Comics legend Alan Moore has finished the first draft of his second novel, Jerusalem – and it runs to more than 1m words.
His daughter, Leah Moore, made the announcement on Facebook on Tuesday, adding with a wink that “now there’s just the small matter of copy editing” a book of that length, “and it’s all done”. To put that “more-than-a-million-word document” into context: Samuel Richardson’s doorstopper, Clarissa, runs to around 970,000 words, 200,000 more than the Bible . War and Peace is around 560,000 words long.
Moore, revered for creating comics including Watchmen and V for Vendetta, has been working on Jerusalem since 2008. It focuses on a small area – half a square mile across – of the town where he grew up, Northampton, and explores its history through stories from his family’s past, Moore’s take on historical events, and of course fantasy. “Any editor worth their salt would tell me to cut two-thirds of this book but that’s not going to happen. I doubt that Herman Melville had an editor – if he had, that editor would have told him to get rid of all that boring stuff about whaling: ‘Cut to the chase, Herman’,” he told the New Statesman in 2011.
Moore added at the time: “I have doubted that people will even be able to pick it up. I’m not averse to some kind of ebook, eventually – as long as I get my huge, cripplingly heavy book to put on my shelf and gloat over, I’ll be happy.”
The author has revealed intriguing details about the book in the past, telling the BBC in 2008 that a section will feature his brother’s adventures in the fourth dimension, while the “middle bit” is “a savage, hallucinating Enid Blyton”.
According to other interviews, there is also a “Lucia Joyce chapter, which is completely incomprehensible … all written in a completely invented sub-Joycean text”, a chapter in the form of a Samuel Beckett play, because the author once visited the town to play cricket, “a noir crime narrative based upon the Northampton pastor James Hervey, whom I believe was the father of the entire Gothic movement”, and “a combination of the ghost story and the drug narrative”.
“I am currently on the last official chapter,” he told the Guardian late last year, “which I am doing somewhat in the style of Dos Passos. It should be finished by the end of the year or close to it. I don’t know if anyone else will like it at all.”
V for Vendetta (1982 - 1989)
This dystopian graphic novel continues to be relevant even 30 years after it ended. With its warnings against fascism, white supremacy and the horrors of a police state, V for Vendetta follows one woman and a revolutionary anarchist on a campaign to challenge and change the world.
Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow (1986)
Moore's quintessential Superman story. Though it has not aged as well as some of his work, this comic is still one of the best Man of Steel stories ever written, and one of the most memorable comics in DC's canon.
A Small Killing (1991)
This introspective, stream-of-consciousness comic follows a successful ad man who begins to have a midlife crisis after realising the moral failings of his life and work.
Tom Strong (1999 - 2006)
A love letter to the silver age of comics that nods to Buck Rogers and other classics of pulp fiction. Tom Strong embodies all of the ideals Moore holds for what a superhero should be.
The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (1999-2019)
One of Moore's best known comic series, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is the ultimate in crossover works, drawing on characters from all across the literary world who are on a mission to save it.
There is no word yet on an official release date for the book, and Comics Beat reports that it has not yet got a publisher. “Now, how many years do you think it will take to give the first draft a run through?” wrote Heidi MacDonald. But “no matter how long it takes. Jerusalem will be an event when it finally appears.”
