“Each thickened scene is a new stain on our fingertips and it leaves its marks backwards and forwards in the text.”

And I thought I admired his graphic novels . . .

Yes, Jerusalem is huge (over 1200 dense pages), and yes it is enormously ambitious in a modernist sense. Yes, it harkens richly to the densest passages of Joyce or Blake, and yes it takes enormous liberties with a novel’s form or structure. Yes, it spends seemingly incredible time with the minutiae of daily living as it does with its loftier cosmic themes, but this is not an act of a writer out of control, as many reviewers suggest: no, this is a writer expansive in his reach and recognizing that the schemes of the universe’s engineers are every bit as significant as a troublesome bout of urination in an abandoned public toilet. Early on in the novel, what seems to be an angel speaks to one of the characters: “This will be very hard for you.” Advice for readers.

Still, give this novel its necessary reading space and its breadth and re-figuring of nothing less than the nature of existence reveal themselves: the sense of humor of angels, the ultimate power of a Destructor, the nature of time and its end, the sensibility in madness, the holy brevity of the flesh, the history of an author’s home town, the curving Escher-like significance of narrative, whether autobiography or cosmogony.

Each thickened scene is a new stain on our fingertips and it leaves its marks backwards and forwards in the text. You will learn the deep-storied streets of Northampton in routes unwalked by most of its own inhabitants. And along the way, we find a kind of wonder that visits too few stories, one that requires less the music-swelling climaxes of character awe and more like the velocity of a falling cough drop or the advice of a 19th century midwife.

Yes, this is a novel largely impossible to summarize. As I write this, the ambitious annotators out there seem to have abandoned their attempts far short of completion. Outside of a fairly handy family tree posted, there are no real resources to help you along the way. Looking for a trusty and comfortable quest story? Abandon that hope. Want to know what’s it like to wear a necklace of dead rabbit pelts? As it happens, you may be in luck.

So yes, this is a monumental achievement of a (post-)modernist novel in the contemporary moment, and yes, I will be reading it again to see what I missed wading in the first time, and yes, I will read more of Moore so long as he writes it, it seems. And yes, and yes.