Annotations for Jerusalem by Alan Moore
Book 3 – Vernall’s Inquest – Cornered
James Cockie is probably based on the similarly-named John Dickie. The Introduction on his blog reads:
For 30 years I followed the teaching trade. For the same 30 years I was also a Labour Councillor on Northampton Borough Council. For ten of those years I was leader of Council. On leaving council (all 30 years representing castle ward) I went to Warwick Business School and completed a masters in Public Administration (MPA) which included a stint at the Kennedy School of Governance (Harvard) and Georgetown Univ. I was also for a number of years a partner in a small export orientated business. Now I write weekly for the Northampton Chron & Echo and do a little supply teaching when the mood takes me. Have been married almost 40 years to Marie- who left school at 15 and now has a PhD. and was Chair of Northants Police for over a decade and has worked nationally in a number of policing roles. Marie was awarded a well deserved OBE in the 2008 New Years Honours.
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Annotations for Jerusalem by Alan Moore 
In the edition of the book that I have, this chapter is called Cornered.
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Ack – fixed – thanks
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Page refs from the Knockabout paperback .
P. 1111 “take her, the one with stripy hair” This is Marla. He judges her in a poor light.
P. 1112 “I blame bad Government.” And this fom someone who was part of the local council and identifies himself as such.
P. 1114 The actual quote he is thinking of is “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” It is from Hamlet by William Shakespeare. In Shakespeare, bad dreams are a sign that a character is troubled in some way.
Frequently uses derogatory name-calling when referring to the people of the Boroughs. “Numpties”, “muppets”, “half-baked pissheads”, etc.
P1115 “in the end you have to balance practicality against nostalgia ” he thinks fondly of the past and the way that the Boroughs used to be and dislikes what it has been turned into. He gives himself the “benefit of the doubt” by trying to justify the planning decisions made by the council when he was part of it. Not just a part of it, because he was the council leader at some point.
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Page 1101 is the same conversation as page 761, but obviously from Jim Cockie’s point of view (Cockie being the narrator of the chapter). Also confirms the drunk man from that conversation was Ben Pruitt (if the “ah ha ha” hadn’t given it away).
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“Ben Perrit”. Phone changed the name on me.
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So what did John Dickie do that made the author satirize him in this way, if indeed Jim is a standin for John? As I understood it, the whole book is leading up to the artshow which is supposed to trigger some kind of judgement day. And then after the artshow, there IS a judgement, but only judging Cockie. So does that mean the whole of judgement day amounts to blaming everything on this one man? Am I reading it wrong?
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Personally, I think that you are reading it wrong. Jerusalem states over and over again that everything is interconnected, and everything happens because of God’s Plan. Even the venal actions of a Northampton city council member. To blame anyone is to entirely miss the point. The Inquest isn’t so much a “judgement” as an “assessment”.
Moore seems to feel that Cockie/Dickie is corrupt, hypocritical, and pathetic. But in the context of Jerusalem’s metaphysics, that’s his *function*, not something that he can be *blamed* for.
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