World Literature Today

PHOTO : JOE BROWN 28 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 Q&A WORLDLIT.ORG 29 A lan Moore is the most celebrated comics writer living but doesn’t write comics anymore . For the past decade, he’s been working instead on his second novel, Jerusalem, a sprawling epic covering a span of time stretching to the heat death of the universe but contained geographically within half a square mile in Moore’s hometown of Northampton, UK, in an area known as the Boroughs. Using the rapidly eroding map of his own working-class neighborhood as a canvas, Moore spins a tale of life and afterlife, using narrative tools that include stream of consciousness, verse, playwriting, and Joycean glossolalia to boot. It is both the culmination of his life’s work as a writer and a radical departure for an artist known for them. So it was with great excitement that I sat down to talk with Moore about this crowning achievement of his career. Rob Vollmar: Jerusalem builds on themes and techniques that began in your work as early as From Hell but figured heavily in your first novel, Voice of the Fire, and, more recently, in your homage to your friend and mentor Steve Moore, Unearthing . Could you talk about psychogeography and how it came to play such an important role in your work? Alan Moore: Psychogeography would be the understanding that in our experience of any place, it is the associations, the dreams, the imaginings, the history—it is all the information that is relevant to that place which is what we experience when we talk about a place. That is what we’re talking about. We’re not actually talking about the hard bricks and mortar. Yes, that is all that we can measure in the material world, but that is not the essence of what we feel when we talk about a particular place that means something to us. It is always that psychological effect the place has on us that is going to be paramount , and that is psychogeography—a way of considering the landscape around us as more than its physical components, acknowledging that there is much more to all of this than the material world. The bigger part of our experience is spent in this vague, drifting, entirely immaterial world of associations. I suppose that the first time I ever heard that term, it would have been in the context of my first discovering the extraordinary Northampton Calling A Conversation with Alan Moore by Rob Vollmar 30 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 work of Iain Sinclair. During the early stages of From Hell, I had been sent a copy of Lud Heat, which was one of Iain’s early super-dense poems that are on the verge of turning into prose. He was dealing with his time spent maintaining the lawns and gardens of the churches in East London when he was working for the council. A lot of these were Nicholas Hawksmoor’s churches. Iain started to notice some alignments between these churches, which were suggestive. He put all this into Lud Heat. I was fascinated because this seemed to me to be a new way of engaging with place. Place has always been immensely important in all my work, even from the earliest days of my career. Even if a thing was a fairly average superhero narrative like Captain Britain or something like that that was set in this country, then I wanted it set in a real London that contemporary people would recognize. I was also very keen to have things like V for Vendetta set in a visibly real and accurate London. It wasn’t really until I discovered Iain’s work that I saw the kind of focus Iain was capable of that I had been missing, and I quickly understood that this wasn’t something Iain had invented. There were all sorts of people who had made “walking with an agenda,” as Iain calls it, into a kind of art form. There was Arthur Machen with his illuminating strolls around London. There were the situationists, the surrealists with their walks that would be like planned experiences. There were the flâneurs. There...