Jerusalem by Alan Moore

This book has left me feeling like my brain is a touch melted, in a good way.

For those that are uninitiated, Alan Moore (creator of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The Killing Joke, etc) wrote a massive novel over the course of 10 years and published the 1200 page entirety of it in 2016. It's a dense, multilayered amalgamation of philosophy, experimental fiction, and shifting points of view as we traverse the lives and history of residents in Northampton, England where Moore is from and still resides.

To start, this is probably the single thickest book I've ever read. The 1200 pages is laughably nondescript in how long and dense this story actually is. At 600,000 words, it's almost twice as long as Sanderson's The Way of Kings even though it's fewer pages. The fucking audiobook is 61 hours long. It's a feat in itself just to get accustomed to the biblical pages of this monster and make it through to the other side. This isn't even touching on the ways Alan Moore experiments with writing style, wordplay, form, format, and view.

All that noted, however, and I have to say it was incredibly enthralling. I can't pinpoint what it is in the way that Moore writes, but I found myself lost in it consistently throughout, even though it isn't written in a particularly complex way. It's simple, not high prose or exceedingly flowery, and I fell straight into it with only a few notable exceptions that were intentionally hard to decipher. It's an incredible showcase in the power of varied forms of language and perspective.

The story itself is something of a slice of life narrative that changes whose slice we're seeing every chapter and how it extends beyond life. While I may have seen some of the individual concepts done before, I can say I don't think I've ever seen a mythology quite like this one and it's a very cool thing to explore. While some parts drag or digress, the varied perspectives and nonlinear storytelling keep things fresh and interesting even when you're wading through one of the rougher, more disturbing sections.

On those topics, there is certainly a lot of darkness here. Much of it is sexual, violent, and explicit to the point of even being in the point of view of both victims and perpetrators. If you are someone who deals with triggers, I would highly recommend checking those before you embark on this Asmodeus Ride of a book. Some of the sections are rough, racist, out of time, bigoted, and downright nasty, and I feel it adds a level of grim reality to this homage to the poor and forgotten.

I'm sure there are things I've missed, and it took me a long time to chew through the whole thing, but I would recommend people check it out. Even with its digressions and distractions, even if you don't particularly like sections or even the whole thing, this was a fascinating ride and incredible study in characters, place, time, life, death, love, hate, class, and breaking the limitations of literature.

Has anyone else read this one? What did you think?