Heaven, hell and Northampton

A century ago, Sir Hubert Parry set Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ to music. The lyric had been written 100 years earlier and was part of Blake’s desperate lament for the fallenness of England. What might have been the golden streets of a holy city was instead a place of mourning, the site of dark satanic mills. He never himself gave it the title ‘Jerusalem’. Parry took up the lines and turned them into an anthem of fierce hope, sung ever since by the Women’s Institute and many other worthy bodies. The insistence is always that Jerusalem is here and now, if only we had spirits large enough first to imagine and then to build it.

And so, for Alan Moore, Jerusalem is Northampton, where he was born and raised. More specifically, it is the area of Northampton called the Boroughs: a place these days of drug addiction, theft, prostitution and whatever other delights our modern urban world has to offer. But Moore’s totemic city is not restricted to the present. It moves back and forth through time and in and out of the conventional dimensions. In fact, those lines of Blake (a continuing presence throughout this novel) might be even more appropriate as an epigraph: ‘How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?’ How indeed.

So Northampton is the microcosm, not merely for our material world, but for supernatural dimensions too. The Upstairs and the Downstairs, as they are called here. A monk arrives from Jerusalem in the time of Charlemagne, a decade after the death of Offa. He has brought a cross from Jerusalem to Northampton, thought to be the centre of England, and by leaving it there, he effectively makes it the spiritual centre of England.