While Alan Moore has long been a creative visionary in the world of comic books, some of what he says tends to be a little crazy. While it can get annoying, some of that crazy is also what is driving him to bring out a one million word novel called ‘Jerusalem’ and that is is the kind of crazy I can fully get behind! We don’t have the exact word count but it is over one million words at this time and the announcement was made by his daughter, Leah Moore which you can read below.

 

She also added that “now there’s just the small matter of copy editing” a book of that length, “and it’s all done.” I’m sure that won’t too hard to find someone qualified that wants to edit Moore’s work, I think we can all agree that if anything it is more of a matter of how long will that take them to edit. Of course any editor working on this is going to have a rough ride as Moore has previously stated that “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.’”

So what will they possibly be able to do? If most of it can’t hit the cutting room floor, it’ll be a nice challenge laid out before them.

A million words though? That is a daunting task to think about reading let alone editing. Curious about how the word count stacks up to other famous pieces of the written word?

  • 970,000 words – Samuel Richardson’s ‘Clarissa’
  • 770,000 words – the Bible
  • 650,000 words – ‘War and Peace’

There are a few others out there that are longer, but most of them you most likely have never heard of or were released in multiple volumes. Would we see a multi-volume release of ‘Jerusalem’? Not likely as Moore says that “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.”

I am guessing we’ll most likely see a special edition released and after that most sales would end up as a digital copy. I can’t see a mass publication of a one million word novel these days.

What is the novel about though? Well, with a million words quite a bit will be covered and it will include aspects such as an adventure in the fourth dimension of his brother, a savage and hallucinating Enid Blyton, a chapter that is going to be nearly or completely unreadable that involves Lucia Joyce, another chapter that is done in the style of a Samuel Beckett play, a famous pastor narrating a noir crime, “a combination of a ghost story and a drug narrative,” the last chapter is being done ” somewhat in the style of Dos Passos,” and who knows what else.

Sounds like a something that will be very trippy, very Moore, and possibly not something people will even like. According to the author, “I don’t know if anyone else will like it at all.”

Is Moore’s most epic work to date which almost sounds like a collection of short stories that will be loosely tied together sound like something that you’d want to read? Share your thoughts below!

Source: The Guardian