another dimension, then an observer who was able to stand outside it would see everything happening simultaneously, throughout eternity: as Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians do, as Doctor Manhattan does, as the author of the book does. There is no free will, because everything that will happen is already happening / has already happened. Without free will, there is no good or evil, only what is. There is an afterlife, but it is neither Heaven nor Hell, just the pain or pleasure of living forever your best or worst actions: we are our own punishment and reward. There are ghosts, some of them permanently attached (for happy or unhappy reasons) to the locations of their lifetimes, some just visiting from Upstairs. Much of this appears to be Moore's real-life philosophy.
Upstairs itself is another matter: part another Northampton patched together from the dreams of its inhabitants, part vast Victorian edifice inhabited by a Stanley Spencer vision of not-Angels-but-Angles, a team of Master Builders in shining robes. This feels invented, for the purposes of the book: Dominic Wells reports Moore as telling him "Nearly everything is historical fact," but deadpanning: "I'd take all the angels and demons with a pinch of salt..."
That use of wordplay is characteristic of the book, which takes an authentically medieval stand on puns: verbal similarity is not just a basis for bad jokes, it is significant and must be taken seriously. Michael Warren's name places him under the special protection of the Archangel Michael whose statue warches over the Boroughs from the pinnacle of the Guildhall; it is also, in the real world, the name of Moore's younger brother Michael. A warren is a network of burrows, an animal's underground home, which echoes the sense as well as the sound of the Boroughs, the area of Northampton where he lives and which he represents, as does his elder sister Alma, the artist whose exhibition brackets the novel and embodies the Boroughs. Alma, but for a few minor changes (an M for an N, primarily visual rather than written art and a change of gender) is transparently Alan himself. Jerusalem is, in the words which precede the publishing information, "Based on a true story," and that story is the story of a family as much as the story of a city.
Wordplay reaches its height in 'Round the Bend', the chapter which follows Lucia Joyce, who was diagnosed as schizophrenic and spent the last 30 years of her life in Saint Andrew's Hospital, Northampton. It is written in a sort of Joycean code, starting "Awake, Lucia gets up wi' the wry sing of de light ...quot; I have a half memory of reading an interview in which Moore admitted that it might have been a mistake to open Voice of the Fire with such a challenging firt chapter; and was telling people, as I did here, that Jerusalem was " never as stylistically challenging as the first section of that earlier book." Silly me! What Moore meant, as he explains on another interview, was that he would save that up for chapter 26. Reading it is rather like solving a crossword puzzle, building meaning from the sounds of the words but also extracting the sense of the associations and allusions, and keeping this up for more than 40 pages. It took Moore a year to write, apparently, and when he had finished it, he took two years off to do something else.
The obvious question is, was it worth it? The same applies to the book as a whole: does it justify its length, or would it have more impact - not to mention more readers - if it were shorter? Alan Moore doesn't think so: " But it's exactly the length that it needs to be, give or take 100 words or so in editing." The repetions, the cleverness for its own sake, the accumulation of details, not to mention a detour to Lambeth, justified by Moore's actual family history and the desire to involve William Blake in the grand project, all these things are as they are because that's the book he wants to write. It could be more tautly edited, but it could never be less than a great baggy monster of a book, so why not lie back and enjoy it?
That weekend's Guardian Review had a feature suggesting holiday reading, books that are in themselves a holiday because they take you somewhere else. It didn't mention Jerusalem, but that is absolutely what Jerusalem does: I spent lockdown in Northampton. Jerusalem is about life and death, time and free will, family and art and town planning and many other things, but above and beyond all else, it is about Northampton. Chapter after chapter follows a different viewpoint character as they walk - or cycle, or very rarely drive - around the Boroughs, the oldest part of Northampton. The dates of these perambulations vary from the earliest Saxon settlement to the present, the near future and eventually to the end of time. It seems at first as if you could spend a holiday following each route in turn, with the help of John Coulthart's elegant map, but it becomes clear that you would at times be tracing ghost roads, streets that are no longer there. Alan Moore took interviewer Dominic Wells on a walking tour of some key locations, including the grassy patch which was once his bedroom (and that of Michael, in the book): the lost streets are still standing in his memory, and in the book. I said in that earlier post "I feel slightly as if I should be making notes, drawing diagrams, following people's movements on the map (there is a very nice map) because paths cross from one section to another, and I'm probably missing connections...". It's true that there are days which are significant if only because they accommodate more than one chapter, and so permit characters to meet and interact (or to fail to meet, and glimpse each other in the distance); but that map would have to be four dimensional. John Coulthart's map includes buildings which never actually coexisted, but that's just a start: a complete map would layer era upon era, showing you the same place at different times. And you'd still need a way to include 'Upstairs', the Northampton of the afterlife ...
Part historical guide book, part philosophical treatise, Jerusalem is large, it contains multitudes. If time is just another dimension, then an observer who was able to stand outside it would see everything happening simultaneously, throughout eternity: as Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians do, as Doctor Manhattan does, as the author of the book does. There is no free will, because everything that will happen is already happening / has already happened. Without free will, there is no good or evil, only what is. There is an afterlife, but it is neither Heaven nor Hell, just the pain or pleasure of living forever your best or worst actions: we are our own punishment and reward. There are ghosts, some of them permanently attached (for happy or unhappy reasons) to the locations of their lifetimes, some just visiting from Upstairs. Much of this appears to be Moore's real-life philosophy.
Upstairs itself is another matter: part another Northampton patched together from the dreams of its inhabitants, part vast Victorian edifice inhabited by a Stanley Spencer vision of not-Angels-but-Angles, a team of Master Builders in shining robes. This feels invented, for the purposes of the book: Dominic Wells reports Moore as telling him "Nearly everything is historical fact," but deadpanning: "I'd take all the angels and demons with a pinch of salt..."
That use of wordplay is characteristic of the book, which takes an authentically medieval stand on puns: verbal similarity is not just a basis for bad jokes, it is significant and must be taken seriously. Michael Warren's name places him under the special protection of the Archangel Michael whose statue warches over the Boroughs from the pinnacle of the Guildhall; it is also, in the real world, the name of Moore's younger brother Michael. A warren is a network of burrows, an animal's underground home, which echoes the sense as well as the sound of the Boroughs, the area of Northampton where he lives and which he represents, as does his elder sister Alma, the artist whose exhibition brackets the novel and embodies the Boroughs. Alma, but for a few minor changes (an M for an N, primarily visual rather than written art and a change of gender) is transparently Alan himself. Jerusalem is, in the words which precede the publishing information, "Based on a true story," and that story is the story of a family as much as the story of a city.
Wordplay reaches its height in 'Round the Bend', the chapter which follows Lucia Joyce, who was diagnosed as schizophrenic and spent the last 30 years of her life in Saint Andrew's Hospital, Northampton. It is written in a sort of Joycean code, starting "Awake, Lucia gets up wi' the wry sing of de light ...quot; I have a half memory of reading an interview in which Moore admitted that it might have been a mistake to open Voice of the Fire with such a challenging firt chapter; and was telling people, as I did here, that Jerusalem was " never as stylistically challenging as the first section of that earlier book." Silly me! What Moore meant, as he explains on another interview, was that he would save that up for chapter 26. Reading it is rather like solving a crossword puzzle, building meaning from the sounds of the words but also extracting the sense of the associations and allusions, and keeping this up for more than 40 pages. It took Moore a year to write, apparently, and when he had finished it, he took two years off to do something else.
The obvious question is, was it worth it? The same applies to the book as a whole: does it justify its length, or would it have more impact - not to mention more readers - if it were shorter? Alan Moore doesn't think so: " But it's exactly the length that it needs to be, give or take 100 words or so in editing." The repetions, the cleverness for its own sake, the accumulation of details, not to mention a detour to Lambeth, justified by Moore's actual family history and the desire to involve William Blake in the grand project, all these things are as they are because that's the book he wants to write. It could be more tautly edited, but it could never be less than a great baggy monster of a book, so why not lie back and enjoy it?
