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Post by rberman on Feb 6, 2020 14:45:00 GMT -5
 Alan Moore wrote a novel! 1200 pages, probably comparable to his Watchmen script in length. I will post observations from each section of the book, so spoilers ahoy!Prelude- Siblings Alma and Michael Warren are two sides of the same coin. A former pudgy child, as a fifty-something woman Alma is tall, lanky, with a cigarette contralto and long, straight hair framing her face. She is a hashish-using artist who bases her work on her dreams, and her art affects reality. Basically, Alan Moore. Al Mo. Alma. Her interactions with annoying fans mirror those of Moore. Her iris has an inner ring of gold, like the corona of an eclipse. Michael is a day laborer and family man. He is handsome, even effete, a womanish man to match Alma’s mannish woman. He died temporarily as a child. Late in life, a blow to the head restores the memory of his experience of death. He and Alma call each other “Warry” (Warren, but also wary and warlike), emphasizing their unity. Alma and Michael’s paternal grandmother was surnamed Vernall originally. “Of the Spring.” Suggests equinox, Faerie. Madness is described as becoming “cornery,” i.e., turning the corner into Faerie. Likewise “angles,” which is also a pun on “angels,” connecting the seen and unseen worlds. Alma and Michael have a cornery heritage and prefer to sit in the corners of rooms. What we call madness is just seeing the bigger picture for what it is. Synchronicity: Coincidence is just a pattern beyond our limited frame of reference. We are not privy to the higher plane that makes sense of it. Northampton, Moore’s hometown, is a major character, like Dublin in Joyce’s Ulysses. Much attention to transitions in the uses of various urban eras over the centuries. All the streets and buildings are lovingly described. The focus is an area called The Burroughs, which recalls the home of a rabbit (a burrow, a Warren), connecting Watership Down to Edgar Rice Burroughs. Gaiman’s Neverwhere also. One Faerie character is named The Third Burrough. A personification of an era of the city? Doors and stairs now lead to nowhere that still exists in our world. A teen reports having been trapped in a long-gone pub. Moore suggests the ghosts which haunted the shops of his youth have been rendered homeless by urban renewal projects. Moore is uniformly appalled by urban change just as Tolkien was by rural change. Streets lined with 1940s featureless row houses = good. High rise 1960s versions of the same = bad. His attitude is essentially nostalgic. The good hearted urban folk of yesteryear are compared to centaurs, Pegasus, Sphinx. Creatures lost in myth. The book title “Jerusalem” recalls William Blake and his poem about transitions in English life. The cover art depicts the Burroughs as a person. The sole encomium on the dust jacket comes from a schoolchild who declares Moore “the best author in human history.” Moore is mocking the use of celebrity praise as a selling point, though he himself has written encomia. Genre namedropping: the comic book store which sold 1960s American imports like My Greatest Adventure, Journey into Mystery, and Forbidden Worlds, as well as the book Village of the Damned, the hive-mind story which Grant Morrison incorporated into New X-Men as the Stepford Cuckoos. Alma has an activist friend Roman Thompson she calls Thompson the Leveller, referring to a populist movement of the 17th Century. The good guys have names out of the past. |
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Post by EdoBosnar on Feb 6, 2020 15:49:25 GMT -5
Alan Moore wrote a novel! (...) It's actually his second novel; the first, Voice of the Fire (which also focuses on Northampton) was published in 1996. That's one of the many books that's been sitting on my shelf for years now, waiting to be read... |
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Post by berkley on Feb 6, 2020 16:30:00 GMT -5
Alan Moore wrote a novel! (...) It's actually his second novel; the first, Voice of the Fire (which also focuses on Northampton) was published in 1996. That's one of the many books that's been sitting on my shelf for years now, waiting to be read... Voice of the Fire is really good - and another piece of evidence, if any were needed, that Moore operates at several levels above just about any other comics writer you can name, because I can't see anyone else producing something as good.
I'll have to avoid rberman's review of Jerusalem for now since I haven't read the book yet myself.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Feb 6, 2020 17:00:55 GMT -5
It's actually his second novel; the first, Voice of the Fire (which also focuses on Northampton) was published in 1996. That's one of the many books that's been sitting on my shelf for years now, waiting to be read... Voice of the Fire is really good - and another piece of evidence, if any were needed, that Moore operates at several levels above just about any other comics writer you can name, because I can't see anyone else producing something as good.
I'll have to avoid rberman's review of Jerusalem for now since I haven't read the book yet myself.
I haven't read Voice of the Fire yet...but Neil Gaiman would like to have a word with you. |
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Post by kirby101 on Feb 6, 2020 18:00:52 GMT -5
Voice of the Fire is really good - and another piece of evidence, if any were needed, that Moore operates at several levels above just about any other comics writer you can name, because I can't see anyone else producing something as good.
I'll have to avoid rberman's review of Jerusalem for now since I haven't read the book yet myself.
I haven't read Voice of the Fire yet...but Neil Gaiman would like to have a word with you. He said "just about any other comic writer".  |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Feb 6, 2020 18:13:38 GMT -5
I haven't read Voice of the Fire yet...but Neil Gaiman would like to have a word with you. He said "just about any other comic writer". Fair. I didn’t read closely enough. |
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Post by rberman on Feb 8, 2020 14:43:19 GMT -5
Book One: The Burroughs (with a picture of brick row houses in Northampton) Part One: A Host of Angles (title confirms the angel/angle pun implied in the Prelude) Ernest John Vernall is a painter working on restoration of the art on ceiling of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. One of the angel paintings comes to life and tells him many mysteries that turn his red hair white and drive him mad, and his family commits him to Bedlam Sanitarium. That's the story! The angel's discourse deals with higher dimensions. Due to the folding of space and time, all lightning bolts are the same bolt. Locales apparently distant in three dimensions may be quite close in higher space. New theme: The torus. A human being is a torus, with the inside of the alimentary canal topologically outside of the body. (Certain medicines depend on this fact.) The angel writes "torus" on Ernest Vernall's painting platform. Names dropped: William Blake and Victorian "fairy painter" Richard Dadd are among those whose encounters with the "corner world" gave them insights perceived as madness by their peers. 
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Post by rberman on Feb 8, 2020 22:48:33 GMT -5
Part Two: ASBOs of Desire Meet Marla Roberta Stiles. She's a bisexual, drug-addicted prostitute in Northampton. Did I mention this was an Alan Moore story? Her Jamaican mother named her after Bob Marley. Most of this chapter involves her thinking about the life of a prostitute, unsuccessfully looking for a John on the streets, and unsuccessfully trying to score some drugs. Her reading interests include Princess Diana (murdered by the royal family!) and Jack the Ripper (killer of prostitutes). Marla's fellow prostitute (and sometime lover) Samantha recently disappeared as part of a rash of hooker rape/murders. "Five rapes in ten days." Grant Morrison among others has noted the ubiquity of rape in Moore stories. Marla, perhaps inspired by her reading about Jack the Ripper, feels sure that her own time is coming. When a sinister car pulls up, she feels destiny compelling her to enter it... This episode takes place concurrently with the Prelude. Roman Thompson knocks on Marla's door at one point, inviting everyone (in all the tenements, apparently) to come to Alma Warren's art exhibition. Marla fancies herself a would-be artist since as a child she made a collage of Princess Diana photos. Marla fantasizes about her collage being celebrated as a great work of art that wins her fame and fortune. When she returns home after an unsuccessful night on the street, her Princess Di scrapbook and her Jack the Ripper book have been stolen. At another point she also meets a published poet (name unknown) on the street. He turns down her sexual proposition and acts quite odd; likely he too has seen the Corner World. The chapter title "ASBOS OF DESIRE" (rendered in all caps) refers to an ASBO, an "Anti-Social Behavior Order," or what we in America would call a restraining order. Basically it limits the freedom of a citizen somehow. In Marla's case, she is forbidden from bringing any men to her apartment because she has so often been loud in the hall with them, awakening the neighbors at 2am. Tony Blair instituted ASBO policy when he was Prime Minister, and Moore clearly can't stand this infringement upon individual liberty. I don't know about the "of Desire" part. Since Marla is bisexual, I wondered whether it was a pun on some Romantic poem called "Lesbos of Desire," but I couldn't find any such thing. Mystery unsolved. Anyway, the term is now dated, since in 2014, ASBOs were rebranded as CBOs, Criminal Behavior Orders. The overall tone of this chapter is "unreliable narrator." The details of Marla's expletive-laden thoughts about her life betray her to be not as sympathetic a character as she imagines herself. On one sad page, she reflects at length how drugs used to take her to a higher place, but due to habituation she now lives "below the world" and must take drugs just to feel normal for a little while. This is a real thing. Marla feels Britain is becoming a police state due to the near-ubiquity of security cameras which prevent her from working the streets. This mirrors Moore's concerns about Fascist Britain in V for Vendetta.Namedropping: The mad poet seems otherworldly, "like he might be the next Doctor Who." He's also compared to Farmer Giles, protagonist of one of Tolkien's non-Middle-Earth stories. Marla's book about Jack the Ripper was written by someone named Mallard. I couldn't find a real book like that. However, Jack Mallard was the author of a book about the serial killer behind the 1979-1981 Atlanta Child Murders, which figured strongly in Martin Pasko's "In a White Room" Swamp Thing story that I reviewed in this thread. Coincidence? Maybe.
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Post by rberman on Mar 28, 2020 10:10:28 GMT -5
Part Three: Rough SleepersThis one was tricky and deserves a spoiler alert since the conceptual conceit of this chapter is only apparent partway through. A “rough sleeper” in the UK is a vagrant, sleeping out in the open. But as we’ve seen in earlier chapters, in Moore’s story the vagrants are revenants, ghosts whose homes have been destroyed by urban renewal, so they’re forced to roam the streets instead. They refer to their prior time alive as “the life,” which at least in America has Mafia overtones, and as “the Twenty Five Thousand Days” (68 years), which recalls the Thousand and One Nights on which each night was a different story. The revenants interact with each other and with humans whose dreams bring them temporarily into the spirit world. The visiting dreamers can be recognized by their relative state of undress; ever had a dream in which you forgot your pants? The revenants also spend eternity revisiting favorite scenes from their time alive. They see the world as grey, all the colors washed out, and moving objects and persons leave a trail of after-images behind. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell whether the revenants are having a “real time” experience with other revenants or remembering a previous experience they had while alive. Though the narration in this chapter is third person, we’re seeing through the eyes of a revenant named Freddy Allen, so once again the narration is somewhat unreliable and must be pieced together retrospectively since the premises are not explained at the outset. Freddy hangs out with his revenant friend Mary Jane (drug reference!) in a pub. He meets a friar revenant who’s carrying a mysterious burden to “the centre.” He recalls consuming hallucinogenic Puck’s Hat mushrooms with his buddy Johnny. The detailed description of the mushroom’s appearance and flavor takes up a whole page. He remembers his friend Georgie Bumble giving blow jobs to furtive monks in exchange for more of said mushrooms. He revisits the memory of his youthful tryst with married woman Patsy Clarke; her husband Frank is out of town. This time, a 17 year old Negro girl is there too (a dreamer?) pleasuring herself while watching him. He regretfully recalls almost assaulting and raping an upper class teen, but backing out. Now for the punchline. Freddy climbs one of the apparent “stairs to nowhere” (we’re reminded that some people seem like stairs to nowhere too) into a celestial attic where four angelic, white-robed Master Builders are playing a game of billiards that represents Northampton. The balls are people. The four pockets point toward the four corners of Northampton. Each pocket has a graffiti glyph: tower, phallus, skull, and cross. These four images appear on a page together between the table of contents and the title page, showing their central importance to the story, and we’re reminded of Moore’s fascination with the Tarot deck with its four suites of cards. One of the angels is Mighty Mike. He hits the black ball representing Charley George into the cross pocket. An angel named Yuri shoots a “grey ball” (a morally ambiguous person) into the skull pocket (death? Hell?). In the process the brown ball representing the Negro* girl voyeur is also brought very near to the skull pocket. Mighty Mike manages to sink that ball in the Cross pocket (salvation?) instead. The point being that human lives unfold according to patterns governed by forces that we cannot perceive or comprehend, until we are dead. Other characters from his memory: Clara Swan, young wife of Joe, pushing a pram in the 1920s, with her daughter Doreen inside. Phyllis Painter (an artsy name; we’ve been told surnames are important), a child in the 1920s, grows up to be a gang leader it seems. Will we see these people again later in the book? Probably. The overall theme of this chapter is very similar to J. Michael Straczynski's Midnight Nation, with a close affiliation between societal outcasts and spiritual awareness. Plus sex and drugs (the only things Freddy has fond memories of, it seems), but no rock and roll. * In writing this, I realized that I don't know what term is used to refer to black people in the UK as of 2020. Acceptable terminology shifts generationally. Obviously the term isn't "African-American." I've never heard "African-Briton" either. Any UK folks want to help me out here? This chapter was inspired by the notion that the universe can be modeled as a four dimensional object, and our consciousness moves linearly along the "time" dimension from our birth to our death. After that, there's nothing left for our consciousness to do but replay those moments. Moore discusses this in an interview here: You’ve got the Big Bang at one end of the rugby ball and the big crunch or whatever at the other end, and every moment that has ever existed or will ever exist is somewhere contained within that huge solid. Eternally. And the moments that make up our lives, I imagine them as some kind of filaments, where you might say that we’re a couple of metres high and maybe a metre wide, half a metre deep, or whatever, and we’re seventy or eighty years long. So, filaments that perhaps look like millipedes, with lots of arms and legs are frozen, like flies in amber, in time, forever. And its just our consciousness moving through that length that gives the illusion of things happening. Just like if you got a strip of film. The individual cells are not changing, they’re not moving. They are that way forever. But when the projector beam, or in this case our consciousness plays across those, Charlie Chaplin does his funny walk, rescues the girl and foils the baddie. There is the appearance of story and narrative and events, which are not really there. There’s just a series of moments.
If this is true then when our consciousness gets to the end of our lives I would think it would have nowhere to go except back to the beginning of them. Which would speak to an eternal recurrence where every time, it would feel like the first time. Although of course in the light of this notion it doesn’t make sense to even talk about a first time. But here every moment is the same moment, the same thoughts, all of the same events over and over again. All of the best moments of your life. Forever. And that is Heaven.
And all of your worst moments, over and over again, forever, that is hell, that is purgatory...
It's one of the reasons I stopped drinking was that I thought all of those moments when you – even thirty years later – you just go, ‘Oh, you twat!’ It's not like its just some of those moments, or most of those moments, but all of those moments – throughout which you were pissed!
I was greatly involved and more than halfway through Jerusalem when I came across this great quote by Einstein from a few months before he died. He was consoling the widow of a fellow Physicist and he said and I’m paraphrasing here but he said to this woman, ‘Look, to Physicists like me and your husband death isn’t really a big deal because we understand the persistent illusion of transience.’ That is five words. If I’d heard them before I started writing Jerusalem I would probably have saved myself some 614,000 other ones!
And yet that is the persistent illusion that people have: that people, places and things are going away, never to be seen again. Whereas in a solid time they are there forever. And that makes every moment eternal. And it makes us all eternal. And it makes this place, Jerusalem, the eternal city. Everywhere. Even, perhaps especially the lowest places, the slums. Because they probably need Jerusalem to be ‘builded between those dark, satanic mills.’ That’s where you need Jerusalem most...
And I would also point out that Nietzsche who was of course a far more sloppy thinker than I am (LAUGHS) – he came out with a slightly more flawed version of the same thing – but he was basing it upon the fact that he believed the universe to be infinite, so in an infinite universe you will get infinite recurrences just of this world, just as you would in mathematics. But actually, this is not an infinite universe. Its very big but it’s not infinite. So what he was saying about his very similar idea of recurrence was that it was the most scientific idea of a kind of afterlife and that’s why he liked it. And yet its not really an afterlife. It’s a during-life. Well, he was saying that if you followed that belief, you would have a better life, whether or not it turned out to be true. To say every moment is eternal. Don’t do anything you can’t live with forever. Be kind. Try to make every moment as good as possible, if this is where you’re going to be forever.
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Post by rberman on Mar 31, 2020 23:41:49 GMT -5
A little more research into that last chapter... the "Puck's Hat" mushroom which Moore so lovingly describes is Psilocybe semilanceata, commonly called Liberty Cap. Its active chemical, psilocybin, is a powerful hallucinogen.  Mushrooms have been associated with dream states and visions of Faerie for centuries, with Alice in Wonderland as a prominent example. Jerusalem previously mentioned Faerie painter Richard Dadd. One of Dadd's works inspired by Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" shows Puck holding court for tiny faeries while sitting on a mushroom. "Pookie" is Irish slang for a mushroom.  |
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Post by rberman on Apr 1, 2020 22:25:41 GMT -5
Part Four: X Marks the Spot
An X has four corners (spirit realms) and a center, just like the four-pocketed pool table in the story of Freddy Allen. Freddy met a revenant who was a friar, carrying a heavy bag and looking for the center of Northampton. This chapter is about that monk, who lives in the ninth century. Birth name Albgerge, Christian name Peter, nickname “Le Canal” (The Channel) because he sweats so profusely.
He’s apparently been carrying this burden all the way from Jerusalem to the center of ancient Hamtun (modern Northampton), which is the center of the kingdom of Mercia, which is the center of England, so in Alan Moore’s worldview, his own hometown is the center of the nation, and perhaps the universe. Certainly of his own universe. The actual center of England is on a farm in Leicestershire, 50 miles north of Northampton.
It’s a pretty slow chapter. Peter spends many pages walking around Hamtun, seeing the sights, visiting all four corners of the town. I’m sure that Moore can see everything he’s describing in his mind’s eye, but it all runs together for readers, page after page without much in the way of dramatic tension. Two sights get called out for attention: a pagan temple decorated with a dragon, and a well whose rusty water Peter initially mistakes for blood.
A little more happens near the end. Peter rescues a girl being menaced by a burly dude, and then he wonders whom that girl will end up being the ancestor of. Something tells me we’ll find out eventually. Also, we get to see Peter’s side of his exchange with the revenant Freddy Allen, who directs him to the center of town. Peter has some déjà vu which suggests that he too is a revenant remembering these life events rather than experiencing them directly.
Finally, an angel appears to Peter, guiding him to St. Gregory’s church, where he dies in the yard and surrenders his burden to two monks. It’s some sort of flat talisman about a foot square. As Peter dies, there’s much talk about the angles and corners of both the talisman and the church building, connecting this event firmly to the world of Faerie. Peter expresses the now-familiar conviction that his whole journey has been guided by a pattern beyond his comprehension.
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Post by rberman on Apr 5, 2020 6:50:17 GMT -5
Part Five: Modern TimesOne of the keys to concentration is the ability to engage with the material before you, to feel like you are “winning” the contest of extracting a meaning that connects to other pieces of information already filed in your brain. You can’t listen very long to people speaking a foreign language; you will tune them out. The art of teaching involves presenting information in the right order, and at the right interval, so that students always feel like they are “winning” and are willing to keep “playing.” When I started this chapter about a twenty-year old Gilded Age actor in 1909 whose real name is Charles but who is introduced to the reader as “Sir Francis Drake” and “Oatsie.” I was several pages in, and it felt like a slog; I was not “winning.” But as I read about him and his brother Sydney and their tramp act and circled back to the chapter title, I realized I was reading about Charlie Chaplin and his brother. A little Googling confirmed my suspicion. Suddenly the chapter was much more interesting, realizing that the details Oatsie’s memories were (1) nonfiction, and (2) connected to celebrity. This was enough reason to restart the chapter and feel like I was “winning.” Here's a picture of Charlie Chaplin playing on the hockey team of his impresario Fred Karno, who is mentioned in this chapter several times. Stan Laurel stands behind.  Charles (never called Chaplin in this chapter; you have to figure that out) has a several-page encounter with May Vernall Warren, sister of Johnny Vernall, wife of Tom Warren, mother of toddler May Warren, who is the most beautiful child that Charles has ever seen. Charles is discomfited when May V. Warren recognizes him. Turns out they are the same age and both grew up in Lambeth but are both now in Northampton. Like all the other characters in this book, Charles is amazed by the hidden patterns that guide our lives into such coincidences. He thinks about how British class structures restrict the prospects of citizens to better themselves, trapping them like ferrets in a burrow (and a Burrough) for life, an invisible societal cage from which he aspires to spring. As with the previous chapters, apparently random details take up lots of space. Charles remembers his drunk father, his pious thespian mother in the asylum, meeting composer Claude Debussy and boxer Ernie Smith. I wish I could consign these details to irrelevance, but then again Moore is spinning a pattern I can’t yet understand. For instance, I retrospectively realize the need to document more detail about the Warren family, though I doubt this will be intelligible to any of you who aren’t reading the book. I’m putting this here for my reference. Part One “A Host of Angles” took place in 1865 with Ernest John Vernall, his mom, wife Anne, and children Thursa and Johnny living in Lambeth. Johnny was later called “Snowy” and had a son also named Johnny and a daughter May Vernall, whom Charlie Chaplin met at age twenty when she was walking in Northampton with her infant daughter May Warren. Snowy also had an accordion-playing daughter Audrey. May Vernall Warren is the paternal grandmother of Alma and Michael Warren from the Prologue, so baby May Warren must be the sister of Alma and Michael’s father Tommy Warren. Alma and Michael’s mother is Doreen Swan Warren, whose father Joe Swan died of tuberculosis. Doreen’s mother is Clara Swan. The Prologue reports that May V. Warren grew up to be a “deathmonger” (mortician) and something of an “ogress” with a bad temper, in contrast to the beautiful, hopeful woman that Charlie Chaplin meets. May, her father Snowy, her aunt Audrey, and her great-aunt Thursa all went “cornery” (mad) like their ancestor Ernest Vernall. Baby May Warren is conspicuous by her absence in the Prologue’s reckoning of Alma’s ancestry. Does she have another name, or does she die in childhood, or what? What is this book about?I’m now 175 pages into the book and still unsure what it’s about. The anthological structure leaves us without a clear protagonist. All the anecdotes revolve around Northampton and its changes over time. Even in this chapter, May V. Warren gives a dissertation on a large variety of businesses which have occupied the building currently serving as a theater for Chaplin’s production of the play “Mumming Birds.” Is Northampton then the protagonist, just as a New York City neighborhood, seen over time, was the central character in Will Eisner’s “Dropsy Avenue”? Another obvious point of comparison is James Joyce’s towering “Ulysses,” which follows two men around Dublin on a completely ordinary day, structuring their experiences to mirror Homer’s “Odyssey” while engaging in a variety of literary stylistic homages. Moore does the stylistic homage thing all the time, most notably in Promethea but more generally in everything he writes. But a more specific theme is emerging. We keep returning to the Warren family, whose modern descendants are Almo and Michael Warren. And Almo = Alan Moore. So this book is about Alan Moore’s ancestry, whether biological, spiritual, or both. Do any of the details come from his own family?
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Post by mikelmidnight on Apr 6, 2020 11:40:29 GMT -5
But a more specific theme is emerging. We keep returning to the Warren family, whose modern descendants are Almo and Michael Warren. And Almo = Alan Moore. So this book is about Alan Moore’s ancestry, whether biological, spiritual, or both. Do any of the details come from his own family?
His brother's choking on a sweet and being transported to hospital on a vegetable cart, dying and returning to life, actually happened to Moore's brother.
There are other odd bits I recall as relating to his life, but that's the standout. I'm sure he's fished through his biography heavily in this (in later chapters, his wife appears as a character, although she does not marry Almo Warren).
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Post by rberman on Apr 6, 2020 11:44:44 GMT -5
But a more specific theme is emerging. We keep returning to the Warren family, whose modern descendants are Almo and Michael Warren. And Almo = Alan Moore. So this book is about Alan Moore’s ancestry, whether biological, spiritual, or both. Do any of the details come from his own family?
His brother's choking on a sweet and being transported to hospital on a vegetable cart, dying and returning to life, actually happened to Moore's brother.
There are other odd bits I recall as relating to his life, but that's the standout. I'm sure he's fished through his biography heavily in this (in later chapters, his wife appears as a character, although she does not marry Almo Warren).
Makes sense. I see (but have not mentioned for the sake of brevity) many little details about the Warren family which seem to be there less for plot and more as a tribute to various relatives and past experiences. Like the accordion playing great-aunt and the black man with ropes for bicycle tires. |
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Post by rberman on Apr 6, 2020 22:46:02 GMT -5
Part Six: Blind But Now I See
This one was an easier read. It’s about a man named Black Charley, and also Henry. I assume this is the same Black Charley George whose black ball was sunk into the “cross” pocket (symbolizing salvation) in the angelic billiards game witnessed by the revenant Freddy Allen. Charley was born a slave in Tennessee. He was a boy at the end of the American Civil War, and he has a brand on his arm that looks something like a libra scale. He moved his family to Kansas to avoid racial hate crimes, where he knew Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickock. Even in later life, he thinks often of a woman named Elvira he met there as well. He eventually moved to Wales for work. By 1909, he rides around Northampton on a bicycle with ropes for tires, collecting unwanted junk from residences to sell. Scavengers like Charley were known as "rag-and-bone men" and were an essential but unromantic part of pre-modern life, ensuring that every scrap of recyclable material found its way back into the supply chain rather than the waste heap.  The chief part of this story involves Black Charley traveling up the road from Northampton to Olney to visit the church formerly pastored by John Newton, the author of “Amazing Grace,” Charley’s favorite song. Charley is shaken to learn that before John Newton was a pastor and hymnodist, he was a slaver trader. Charley tries to reconcile this evil past with the apparent change of heart implicit in the song lyrics “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.” The title of this chapter is another line from that same song and appears to refer to Charley’s revelation about John Newton’s background. On his way home, Charley passes Charlie Chaplin, in the replay of a brief scene from the previous chapter. He also briefly sees May Vernall Warren and tells her that her beautiful child May is an angel. Now there is a detail likely to come back around! Finally Charley goes home to Scarletwell Street and his family, passing the lamp-lighter Mr. Beery, making his dusk rounds. Charley once saw a bizarre animal roped in the street here. He doesn’t tell us what it was. But in this interview with NPR, Alan Moore said it was a Zebra that he himself saw as a child. As a late middle aged tinker, Charley lives on Scarletwell Street with his young white wife Selina (Selene, the moon?) and his children Mary and Henry. Unusual for a Protestant to name his daughter “Mary.” Scarletwell keeps popping up in this story. It’s where Fred Allen meets his unnamed friend to consume mushrooms. It’s where Joe Swan (Almo’s maternal grandfather) and his family lived as well. This chapter reiterates information about May V. Warren’s father Snowy and grandfather Ernest, who went mad from encountering the angel at the cathedral. We know where the name “Scarlet Well” comes from too, because Peter the medieval friar found a well in Hamtun whose iron-rich sediment turned its water red, so that the well was used to dye fabrics.
What’s It About? This chapter closes with a clear thesis statement as Charley considers various famous people like Buffalo Bill and John Newton: “Just ‘cause a feller was remembered well, that didn’t mean as he’d done something to deserve it.”
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