Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Alan Moore - Jerusalem
Can anyone confirm if this review is accurate. I don't want to waste my time reading a lengthy dud
suggestedformaturereaders.wordpress.com/2017/02/18/a-work-as-grand-and-various-as-that/

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>And then when you do decipher it, the question is why. Finnegans’ Wake is apparently half-fable, half-dream, a family history told in a single disputed incident of wrongful incarceration, a comic monologue of disputed fact and wildly unreliable narrators. Round The Bend is… a wander around the Boroughs. Well, not the whole Boroughs, but those districts of it affliated with mental illness: St Andrew’s Hospital and the other madhouses which have held residents of the First Borough throughout the ages. It is, therefore, just like most of the other chapters of Jerusalem. Finnegans’ Wake is intended as a work in which the form and the content are inseparable, a story which could not be told any way other than it is. Round The Bend is a chapter of Jerusalem run through a hypothetical Joycean option on Google Translate.
Moore BTFO

>And the very attempt to lay blame points out a deeper flaw, namely that the two messages of Jerusalem are at odds with one another. If there is no death, if every moment is a jewel in eternity observable in every facet from every angle, then the death of the Boroughs is no more a tragedy than the fall of a raindrop. It’s not dead; where would it go? It’s still there, still living, just further back in the book. That, rather than the gratuitous stream-of-consciousness or the attempt to frame a villain, is what puts this chapter in the three worst. It demonstrates its own falsity and has nowhere else to go.

That's a fair review.
I wouldn't have identified Chaplin without that later explanation, but the larger point about Moore not trusting the reader too is valid.

Thanks. I was suspicious of the other reviews I read, too many soft critiques inhibited by nepotism or goodwill towards his previous work.

>Can anyone confirm if this review is accurate. I don't want to waste my time reading a lengthy dud
Wouldn't you know whether the book is good or bad before having read it all?

yeah deterministic Eternalism & moral outrage don't mix

I mean, it has a fucking epilogue where he recaps the entire book. An art exhibit where each painting has the name of a chapter in the book, and where describes what happened in that chapter, and then explains to the reader what everything in that chapter symbolized.

Is there even a word for that level of hackery?

>an art exhibit where he describes what happened in each chapter, then explains to the reader what everything in that chapter symbolized
Hahahahaha.

Reminder that Moore was lost his 1st wife to a lesbian lmao

>Is there even a word for that level of hackery
three words: comic book mentality

That does sound fucking awful. Pure masturbation.

>Watchmen is outdated now

disregard.

why would you expect a comic book guy to write a decent novel?

Voice of the Fire is great.

I think Neil Gaiman's books are good

>It was designed to be outdated; it was designed to be the final word on superheroism, a genre-killing piece that salted the ground after it meaning nobody could write idiotic might-means-right power fantasies again. It was also intended to spell the end of comics’ naive period, its importation and invention of literary devices intended to lay to rest a tradition of writing stuck halfway between childrens’ books and the flat devices of genre.

What? How was it design to "Kill" comics? what fuckery is this? bad review. I'm on the second book and I'm enjoying it. Moore likes describing things too much and the first part, the characters always arrive at some epiphany that eluminates their struggles and the town, almost to a fault, but it's still good writing. A good edit would have been nice to trim all the needless descriptions, but that's about it. Worth a read.

>eluminates

>Buried by its first publisher perhaps because of the opening chapter written with a vocabulary of 500 words which, the author said, was to “keep out the scum”.

Tell me again how he isn't /ourguy/?

I don't think it's hackery or masturbation, he's probably just tired of people grossly misinterpreting his work (obviously not realizing that the average capeshit reader is a special kind of retarded).

>artist can't handle ambiguity about his work
>uses symbolism and evasive literary techniques

>makes a character he thinks is completely unlikable
>becomes a cult hero
surpirse, people have different values

honestly, the guy should just be glad someone hasn't made him cut his dumb ass hair and get a real job

because he did, see

>he's probably just tired of people grossly misinterpreting his work

shouldn't even be a concern provided that the message he relays is actually a clear purposeful message and not some half-brained attempt at being profound

It's a dud. Voice of the fire is a fine novel. I enjoy From hell a ton and would endorse that.

Alan Moore no longer knows the score :(

Deep down in Moore is a working class lad who thinks child molesters SHOULD be killed but he had his brain addled by New Left platitudes so he's ashamed of that side of himself. The tension between the views is what made Rorshach interesting.

>New Left
He's an anarchist.

He's a social democrat larping as an anarchist.

>Alan Moore

The criticism being deserved doesn't mean Jerusalem isn't worth a read.

the sheer length of it, on the other hand... it'd have to be more than just "worth a read"

>suggestedformaturereaders.wordpress.com/2017/02/18/a-work-as-grand-and-various-as-that/

I read Jerusalem in its entirety over the winter, which came to over 1200 very densely written pages, but I found that review tl;dr.

If you can get through that review, you can get through the novel.

The writing is beautiful though sometimes repetitive. I loved most of the characters; the clunkiest bits were the finnigan's wake chapter of stream-of-consciousness and the baby being piggy-backed by her granddad through eternity. Worth a read, though. However I was also a huge Bauhaus fan in my teens so that helped too.

However, and I don't know if this had anything to do with the book or not, but I had the most incredible,vivid dreams when I was reading it.