"That's what art's for; it rescues everything from time."
An early chapter in Jerusalem, Alan "Swamp Thing" Moore's enormous contribution to prose fiction, depicts a black man, born a slave in the United States but freed by the Emancipation Proclamation as a teenager, whose wanderings have landed him in and around Northampton, England in the early 20th century. Henry, sometimes called "Black Charlie" by the locals, first surfaces briefly in a prior chapter as a figure that chapter's point of view character (who is actually named Charles but goes by "Oatsey," a nickname derived from Cockney rhyming slang and who turns out to be someone famous you're going to have to read the book to find out about) encounters at two interesting moments in that character's life. When the next chapter proved to be focused on Henry/Black Charlie, I felt a rare delight in that the author had recognized that a figurant in one story was interesting enough to deserve his own chapter. As I've observed here before, I have a habit of getting more interested in background or side characters than I am in the protagonists, and I'm usually left frustrated. But not here!
And not only does Henry get a fascinating back story and a fulfilling afterlife in "the Upstairs"*, but his chapter is the most moving one yet encountered as one settles in to this enormous work of over 1200 pages (just over 60 hours!). Henry, who travels the countryside on a sturdy bicycle with ropes for tires, drawing a cart as he goes about his rounds, with wooden blocks attached to his feet for braking (because this is from before bicycles had brakes) learns near the beginning of his day that his favorite hymn, "Amazing Grace" was written by a pastor at a church in Olney, which is not far from where Henry hangs his hat and dotes on his family. On a whim, Henry takes time out from his ordinary rounds to visit the church and bask in the wonder that a white guy in England wrote a song that Henry has always felt best reflected the Black experience in America. Upon arriving, he is disappointed to learn that the pastor, John Newton, is not buried by the church in Olney, but, as readers who already know about John Newton, or even can just guess there's going to be some irony here, can foresee, this isn't going to be Henry's worst disappointment of the day. Go read about John Newton at that link, if you don't already know.
We are spared a scene where the kindly churchwarden who admits Henry to the building and shows him Newton's portrait reluctantly shatters Henry's illusions about the author of "Amazing Grace"; when we pick up with him again he is pedaling home and having to stop every mile or so to wipe the tears from his eyes.
Of course, I had to wipe my own. Alan Moore, what are you even doing to me, man? I was ready for some crazy magick (I'm a huge fan of, for instance, Promethea) or some gratuitously gross Lovecraftiana (seen Neonomicon? Jacen Burrows was the illustrator, if that gives you any clue on that score), or another round of "let's dump out the whole box of action figures and make them fight evil together (Hello, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) or some intensely esoteric and deep pop culture local to Moore's hometown of Northampton (Dodgem Logic, anyone), but not to get my heart torn right out of my body and squeezed dry before I'm even sure what this enormous doorstop of a novel is really going to turn out to be!
Which is kind of a hybrid between one of Edward Rutherford's better efforts and B. Catling's Vorrh Trilogy (even to including quite a significant role for one William Blake in its back story)**, except tossed into a kaleidoscope, there to be manipulated with manic energy at varying speeds by its author-operator. Ah, there at last is the Alan Moore I expect.
Interestingly, the reader's experience of Henry's "Amazing Grace" experience makes a useful lens through which to look at one of Jerusalem's larger themes; for as much as it is geographically concerned with Northampton and the region within it known as "the Boroughs", it is, in terms of character, somewhat focused on a peculiar family, first known as the Vernals and later the Warrens when a woman of the family in the early 20th century marries a man named Tom Warren and it's their descendants we subsequently meet and observe, who have been marked out by an ancestor's possibly fated encounter with an angel (and these angels are just as weird as Catling's Erstwhile while also partaking of, at least metaphorically, the internet's obsession with the weirdness of "biblically accurate" angels) in the 19th century. A strain of supernatural power that presents as a distressing mental illness appears in many of them, but what it amounts to is that they have come to perceive time very, very differently. They see all of it at once. So, for example, when John "Snowy" Vernal's first daughter is born, he can't handle the birth because he already knows how her whole life will go, what tragedies she will face, and how she will die in 80-some years: all alone and not even noticed for a few days. I'd probably jump up on a nearby roof instead of watching the delivery, too, Snowy.
So our experience of wincing in anticipation for Henry's loss of innocence regarding the author of "Amazing Grace" (presuming the reader already knows the realities of John Newton's life, which I think is pretty commonly known now? But I live in a bubble of internet where it is and maybe you don't? Anyway, pretend you did because it's dead easy to educate yourself) mirrors that of Snowy and others of his family, earthbound kwisatz haderachs without the benefit of sworn fedaykin or interstellar travel.
The Vernal-Warrens, often in sibling pairs, continue this weird existence well into the 21st century, in which their unique birthright as sort of supernatural watchmen of "the corners" makes them an integral part of a great universe-defining Event set for 2006, for which the first half or so of the book, including a whopping 11 chapters of a toddler's near-death experience, is just table setting and elaborate foreshadowing and even so when the Event finally comes, the reader is by no means ready for what's coming.
A lot of this book is written from a sort of multidimensional, godlike perspective we've seen Moore play with in, for instance, Watchmen, whose Dr. Manhattan character narrates his experience in an omniscient "everything that happens is happening at once" style, finally perfected for Jerusalem because the characters in Jerusalem afflicted with this power still care. They care deeply, whether they are angel-Builders who know that what they're asking of the Vernals will be hard for them or fathers who know that their granddaughters are doomed to die young even as they watch the baby's mother being born.
This continues even into the novel's ostensible main character (and Moore's self-insert figure), the irascible, seemingly sociopathic artist Alma Warren - whose younger brother, Mick, was the toddler who spends eleven chapters choking on a cough drop while his spirit is lead on a bewildering and revelatory tour of time and space by a gang of deceased fellow Northamptonians who have chosen to spend their afterlives as street urchins calling themselves the Dead Dead gang*** -- is passionate about the welfare of what's left of the denizens of her beloved Boroughs, where England has been stashing its unwanted working class and its unwanted weirdos for some 800 years, and mad as hell at how the forces of globalization and gentrification (given form in the Upstairs as a giant torus-shaped chimney, sucking in and burning up the very substance of the world from a spot near a pub) have torn the community apart and especially what this means for its older citizens who have known no other life and are suddenly uprooted and moved into unfamiliar apartment blocks full of strangers. This is her hobby horse and the great subject of her coming art exhibit in 2006, which is ostensibly the Event towards which everything else in the novel is leading us, except...
Except about halfway through one figures out that the most important person in this novel is one whom we've barely met, who doesn't even get a name unless you're paying very close attention/going back to re-read or re-listen to sections (her name is Marla). She's just a poor, drug-addled sex worker whom we see sort of in the background of other scenes in 2006 and for most of the novel she's just a bit of local color, until we realize [SPOILER ALERT DUH] that she is the same person whom Mick briefly met during his tour of the Upstairs, a woman who had a terrible past but turned it around and wound up doing an incredible amount of good by developing a questionnaire that helped a future-from-our-perspective UK government humanely and sensibly handle a flood of climate refugees and all around prevent the country from becoming, say, what we see in Alfonso Quarron's searing Children of Men.**** She's so important that Asmodeus himself tried to manipulate a young and ghostly Mick (newly arrived in the Upstairs) into promising to help Asmodeus kill her someday, but instead, with the help and inspiration of the Dead Dead Gang, he helps rescue her from a client-turned-rapist who has decided to murder her (this act of heroism also involves ghosts from other time periods and living relatives of Mick and Alma but it all starts with the Dead Deads).
But up until her escape from gruesome death, she has been the only person we've met who hasn't gotten the Henry treatment. Do you think maybe Alan Moore has a point in all of this? Maybe something about always be kind and stand up when you can because you never know how important what you've done might turn out to be for future generations, maybe? What a silly, comic book writer thing to spend 1200+ pages to tell us. Silly, silly Mr. Moore.
Anyway, like we always love to joke about Gene Wolfe, patron saint of big complicated books you have to read many times to understand, I just read Alan Moore's Jerusalem and all got was the sinking feeling I'm going to have to read it again. Because I almost got too distracted by the epic flights of fancy (we haven't even talked about Snowy Vernal's afterlife, journeying to the very end of time and space itself with his beautiful baby granddaughter on his shoulders!) to notice this, and at first I actually found the ending of Jerusalem a bit of a let-down. But it's not. Because what seems like the ending -- Alma's exhibition and its moderately satisfying but decidedly not epic denouement -- isn't the point at all.
Magicians are tricky.
Anyway, wow.
*Which is sort of Heaven-like but a lot more interesting than most afterlives, incorporating as it does a lot of elements of the kind of space-and-time-bending geometry that marks the last act of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar but still manages to serve as a stage for a lot of good old fashioned character drama and a rollicking good post-mortem adventure story. Because Alan Moore
**Others have insisted this is a sort of James Joyce homage/pastiche, and there are certainly elements of that, but for me the Rutherford/Catling elements are far too prominent in comparison to the Joyce ones, for all that there are whole chapters of Joycean near-gibberish - which, cheers to Simon Vance for rendering so perfectly comprehensible that his narration has half- convinced me to try Finnegan's Wake after all.
***And if you're thinking those eleven chapters are my favorite part of Jerusalem, gold star to you. Mick's adventures with the Dead Dead Gang are so delightful even the denizens of the Upstairs are fans, because one of the kids, Drowned Marjorie, managed to write and publish a complete account of them in the afterlife, but hasn't yet as these adventures take place, except the kids keep running into beings that are huge fans of theirs and do them favors as a result, because time is way more than wibbly-wobbly and if Alan Moore is ever allowed near Doctor Who it'll pretty much collapse all of existence.
****A movie that came out in 2006, which is the year in which Alma's Exhibition and the Rape of Marla/Kaff take place and this cannot be a coincidence; if there's any writer living who pays razory attention to pop culture, it's the Wizard of Northampton.
