Alan Moore’s new prose novel Jerusalem has long been in the works, and now we know when it will be released: September, 2016. Less than a year from now, we will once again enter the mind of Alan Moore through language alone, as we did through his masterful first novel The Voice of the Fire (available from Top Shelf Productions).
Gosh London has published Moore’s promotional blurb for Jerusalem, and it sounds like readers are in for more of a mind-blowing experience than even Voice of the Fire provided:
In the
half a square mile of decay and demolition that was England’s Saxon
capital, eternity is loitering between the firetrap tower blocks.
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-coloured puddles and the fractured dreams of those who
navigate them. Fiends last mentioned in the Book of Tobit wait in
urine-scented stairwells, the delinquent spectres of unlucky children
undermine a century with tunnels, and in upstairs parlours labourers
with golden blood reduce fate to a snooker tournament.
Disappeared
lanes yield their own voices, built from lost words and forgotten
dialect, to speak their broken legends and recount their startling
genealogies, family histories of shame and madness and the marvellous.
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 towards 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 and poverty; of Africa, and hymns, 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. Fierce in its imagining and stupefying in its scope,
this is the tale of everything, told from a vanished gutter.
