Jerusalem

For some reason, many reviewers here seem to compare Jerusalem with Infinite Jest. I don't see anything similar between the two, besides the length and pages-long walls of text.

"This will be very hard for you", says one character in the book, and reading this book is hard indeed, but there is no payout of any kind. It just goes and goes and goes.

I have to confess that Jerusalem is one of these extremely rarely books that I did not finish. Somewhere near the end of Book Two I've decided to check reviews on goodreads, and some of the most unflattering ones were describing what I was feeling, and so I realised there is no point in further miserable waste of time. I'm no literary critic, and English is not my first language, as you have probably guessed, but in some cases you don't have to be an expert to tell flies' crap from an ointment, and I believe Jerusalem is particularly fitting case. It is as if it was written by a student who just wanted to make a pretentious brick of a work.

Plot is extremely self-contradictory. Some examples from Book Two (which is the only one that seems to at least pretend to have a conventional plot) (yes, that's the one that describes chocking on a cough pill):

Narrator: painstakingly describes for 10 pages how there is no time in afterlife, and how our spacetime is seen just as 4-dimensional brick from there. Time: flows.
Narrator: painstakingly describes for 10 pages how, because there is no time, people can't even utter words such as "is", "was" or "will be"; even when they try to say these, they actually say "wiz". People during the next five pages: only say "wiz" instead of "is", "was" or "will be". People on the next 300 pages after that: routinely use "is", "was" or "will be" without giving a second thought, with occasional appearances of "wiz". Probably Moore has originally written these chapters in more conventional style, had to replace all the verbs by hand because his text processor does not support autoreplacement, got tired of that after first five pages.
Narrator and protagonists: describe for 50 pages how they can effortlessly jump from one time to another, with a minute-level precision. Protagonists: "oh, we don't have time for that, we should hurry up, or we'll be late for some meeting in another era".
Narrator: so this three-year old kid looks like ten-year old and has a mind of adult person in afterlife. Protagonists: interact with that person like it is adult. Also narrator: repeatedly uses "toddler" to refer to that person for the next 300 pages. Aren't toddlers supposed to, well, toddle?
Narrator: so there are these heavenly creatures who are also angels and unimaginably just and fair and who basically built that place and who deeply care about people and everything. Two most important angels: after having a minor disagreement, without attempting to solve it by civilized means, start a fist fight that reverbates throughout the entire world and threatens to destroy a significant part of their project.
Narrator: so this protagonist girl is so shy and tight-lipped that it is rarely that you hear a single word from her, let alone two words. Girl: constantly interrupts everybody with her walls of text.

There is no a single relatable hero. Although on paper they're supposed to have some distinguishing traits, they all act the same. You have dozens of POVs, and they only differ by external events.
For most of the book two, protagonists just aimlessly go from one place or time to another, with a fake sense of great urgency and need. Protagonist: "OK, now we need to go to X, hurry up everyone!" Why X? Why is it important? Why do they need to go there? Protagonist does not explain and does not know; nobody instructed them to go to X. Once they arrive to X, they just look around, and soon afterwards "OK, there is no time to look around, move on, we need to get to Y!"

And writing is just abysmal. It is what happens when lazy student wants to dilute their short essay to comply with the minimum length requirements. You get adjective and adverb abuse going on a horrendously scale, and a whole load of repetitions put on top of that.
A typical sentence from Book Two: "Phyllis shook her head in a briefly-enduring smear of features, much like when you drew a face in ballpoint pen on a balloon then stretched the rubber out". It was preceded by about a hundred of other similar descriptions on how everything looks in that place. We already know how it looks when somebody shakes their head, protagonists know that, narrator knows that, it does not add anything new and does not build up an atmosphere, there is no need in describing this yet again, unless you want to make your book several hundreds pages longer.
And Moore, knowing that repetitiveness is a sin, tries to state these repetitions in a different way. While half of time he's using the same adjective, in another half he's trying to replace it with some synonyms. He probably had A Complete English Thesaurus With Even The Most Obscure Words at his hands, and of course with such an enormous book he runs of common synonyms shortly, and so in addition to all of the above the book is peppered with Big Words, that serve no purpose but to further obstruct the reader.

TL;dr: There are no ideas in this book, nor is it an enjoyable reading. You'll have to wade through barely readable low-quality writing and not get anything in return.

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.

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.

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.