Scan barcode
A review by trilbynorton
Jerusalem by Alan Moore
5.0
I'm hard-pressed to think of any other artwork that so thoroughly and comprehensively conjures a place as does Alan Moore's mammoth opus. I've never been to Northampton, and had only a brief tour of Google Maps street view to aid my mind's eye, but after almost 1,400 pages I feel like I know the Boroughs as well as any lifetime resident.
Know it in space and in time. Time is Moore's other major concern, both as a dimension and a human experience. Angles [sic] observe history as a four-dimensional plane in which every instant happens at once, while in Northampton the ghosts of eighth century monks walk down the high street.
The two most apt comparisons I can make are James Joyce's Ulysses and Moore's own From Hell. The former because, like Joyce's work, Jerusalem shifts form and style with every chapter (changing from stream-of-consciousness to verse to theatrical script), and of course is set in a single place, albeit extended into the fourth dimension. The latter because, as with Moore's exploration of Jack the Ripper, the century which birthed him, and the century which he in turn birthed, Jerusalem seems to be about...well, everything. History, economics, physics, philosophy, literature, Bauhaus.
Five stars seem somehow inadequate. Perhaps some sort of higher-dimensional score, of which stars are merely a lower extrusion of a points system beyond human comprehension.
Know it in space and in time. Time is Moore's other major concern, both as a dimension and a human experience. Angles [sic] observe history as a four-dimensional plane in which every instant happens at once, while in Northampton the ghosts of eighth century monks walk down the high street.
The two most apt comparisons I can make are James Joyce's Ulysses and Moore's own From Hell. The former because, like Joyce's work, Jerusalem shifts form and style with every chapter (changing from stream-of-consciousness to verse to theatrical script), and of course is set in a single place, albeit extended into the fourth dimension. The latter because, as with Moore's exploration of Jack the Ripper, the century which birthed him, and the century which he in turn birthed, Jerusalem seems to be about...well, everything. History, economics, physics, philosophy, literature, Bauhaus.
Five stars seem somehow inadequate. Perhaps some sort of higher-dimensional score, of which stars are merely a lower extrusion of a points system beyond human comprehension.