An office move not long ago necessitated one of those painful purges I’ve had to face almost from the moment I could read. Still smarting from the sacrifice of books I hadn’t even remembered I owned, I took no consolation from the sight of gleaming wood exposed now that every shelf wasn’t double stacked. A colleague, however, astutely recognized a bright side almost immediately. It’s easier to spot your gems, he remarked, fingering an out-of-print copy of The Letters of Kingsley Amis, after all that culling.
This insight came back to me as I was reading Jerusalem. Of course, a lot of thoughts came to mind while I read Alan Moore’s latest work. This mammoth of a novel is about, it seems, all of the big questions: life and death, sex and love, freedom and fate, time and space, heaven and earth. It’s also, quite simply, well, big. At just under 1,300 pages, Jerusalem takes up a lot of time and space. And even the most devoted of readers will find his mind wandering now and then, and not always in the direction Moore is trying to take it. There just might be a great novel in Jerusalem. But it can be hard to discern amidst the muddle.
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