Via The Guardian comes the news that comic book writer Alan Moore has written a 1,000,000-word novel, called “Jerusalem.”
For some comparison here, Tolstoy’s War and Peace comes in at a little more than 500,000 words. The King James Bible is estimated around 800,000.
About the book itself, The Guardian has this description:
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.
Other details: there’s a chapter written in “a completely invented sub-Joycean text,” a section featuring Moore’s brother’s “adventures in the fourth dimension,” a chapter “in the form of a Samuel Becket play,” and “a combination of the ghost story and the drug narrative.”
I honestly don’t know what to make of this whole thing. There’s a powerful, terrible attraction in difficult tomes, as anyone who’s ever tried Ulysses or Infinite Jest can attest. I’ve felt the pull of doorstop novels many times before, and often the experience of reading them is worthwhile. But this—a million-word novel—just seems like madness to me.
Then again, if you’re Alan Moore, I guess you do what you want.
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