* Alan Moore has reportedly completed writing the initial draft of his forthcoming prose novel Jerusalem. Moore's daughter Leah made the announcement on Alan Moore's Facebook page: "[Alan Moore] has finished the first draft of his second novel, Jerusalem. Now there's just the small matter of copy editing a more-than-a-million word document, and it's all done."
* Jerusalem is Moore's followup to his first prose novel, Voice of the Fire, available from Top Shelf Productions, and which was written about by Marshall O'Keeffe for Comic Book Galaxy a decade ago. Marshall's article is challenging, but then so is Voice of the Fire, the first chapter of which is written in a proto-human form of English Moore invented to convey the thoughts of a character who was on the verge of achieving consciousness. I can tell you that my first reading of Voice of the Fire was not entirely successful, as I came to it not quite ready for the challenge Moore was throwing down to his readers. I've always appreciated Marshall O'Keeffe's look at the novel for the way in which it allowed me entry into Voice of the Fire, which has become my second-favourite novel of all time, after Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.
* I love both novels for similar reasons. They each take the reader on a journey that is not always pleasant, but is ultimately rewarding and is vastly entertaining. They each feature a use of the English language that is a dimension above most other prose fiction, demonstrating a level of planning and complexity that is simply not within the grasp of most writers, or many readers. Both Lolita and Voice of the Fire reward multiple readings, with not only the joy of rediscovering already-known delights, but by revealing new information encoded in such a way that you must read them more than once in order to really gain a deeper understanding of what is happening, while at the same time not alienating the first-time reader too much. Both are works to be respected, admired, and passionately devoured by the hungry mind.
* In my 2004 interview with Moore, he discussed Voice of the Fire in relation to his graphic novel From Hell (with artist Eddie Campbell) and with his decision to become a magician: "One of the things that binds both From Hell and Voice Of The Fire is that...I mean, I started both of them probably around the same time, although there was maybe a couple of years between the start of From Hell and the start of Voice Of The Fire, but one thing that they have in common is that, halfway through both books, I actually decided to become a magician and to begin a serious and practical study of the occult. And this was partly connected with certain parts of From Hell, where we were getting into some of William Gull's beliefs about the nature of gods and, I mean, originally I was just writing these balloons as dialogue just to fill a panel, you know, to fill a page, but I wrote something about the only place that gods, inarguably, exist is in the human mind where they are real in all their grandeur and monstrosity. Which sounded like a nice ringing little line that filled a word balloon and then I sort of stopped and thought about it and actually realized that by complete mistake, by complete accident, I'd written something true, that I couldn't actually think my way around and that was the beginning of a train of thought which, as I say, lead me to a very serious immersion in, what I suppose would largely be referred to as, magic."
* In 2013, Moore spoke to The Believer about Jerusalem, saying it was specifically conceived as a prose novel: "The decision to take on Jerusalem was very much a movement away from comics, to explore the possibilities of what the novel could do. I really enjoyed writing my first novel, Voice of the Fire. It is still one of my favorite works, but it was a first novel, and having learned a little of what writing a novel entails while doing that, I was trying to see if there were any other ideas that I could put into application. So yeah, it was never considered as anything other than a massive book."
* The idea that a mind as creative as Alan Moore's plans a book specifically designed to better what he accomplished with Voice of the Fire is a delightful one to contemplate. I've been a reader of Moore's work since very early in his Swamp Thing run, and can count the works of his that I haven't particularly enjoyed on the fingers of one hand, with a finger left over for his backward, mouth-breathing detractors, many of whom have demonstrated a contempt for creator rights and an unhealthy obsession with Moore's every utterance. Moore's recent comics work, from his growing library of work with Top Shelf (including the still-wondrous League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) to his work with Avatar, show his creativity and intellect are more powerful than ever. There's every chance that Jerusalem will be a landmark, paradigm-shifting novel, the work of a lifetime. More than a million words? I can't wait to read every one.
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