Alan Moore, Jerusalem, Vol. 2 & 3

I finished Jerusalem yesterday, and having made it all the way through the three volumes (which you can also get as one giant thing), I'd definitely recommend it. There are times where my interest flagged, but it gets better and better toward the end. 

The whole thing is set in the Boroughs, the neighborhood where Moore grew up, which is a blasted out working class corner of Northampton, UK. Every chapter has a different narrator, and these range from some down and out residents of the Boroughs to a group of dead children, to a demon, to a sculpture of St Michael holding a billiard cue. One chapter is a play. One is a long poem. It's a giant thing, but feels still larger, epic in scope. It's very strange. I read a lot of strange things, and this was much stranger than most.

It's really good.

Alan Moore, Jerusalem, Book I

Alan Moore's Jerusalem, Book I: The Boroughs, is, though only a third of this massive, complete novel, a giant thing spanning many centuries, but never leaving the small English neighborhood in which it is set. There are many strange deviations from conventional reality, characters who are seen as mad by their contemporaries but who seem to be seeing what is actually happening around them. Ghosts wander old haunts, only to be occasionally seen by their new occupants.

There is a surfeit of detail, of texture, of characters and families and buildings and streets, all slowly overlapping. The pages are large, with tiny margins and small type. It is somewhat overwhelming, and you'd better not be in any particular hurry to get through it, but the writing is so consistently engaging as it switches from narrative voice to narrative voice that I was pulled along easily. I'll have to order volume II...

Christine Coulson, Metropolitan Stories

Christine Coulson's Metropolitan Stories seems a book designed for me: a novel (my favorite literary form) that is sort-of magical realist (a favorite genre)  set in the Met (one of my favorite of places), inflected with a sort of new materialist thread that reminds me of Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter (a favorite approach to art history). And it is absolutely lovely. It's quick and charming book -- I read it cover to cover between my morning tea and my afternoon coffee on a lazy Sunday.

A French armchair has a surprisingly active series of longings. A group of muses, restrained and rococo, are called upon to serve their intended role. Workmen push carts full of light. And a rather famous work turns up most unexpectedly.

I had a friend years ago who served as a night guard at the Met, and it sort of sounded like the best job in the world. The novel makes me again long for a few shifts, at least.