Jerusalem

De: Alan Moore

Narrado por: Simon Vance

Winner, 2017 APA Audie Awards - Best Male Narrator

Fierce in its imagining and stupefying in its scope, Jerusalem is the tale of everything, told from a vanished gutter.

In the epic novel Jerusalem, Alan Moore channels both the ecstatic visions of William Blake and the theoretical physics of Albert Einstein through the hardscrabble streets and alleys of his hometown of Northampton, UK. In the half a square mile of decay and demolition that was England's Saxon capital, eternity is loitering between the firetrap housing projects. 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-colored puddles and the fractured dreams of those who navigate them.

Employing a kaleidoscope of literary forms and styles that range from brutal social realism to extravagant children's fantasy, from modern stage drama to the extremes of science fiction, Jerusalem's dizzyingly rich cast of characters includes the living, the dead, the celestial, and the infernal in an intricately woven tapestry that presents a vision of an absolute and timeless human reality in all of its exquisite, comical, and heartbreaking splendor.

In these minutes lurk demons from the second-century Book of Tobit and angels with golden blood who reduce fate to a snooker tournament. Vagrants, prostitutes, and ghosts rub shoulders with Oliver Cromwell; Samuel Beckett; James Joyce's tragic daughter, Lucia; and Buffalo Bill, among many others. 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 11 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 toward the heat death of the universe.

An opulent mythology for those without a pot to piss in, through the labyrinthine streets and minutes of Jerusalem tread ghosts that sing of wealth, poverty, 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.

Download the accompanying reference guide.©2016 Alan Moore (P)2016 Recorded Books

A Mixed-Bag of Brilliant and Baffling Storytelling

This is a huge story. 61 hours. 600,000 words. The narration is top-notch and will pull you through this monster, despite the fact that you're going to get lost multiple times throughout. The vision that is the creation of this story is mind-numbing, not just for its size and scope, but for its audacity. There is a story here that runs throughout the novel, but it doesn't really have a beginning or an end, and is chopped up so finally that it can be easily lost or missed entirely.

I made it through the whole thing. I enjoyed large parts of it. There were sections I didn't understand and parts that I didn't think we're necessary. As a whole I found it unsatisfying. In bits and pieces I thought it was really interesting and well done. I'm glad that I listen to it, but I imagine I will never revisit it.

epic

it would be too difficult to write a review for this book as it has many tales intertwined under a larger one. The narration was perfect even for the part when Simon Vance had to Basically speak in tongues. It is a huge undertaking for an audio book that made me want to buy a physical copy or even the kindle version just so I could follow along again. Alan Moore at his finest.

just fantastic

with a long, winding, sometimes convoluted and verbose road Jerusalem delivers. for any reader who takes this on stick with it. be patient with it and yourself. you will thank Alan Moore at the end of it all. that is if you are like me and like your fantasy to have little history lessons sprinkled throughout and deep existential metaphors dressed like industrial revolution era tramps.

Best book I’ve read in years

It’s dense. I mean it’s really hallucinations and neighborhood history, bound up in a bunch of different stories. But somehow, it works. I read the book in 2019 then listened here, in 2020. I will listen again, too. This is just sheer audacious lunacy and somehow, it works.

This is my favorite piece of fiction

I really really love this book, I've listened to it repeatedly, it speaks to me in dreams.

Mindblowing, As Usual

This gigantic tome is three books in series, sort of: time jumps around, the middle book is an adult take on a children's novel, the afterlife is not what anyone told you it would be, the world is impossibly expansive, and it all takes place in a neighborhood of Northampton.

And I'm now extremely interested in the life of Lucia Joyce, James Joyce's daughter.

A Gravity's Rainbow for the current generation

This was gorgeous and sumptuous but you need to work and earn it.

As always, Simon Vance's narration is a treat. His accents are fluid and consistent, giving us memorable characters.

Moore's story unfolds with layer after layer, rewarding you with some of the most playful text since David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest." Wonder what the text would sound like as a play? There's a section for that. Wonder how you could tell the story in rhyme? There's a section for that. Wonder if you could still communicate the story in the glossolalia of word and sound replacement? There's a section for that.

The divine and the mundane mix it up in a holy and profane long, slow kiss with grease under the fingernails. I love this book and, as with other long, slow kisses like works by DFW, Pynchon or Joyce, if you give it a shot, it'll love you back.

Dive in. You won't shake it loose for a while

Woah! That's a big book. Alan Moore wrote about every way possible- except a pop tune- but maybe I missed it in the mayhem. And how the reader (Simon Vance) kept me into it - even when he did the really obscure section (you'll understand)-amazing

Amazing book, must be heard, not read

The author obviously loves his home in Northampshire. you must hear reader Simon Vancouver perform the subtly different regional accents. As am American listener, I would miss all the subtext. The book often takes an experimental form and I encourage the listener to stay with it. The author's pain for this part of England moved me.

A mythology memorializing a neighborhood

one of the most memorable works of epic fiction I've ever read, Jerusalem is less a novel and more a mythology built to memorialize The Burroughs at a moment when, like so many "poor" neighborhoods, it faces gentrification and modernization.

Rather than decry the loss, Alan Moore has managed to draw a fantastical and beautiful picture of the neighborhood, moving around through its incomprehensibly long history from the ancient Celtic myth and Roman occupation to the present day and into the future, even venturing beyond the death of the sun.

Simon Vance does an extraordinary job capturing this oversized epic, maintaining an engaging performance throughout. Around the mid section there are a few bits of shoddy editing with repeated takes but who can blame them? It's 50 hours of editing.

Expect long trails of consciousness and unanswered questions. The hardest parts for me were the explicit descriptions of sexual assault which occur later in the book. Moments that I wouldn't remove from the book but that were extremely difficult to listen to.

You need to be patient to listen to the book and it doesn't end with a finali that will be satisfying to the questions the book raises but taken in its totality, the work is an enormous accomplishment that I hope will be immortalized as a portrait of the loss so many are feeling right now.