Archangel Michael wins at trilliards

Sam Kitchener admires a cosmic novel centred on a toddler who chokes to death on a cough sweet

Alan Moore, creator of Watchmen and V for Vendetta, is our greatest living writer of comics; not “graphic novels”, a term he dismisses as “something thought up in the Eighties by marketing people”. Given his aversion to the easy sell, it’s no surprise that Moore’s second novel is a 1,174page countercultural history of his hometown, Northampton.

In its attentiveness to the topography of urban life, as well as its ribaldry and knowing literary references, there is an obvious debt to James Joyce’s Ulysses. But whereas Joyce boasted that Ulysses would keep “the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant”, Moore is desperate to be understood. This may be a surprise to those who have found Moore’s recent work to be hermetic ( Promethea, for example, was a comic-book exegesis of his Kabbalistic theology).

At the heart of Jerusalem is the Boroughs, a depressed district of Northampton, which, here, lies on the boundary between the mortal world and the afterlife or “Mansoul”.

The William Blake to whom visions of this New Jerusalem are vouchsafed is toddler Mick Warren, a Boroughs native. Mick dies when choking on a cough sweet, and is guided through Mansoul by the demon king Asmodeus, before being saved from death after a fantastic piece of trilliards-play by the Archangel Michael: “trilliards” being an eternal game of billiards angels play for the fates of mortal souls.

Jerusalem’s first third gives us Mick’s family history, interspersed with the perspectives of other residents of and visitors to the Boroughs, past and present: a young prostitute; a medieval monk; Charlie Chaplin. The second section follows Mick’s journey through Mansoul, while the third builds up to an exhibition by Mick’s artist sister, Alma, inspired by his infant visions, via numerous digressions, including a chapter where Robert Goodman (a real