Michael Moorcock: The Whispering Swarm (2015)

Edition: Gollancz, 2015
Review number:1500

Are there any literary devices which have not been attempted in novels, by 2015? The Whispering Swarm certainly attempts one which I have never seen before. Many novels include autobiographical elements, but here Michael Moorcock mingles straight autobiographical material with historical fantasy. The autobiographical elements match my knowledge of Moorcock's life picked up as a fan of many years' standing; the fantasy elements centre round the mysterious Alsacia, a part of central London which acts as a refuge (this part is accurate, there was such an area which for historical reasons had the rules of sanctuary applied to it), and which can take those who find it to a semi-mythical London from the past.

Does the idea work? Basically, I don't think it does. There is clearly a desire on Moorcock's part to contrast the mundane real world and the glimpse beyond that in to fantasy, but this means that The Whispering Swarm feels like it is made up of distinct parts which could be pasted together sections from two different stories. It even feels as is though the prose style used changes, more matter of fact for the real world, more poetical and descriptive for the fantasy.

For most of Part One (the first third or so of the novel), Moorcock-as-character has either not yet discovered Alsatia, or is trying to ignore what he thinks might be a delusion. So the fantasy plays little part, and this left me as a reader wanting to skip forward to something more interesting. However, even when Alsatia plays a greater part, it too turns out to be fairly dull, and it is hard for the reader to invest in any of the characters, in either milieu.

The title refers to the noise Moorcock and a few others can sense, the combined voices of the inhabitants of this fantasy London. This is in itself an interesting concept, and would relate well to the themes of his best literary novel, Mother London. That is also about the mythic significance of London, and is much more successful, partly because it is a fully synthesised novel. The best urban fantasy evocations of London (such as those written by Neil Gaiman, Ben Aaronovitch, or Kate Griffin, among others) are also better at integrating the fantasy elements with a real world setting, and also possess a sense of humour which seems to have disappeared from Moorcock's recent work.

I have long been a fan of Michael Moorcock, since my early teens, but have found much of what he has written in the last decade unpalatable for one reason or another. Despite an interesting and unusual idea, The Whispering Storm also fails to impress me. My rating - 5/10.

Michael Moorcock: The Twilight Man (1966)

Also available under the title The Shores of Death
Edition: Sphere Books, 1970
Review number: 1466

Like The Blood Red Game (which I bought in the same second hand bookshop as The Twilight Man in May), this is a reworking of an earlier piece of writing, in this case a serial which was written to fill space in New Worlds during the earliest months of Moorcock's editorship of that later famous science fiction magazine.

Clovis Marca is a former leader of Earth's government, leading a humanity which is now doomed to extinction after an alien visitation has left everyone infertile. As the book begins, Marca returns from a year in space, his way of dealing with the catastrophe. The desperate decadence of the society he finds on his return is a clear precursor of my favourite Moorcock series, The Dancers at the End of Time.  The Twilight Man is a staging post between it and the Arthur C. Clarke novel, The City and the Stars, which appears to have influenced Moorcock greatly, though I do not actually know that he read this particular novel (as I discuss in its review). Doomed decadence is one of Moorcock's recurring themes, as well - part of what he wants to say to his readers through his writing.

While much more Moorcockian (so to speak) than The Blood Red Game, The Twilight Man is still not fully individual in its style: clearly still the work of a writer finding his way, even five years after the publication of the first Elric novel, The Stealer of Souls. Perhaps because it is more like the author's later work, The Twilight Man is less interesting to read than The Blood Red Game: it is slightly too much like the fan's guess as to what early Moorcock would be like to engage.

Reasonably enjoyable in itself, I would give The Twilight Man 6/10.

Michael Moorcock: The Blood Red Game (1974)

Edition: Mayflower Science Fiction, 1974
Review number: 1459


The contents of this novel are actually from the very beginning of Moorcock's career, appearing as a pair of stories in a science fiction magazine in 1962, at around the same time as the first Elric novel, which was much more of a signpost to the type of writing he was going to go on to become known for. This packaging of the stories together which appeared in the mid-seventies must have seemed rather out of step with the cool New Wave work he was writing at the time; The Blood Red Game is, by contrast, clearly derivative from pulpy SF writers like E.E. "Doc" Smith and AE Van Vogt, especially the latter. (I should perhaps mention that, according to Fantastic Fiction, the two stories also appeared as - extremely short - separate novels in 1966.)

The first story, originally entitled The Sundered Worlds, has a hero, Renark, who has the psychic ability to sense the universe as a whole. He realises that it is beginning to contract, threatening the total destruction of humanity, a slightly strange premise that is apparently forgetting that it would take billions of years to contract the universe, even if the contraction occurred at almost the speed of light. No explanation is given of why it poses such an urgent problem, or even any indication that the contraction is very fast. The sundered worlds of the title are a small group of planets which travel between dimensions, and Renark thinks that they will hold the key to saving the galaxy. So he, with a small group of friends, travels to the sundered worlds the next time they pass through our universe, even though no human has ever returned from similar trips.

The second story, sharing its title with this book, follows immediately on from the end of The Sundered Worlds, so much so that I suspect some re-writing was done to cover the join for publication as one. The story now sees humanity facing a different external crisis, being forced to participate in a series of incomprehensible psychic games against alien species, for the amusement of more powerful beings.

In themselves, the two stories are fairly mediocre. To the Moorcock fan, they do have interesting ideas which relate to important concepts behind his later work, including an undeveloped form of the multiverse, with clashes between universes playing a part as they do in several later stories. I can see that they would have been of sufficient interest to a magazine editor in 1962 to publish, but I don't think that anyone would have bothered to re-package them as a novel without Moorcock's name associated with them - if, say, they had been the only published stories by someone who went on to become an advertising executive or a banker, instead of a world famous and hugely influential science fiction editor and author. As things turned out, it is still interesting to read them in the context of Moorcock's other work.

My rating - 4/10.

Michael Moorcock: The Vengeance of Rome (2006)

Edition: Jonathan Cape, 2006
Review number: 1313

After twenty-five years, the final volume of the Pyat Quartet has now at last appeared; it has spent almost all that time listed at the front of Moorcock's publications as "in preparation". The quartet as a whole must rank as one of the most ambitious novel series of the period, as well as one of the most slowly written; not content with being a historical narrative of the first half of the twentieth century, Moorcock has immersed himself in the repellent personality of Maxim Pyat and produced a study of how such a person appears to themselves while making it clear how others perceive them at the same time.

The story of The Vengeance of Rome takes Pyat from a fugitive in Morocco - the ending of the previous volume - to friendship with Mussolini in Fascist Italy, and then close links with the Nazi hierarchy in thirties Germany (extremely close in some cases), through imprisonment in the camp at Dachau to eventually meeting the young Moorcock while running a second hand clothes shop near Notting Hill in the sixties.

Like many historical novels, a lot of the fascination in this series lies in the way in which Pyat's story is threaded into the major events of the time. Though the most obvious counterpart to the quartet may seem to be George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series, the tone here is much more serious, and Pyat's character and role in history are both far more ambiguous. At the heart of the whole series, and emphasised particularly in this final novel, is the conflict between Pyat's anti-Semitism and his appearance: being constantly taken for a Jew is not a good thing in thirties Italy and Germany.

The conceit of the series is that the novels are in fact memoirs edited together by Moorcock from Pyat's papers and memories of conversations the two of them had. There is an introductory page, which suggests that the main task of the (fictional) editorial hand has had to try to harmonise conflicting accounts. One of the usual characteristics of Moorcock's fantasy genre writing is that he positively revels in incompatible versions of stories; this is particularly clear in the recent Second Ether trilogy, each of which treats incompatibility in a different way. So this is a somewhat ironic statement, one of many in The Vengeance of Rome of various different kinds.

One of the most interesting of these, because it reveals a lot about the character and the author's attitude to him, occurs when Pyat is interrogated by the SS about his career as an inventor: "I invented it all", he says, apparently without realising what this suggests about his history; and yet Moorcock also states in the introduction that he found corroborating evidence for many of the incidents that initially seemed most fabulous; this is clearly a deliberate contradiction. The reader, of course, knows that this is fiction, but it is being presented as true as any memoirs - with hints like this that it is at the very least, significantly embellished.

Moorcock fans may have wished to see the quartet completed more quickly, but there are obvious reasons why the novels would be difficult to write (and those obvious reasons may not of course have affected the author, no matter how strongly the novels may suggest them). These are the requirements of historical research and the repellent personality of Pyat already mentioned, together with the difficulty of writing from the point of view of an individual whose opinions in almost every subject seem to be diametrically opposed to those of the author. (Moorcock's own views can be read in the essays in The Opium General, for example, or on his website, Moorcock's Miscellany - currently down after attacks by hackers, an event that is itself something of a commentary on his views.)

It is possible to see the Pyat quartet as a sustained attack on racism. Indeed, the idea that an anti-Semite is so unable to see that Jewish people are just as human as he is leads him to be unable to perceive his own Jewishness is a barbed comment on the stupidity of such a view. But there is much more to it than that, and ranks as Moorcock's literary masterpiece, as The Dancers at the End of Time is its equivalent in the science fiction genre.

Michael Moorcock: The Winds of Limbo (1965)

Edition: Mayflower, 1965 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1207

Early Moorcock is usually interesting, but less individual and more straightforward than his later writing. The Winds of Limbo is no exception. It is set in a huge underground city of the future, underneath what is now Switzerland (possibly not somewhere ideally suited to such a construction), a background which is reminiscent of Isaac Asimov's Trantor if on a smaller scale. The city is capital of the solar system, a class-ridden rigid state, clearly meant to be a satire on early sixties Britain. The sudden appearance of a charismatic anarchist demagogue, the Fireclown, shakes the status quo until those in power decide that they should go to any lengths to stop him gaining more influence.

The plot seems as though it will be typical of left wing anti-establishment science fiction, with an idealistic young couple on hand to expose the government's machinations, allowing the Fireclown to sweep to power and turn out not to be as dangerous as everybody expected. However, the last bit does not happen; the Fireclown is far too nihilistic to be interested in taking over the state. He doesn't just criticise the bureaucratic rigidity of the world and its class system; he opposes the very idea of human society and even the existence of intelligence itself. This makes the heart of The Winds of Limbo interestingly different, and foreshadows some of Moorcock's later ideas about conflict between Law and Chaos, but it does mean that the ending of the novel fizzles out in an anti-climactic and unresolved manner which may be more likely but is less satisfying to read.

Like, say, The Rituals of Infinity, The Winds of Limbo shows signs of inexperience; Moorcock was at this time clearly someone who had lots of ideas he wanted to get down quickly. The background is sketchy, lacking detail - the lower classes, for example, are a stereotypical mass of easily lead uneducated labourers, which means that the reader is left feeling that they are being told that there is class conflict without really feeling that it affects anyone. Even though one of the main characters is not from the top bracket, being considered inferior to the woman he loves, he is still distinctly privileged. He is the grandson of a senior politician but of illegitimate birth because his grandfather refused to let his mother marry out of her class. This makes him an outsider of the whole class system, and this position could have been exploited more cleverly to tell us about this future society and its tensions.

The shallowness of the background - a problem Moorcock quickly learned how to overcome - also lies at the core of other problems that The Winds of Limbo has. It weakens the satire; although class is obviously the target, it remains unclear exactly what Moorcock wants to say about it (other than that it is a bad thing). By 1965, far more penetrating and effective satire had made its impact. The Fireclown's nihilism was either not really the answer Moorcock saw to society's problems, or it was one he lacked the conviction to ram home (it may also of course have been his publisher who required the novel be toned down). The novel reads like the vague ideas of a left wing middle class intellectual, not something inspired by real knowledge of the life of the labouring classes.

The Winds of Limbo is an interesting and frustrating novel; so much more could have been made of the ideas it contains.

Michael Moorcock: Blood (1995)

Edition: Gollancz, 1995
Review number: 1176

When Moorcock began writing his vast collection of tales about multiple universes and the battle between Law and Chaos, there was no such discipline as chaos theory. Blood is the novel (first of a trilogy) in which he seeks to use ideas from the mathematics of chaos, particularly self-similarity and attractors, to add to his earlier ideas.

Blood purports to be part of a collection of manuscripts inherited by Moorcock, which (says the introduction) at first seemed disjointed and unconnected but whose overall coherence was eventually perceptible. The two main threads that Moorcock presents are a bizarre fantasy set in the American South and a parody of pulp-era space opera. The fantasy takes up by far the majority of the narrative, and is reminiscent of J.G. Ballard's apocalyptic science fiction. Civilisation as we know it has been changed dramatically by the appearance of pockets of physical chaos around the world; they can be used to provide power, and reckless drilling has spread their dangerous subversion of physical law. Most of the people who remain live as best they can, but there are some, the elite Gamblers, who spend their lives pitted against one another in complex games of chance and metaphysics.

The space opera sections are less serious, and are about a great struggle across the multiverse between two factions, the Chaos Engineers and the Singularity; most of the weapons and mechanisms of travel described have connections to fractals and chaos theory.

Most of Moorcock's writing seems influenced mainly by his ideas about the science fiction and fantasy genres as a whole, and by the writers he loved in his formative years. Blood is, as far as I know, unique in his output in seeming to show influences which are more individual and recent - Ballard rather than Morris and Howard, Banks rather than Peake. The space opera sections have a more general influence. The style of the novel is opaque, quite difficult to see the meaning, similar to but more successful than John Clute's Appleseed. It doesn't all work, but Blood is an interesting experiment.

Michael Moorcock: Byzantium Endures (1981)

Edition: Fontana, 1982
Review number: 1173

The creation of Maxim Pyatniski, or Colonel Pyat, is Moorcock's supreme piece of literary artistry. Many writers, even some of the best, find it hard to write a convincing, three dimensional character who has a different voice from their own. In Pyat, Moorcock's aim seems to be a narrator who is the diametrical opposite of himself in as many ways as possible. The one thing he is unable to do is to make him admirable or sympathetic - he is rabidly anti-Semitic, self-aggrandizing, foolish, vain, cocaine-addicted (and that is just what comes across in his own autobiographical narrative).

Byzantium Endures is the first of four lengthy novels, which means that it is possible to pursue Pyat's repellent personality at great length through the twentieth century. Myself, I find that a relatively small quantity of this goes a long way, despite the fascinating backgrounds (in this case, Russia just before the Communist revolution and during the subsequent civil war). This feeling was exacerbated by not having read the series in the correct order, as I purchased them as I found them in bookshops, and so there weren't really any surprises by the time I worked back to the first of them. By warned - the impact of Byzantium Endures is drastically reduced by doing this. Even taking this into account, I think that some of Moorcock's less ambitious writing is more successful, and certainly more congenial.

Michael Moorcock: The Revenge of the Rose (1991)

Edition: Orion, 1997
Review number: 1157

The longest and most recent Elric story, The Revenge of the Rose is much more complex than the earlier books featuring this hero. Like most of them, it reflects Moorcock's concerns at the time of writing, and is much more literary in flavour as were the other novels he wrote around this time. It takes the same familiar fantasy genre form as the others in this particular omnibus (they are all quests), but it has a twist.

The plot stems from a Hamlet-like meeting between Elric and the ghost of his father, who commissions him to recover his soul, taken by a trio of warrior sisters. This quest is part of a power struggle between two Lords of Chaos, one of whom is Elric's patron Duke Arioch, and takes place across several planes of the multiverse (these elements coming from the common background to all the Eternal Champion stories). He joins together with a group of characters from these planes, including the fictional Victorian poet Wheldrake, who appears in several Moorcock novels, and, most interesting, a bizarre family of psychics who are wandering the multiverse. (The character from this family, Mother Phatt, bears a striking resemblance to how one imagines Jerry Cornelius' mother would become if she went senile.)

The most interesting part of the novel is the first, which takes place mostly in the fascinating Gypsy Nation. The background to this section, with its rolling cities, must be one of the most unusual in the fantasy genre. The rest of the novel seems to pale by comparison, but this section alone would make it worth reading. I've never really been a fan of the Elric stories, which seem to me to lie at the most hackneyed end of Moorcock's writing; but The Revenge of the Rose is the one which I would choose as the best of them.

Michael Moorcock: The Sleeping Sorceress (1971)

Edition: Orion, 1997
Review number: 1155

Much of Moorcock's output consists of series, some written close together (the Runestaff, for example) others very stretched out (the John Daker / Erekose novels). The Elric series, his longest, are in both categories, most novels appearing in the early sixties, this novel in 1971 and The Revenge of the Rose twenty years later. The unusual aspect of the Elric chronology is that the internal order is sometimes different, with the two final novels coming at the beginning of this omnibus (the second of two Elric collections in the current set of Eternal Champion editions).

The Sleeping Sorceress is really a series in itself, consisting of a trilogy of novellas in which Elric seeks revenge on the sorcerer Theleb K'aarna, chasing him across the world on which his dead kingdom of Melniboné lies. The sleeping sorceress of the title, a victim of Theleb K'aarna's enchantments, plays quite a small part in the plot; her significance is mainly due to the feelings she arouses in Elric through her resemblance to his long dead lover.

Elric has probably always been the best known of the various incarnations of the Eternal Champion, and the only Moorcock character who rivals his popularity is Jerry Cornelius (who has rather ambiguous connections with the concept). However, the reasons for this are not really apparent in The Sleeping Sorceress, which is one of Moorcock's less individual novels. (Even the relationship between Elric and his companion Moonglum reminds me of that between Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, the central characters in Fritz Leiber's Swords of Lankhmar series.

Michael Moorcock: The Dragon in the Sword (1986)

Edition: Millennium, 1995
Review number: 1135

The third John Daker novel appeared after an even longer interval than that between the first two, and seems to represent at least some of Moorcock's final thoughts on the Eternal Champion as the novel of that name had done the first. Both heroics and traditional fantasy appear much less frequently in Moorcock's work after this novel; Pyat may consider himself a heroic figure in Byzantium Endures, for example, but there is little if anything about him to bring admiration from the reader.

The Dragon in the Swoord is also related to the von Bek stories, and follows on directly from the short story The Pleasure Gardens of Felipe Saggitarius, about a failed attempt by a member of the family to assassinate Hitler. This von Bek escapes by travel to another universe, to the one where Daker also arrives after attempting suicide in despair at continuing to be parted from his beloved Ermizhad.

The form Daker takes on this new world is interesting. He is now in the body of a prince with a twin sister; their relationship is not what it is generally seen to be. She wanted to cement her power by marrying him, but then tried to kill him when he refused. Now the rumours she has spread mean that his status among those he first meets changes rapidly from honoured guest to someone tolerated only because of the laws governing hospitality, making his task as Champion yet more difficult.

As a literary idea, the Eternal Champion relies strongly on Moorcock's ability to create multiple variations on the character. In The Dragon in the Sword, he brings two incarnations of the Champion together. This is not the only time he does this (The Quest for Tanelorn is another example), but in this case Daker and von Bek are made more nearly equal in importance. Despite their similar origins (both coming from twentieth century Europe), the two are strongly contrasted, particularly in comparison to other novels involving multiple Champions, which tend to be aiming to highlight the similarities between them.

The Dragon in the Sword also stands out as one of the longest Eternal Champion (in the more general sense, rather than just this particular trilogy) novels, the complexity of the plot being a major reason for this. It wraps up a long chapter in Moorcock's literary life (and does this additionally by including a lot of the lyrics from the album he co-wrote with Hawkwind, Warrior on the Edge of Time, and looks forward to some of his pre-occupations of the next few years as well as backwards.

Michael Moorcock: Phoenix in Obsidian (1970)

Edition: Millennium, 1995
Review number: 1127

It took a long time before Michael Moorcock wrote a novel which was in the strict sense a sequel to The Eternal Champion. In between, he had firmed up the concept suggested by that novel, the idea that fantasy heroes were aspects of the same individual, and had begun several of the other series which use it. A long wait for a sequel is often a bad sign, but here Moorcock has been spending his time refining the concept.

In retirement with his beloved Ermizhad, John Daker is called once more to travel between worlds and take up the mantle of Eternal Champion. He becomes another ancient hero returned to save his people, yet no one seems to know who summoned him, or to what purpose. The city of Rowenarc is doomed by an approaching Ice Age, and its inhabitants have given themselves over to despair and sado-masochistic orgies, a darker equivalent to the Dancers at the End of Time, who would have been in Moorcock's mind soon after he wrote Phoenix in Obsidian. Many of Moorcock's novels contain pictures of decadent cultures, and he is superlatively good at delineating them (here, for example, the description is remarkably sparse, but conveys a lot by focusing on Daker's feelings of disgust).

The other major feature of Phoenix in Obsidian is the reluctance of Daker to get involved, to become a hero once again. This is a something of a rarity outside Moorcock, but in his fantasy it is a theme on which many variations are played. Here, there are two aspects: Daker's longing to return to Ermizhad, which gives poignancy to the story, and his distaste for the weapon of the Eternal Champion, the Black Sword that he is sure that he has abjured in the past, even if he can't specifically remember doing so or even precisely why he has done so.

Many of the middle books in Moorcock's large number of fantasy series tend to be lacking in interest compared to the first and last instalments; the first volume introduces the ideas, setting and character, and the third provides the resolution while in between there is frequently only an unwinding of the plot. This is not the case here, though, as the combination of maturing ideas and a new setting have produced an enjoyable novel which is more than the equal of the early Eternal Champion.

Michael Moorcock: The Eternal Champion (1970)

Edition: Millennium, 1995
Review number: 1116

Begun in the fifties, published in the sixties as a novelette before finally being expanded to a full novel in 1970, The Eternal Champion contains the earliest version of the idea that is central to most of Moorcock's fantasy, together with the fruits of over a decade's development of the theme. The idea is basically that there is one person, immortal or reincarnated, whose aspects are the heroes of fantasy. It is perhaps influenced by the Hindu concept of the avatar, where important figures in legend are incarnations of the gods, particularly of Vishnu; it is also an ironic comment on the unimaginative sameness of much of the fantasy genre.

The story in The Eternal Champion is of Londoner John Daker, who responds to a summons he seems to hear in his dreams, from a barbarian king and his beautiful daughter. They are performing rituals in the tomb of long dead warrior Erekos&eumlaut;, seeking to bring the return of the hero that has long been prophesied. When Daker responds, he becomes Erekosë;, champion of the human race in their desperate war against the alien Eldren. Like the other aspects of the Champion, Daker is tormented by dreams of his other selves, but in this case he is unhappy because, though the humans describe the Eldren as treacherous and wicked, this seems to better match their own actions.

It was a commonplace of science fiction (particularly American science fiction, the major part of the genre's output) in the first decades of the Cold War to mimic that conflict; the best known example is Star Trek, where the Federation represents the West, the Klingons and Romulans the Soviet Union and China. It is rarer to do this in fantasy, which (post-Tolkien) usually uses plots about an individual quest to overthrow tyrrany which makes it not such a good genre to explore political ideas. The Eternal Champion is the only example which comes to my mind. Generally, the rather simplistic and racist assumption is made that the forces of humanity represent the West, and the aliens the Communist Bloc. I don't think that there was generally a conscious desire to write propaganda, more that in the American magazines that defined the genre, writers tended to accept the view that they were the good guys. Young though he was when he wrote this story, Moorcock tries to do something more subtle. The humans keep on spouting rhetoric taken from extreme anti-Communists of the time, justifying treacherous acts on the grounds that that is the only way they can beat the innately treacherous Eldren. What they achieve is to completely discredit their side, showing themselves to be worse even than their portrayal of their enemies, let alone than the Eldren actually are. Even Jolinda, the woman with whom Daker falls in love, eventually reveals herself to be just vain and shallow, and as much prey to xenophobia as anyone else.

The background to the novel is lacking an element which later became an important part of Moorcock's concept of the Eternal Champion: the balance between Law and Chaos. It is a theme that would have probably got in the way of this particular story, which has a different point to make; it is about hypocrisy and hysteria rather than the nature of evil and morality.

The aim of the novel, to make readers think again about the orthodox (Western) view of the Cold War, is unusual in fantasy (though common enough in the more literary spy thrillers like The Spy Who Came In From the Cold). The background is rather dated now, as much of the fiction it is counterbalancing has vanished without trace. Even so, The Eternal Champion has something to say about mob hysteria, which continues to be relevant as the American leadership seeks to renew the war against Iraq.

Michael Moorcock & Jim Cawthorn: The Distant Suns (1969/1975)

Edition: Orion, 1996
Review number: 1033

The Distant Suns is a strong contender for the title of Moorcock's worst novel. Almost totally different in style from his other writing, it is an unimaginative story about a space mission to Alpha Centauri, outdated in style and bearing a marked resemblance to American pulp fiction of twenty or more years earlier. It is so different that it is impossible to read it without wondering just how much input Moorcock had to the collaboration, even though it appears now in an omnibus of his novels and is copyrighted to him exclusively.

The only connection between The Distant Suns and the rest of Moorcock's output are the names of the main characters. The crew of the spaceship The Last Hope are Jerry Cornelius, his wife Cathy and scientist Frank Marek; even so, they are no more than washed out two dimensional versions of their usual selves. (This is not just the fault of the writing; major sources of tension are removed when the three of them are not siblings.) Jerry is the protagonist, but is just a Flash Gordon style action hero. While Moorcock allowed others to write Jerry Cornelius adventures, most of the writers who did so stuck to the style and stylishness which were such important parts of the original stories.

Michael Moorcock: The Black Corridor (1969)

Edition: Orion, 1996
Review number: 1021

The wonderfully atmospheric first few paragraphs of The Black Corridor immediately make it clear what the purpose of the novel is to be. Science fiction of the fifties and sixties in particular treat space travel as a glorious adventure, mankind (almost always male) against the stars. Here, though, the pioneer is a selfish, paranoid man who wants to save himself from the worldwide descent into 1984-style dystopian states.

Ryan is the only member of his family not in hibernation as the ship travels to Earth-like planets around Barnard's Star; he carries out the checks needed by the ship's systems during travel. In the meantime, he experiences nightmares about the past, to the extent that the reader begins to doubt whether the spaceship is real or the hallucination of a lunatic in an asylum.

The Black Corridor is a clever psychological study, told in the form of a classic science fiction story like those which Robert Heinlein specialised in at the time. By the way it is written, it exposes the limited assumptions about people that such stories made (though that was not their purpose - their authors sought to share their enthusiasm about space travel).

Michael Moorcock: The Ice Schooner (1966-1985)

Edition: Orion, 1996
Review number: 1009

Although part of the general repackaging of Moorcock's fantasy output around the Eternal Champion theme, The Ice Schooner is not really that closely linked to the other novels. Having a hero and a quest is not really enough; there are few novels in the genre by any author which would share these common elements.

The much revised novel is set in a future Ice Age, so severe that oceans of ice cover almost the entire surface of the Earth. On these frozen wastes sail great ship-like wind powered sledges, hunting the land whales evolved from the sea creatures of our own time. Konrad Arflane is captain of such a vessel fallen on hard times until he rescues a dying man out on the remote ice. He turns out to be the ruler of an important city, but more relevantly to the plot, he gives Arflane a quest, to find the fabled lost city of New York, a vision, in his daughter, and a ship, a great ice schooner, to captain. The voyage to New York is the quest at the centre of the novel, as Arflane and Ulrica fall in love even in the presence of her husband.

The Ice Schooner is quite a minor piece of early Moorcock, even with the later revisions. Its apocalyptic setting is clearly influenced by the ecological disaster novels of J.G. Ballard, but it lacks the satirical edge. In fact, it is an enjoyable piece of straightforward fantasy with an unusual setting.

Michael Moorcock: London Bone (2001)

Edition: Scribner, 2001
Review number: 995

In Moorcock's earlier short story collection, The Opium General, the title story was by no means the lengthiest item. The same is true here, but London Bone dominates the collection (in terms of quality and memorability) and deserves to provide the title. (There is also a marketing reason for using it as the title, which is the connection it establishes with Mother London, one of Moorcock's best and most successful novels.)

The story London Bone is set in a near future, and is narrated by a speculator who finances West End shows, temporarily suffering a setback because of a collapse in the popularity of Andrew Lloyd Webber. He becomes involved in a new venture, the supply of an incredibly beautiful material initially thought to be mammoth bone from a London building site. It is eventually shown to be human bone, transformed by lime, London clay, and seepages of raw sewage. The story is about the effect that the nostalgia trade has on London, as it cannibalises its past, selling the bones of its ancestors and destroying the soul of the city. It is a powerful and memorable story.

The long story in the collection, The Cairene Purse, is set in Egypt, again in the fairly near future. A western engineer is searching for his sister in Aswan, on a Nile virtually abandoned by tourists because of pollution, the destruction of most of the monuments and their replacement by Disney-built replicas at desert resorts far from the impoverished mass of the Egyptian population. Atmospheric and thought provoking, it is nonetheless not as significant a story as London Bone, perhaps partly because of the length, which feels a touch over extended for the story's ideas.

The Cairene Purse is an odd one out in the collection, for even though not all the other stories are set in London (Doves in the Circle is in New York), they share a metropolitan background which is as well realised as the fantasy backgrounds which were the staple of Moorcock's earlier career. The stories also share a nostalgia for an earlier age, particularly London before or just after the war and certainly before Thatcher, a politician viewed by Moorcock as the destroyer of the essence of her country. Typically for Moorcock, cross references to his other stories abound, characters such as the Cornelius brothers frequently being mentioned in passing.

The best of the stories not yet mentioned is the second, whose title, London Blood, makes it a companion to London Bone. This story, an anecdote of pre war South London, is the most like the novel Mother London. There is really, though, no great connection between these stories and the novel, and London Bone

Michael Moorcock: Mother London (1988)

Edition: Penguin, 1989
Review number: 921

Much of Moorcock's fiction is set in London, and Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove in particular are home to many of his characters, including Jerry Cornelius and Maxim Pyat (in old age). This novel is a celebration of the city over a period roughly corresponding to Moorcock's own lifetime, from the blitz to the book's publication.

The novel tells its story in a very fragmentary way, with chapters not at all in chronological order (though they helpfully have years as part of their titles). The three main characters have a unique ability, to pick up the thoughts of those around them (an idea strongly related to Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which is a novel quite like Mother London, using a similar device to illuminate the story of post-independence India). This ability, uncomprehended by those around them, means that they each spend time in a mental hospital.

Much of the novel is filled with regret, mainly related to the loss of the sense of community important to the city before the Blitz. This is combined with a contempt for some of the things London has become - a heritage theme park, a place where the old working class areas are becoming gentrified and soulless.

There are some beautifully written passages in the novel, which was Moorcock's most successful from a literary point of view. As he moved away from the fantasy genre in the nineties, Mother London pointed the direction in which Moorcock was to go.

Michael Moorcock: Jerusalem Commands (1992)

Edition: Phoenix, 1996
Review number: 905

The third Pyat novel is largely set in North Africa, where he travels, in the guise of Hollywood star Max Peters, to make a film on location in Egypt. It is a real exhibition of Moorcock's talent as well as a superb evocation of twenties life.

As the series progresses, the extent to which Pyat's memoirs are fantasy becomes more apparent. The unpleasantness of his views and his total self-centredness have never been in doubt, but continue to be underlined. He manages to proceed from one self-wrought disaster to another, but still remains convinced that all his visions will come true, that he only fails through the treachery of others and the determination of the Jews to destroy him. (One thing which isn't quite clear, deliberately, is how much the attitudes of the old man writing his memoirs in Notting Hill in the mid seventies are imputed to his twenty five year old self, as though nothing has changed.)

Though Flashman remains the clearest influence, in this particular novel T.E. Lawrence is clearly a reference point. In the section on Pyat's captivity and degradation at the hands of the man who insists that he be called "God", de Sade is also important. As before in this set of novels, though, Moorcock distils something different from his influences, creating a powerful historical narrative and character study.

Michael Moorcock: The Laughter of Carthage (1984)

Edition: Phoenix, 1994
Review number: 887

The second of the Pyat novels - centred around a minor character who originally appeared in the Cornelius Quartet - takes his story from his escape from the collapsing Russia of the civil war which followed the 1917 revolution to a new life in the States. He is as unpleasant a character as ever, definite proof (if any were needed) that the narrators of novels do not have to reflect the views of the author. In this novel, Pyat becomes involved with the Klu Klux Klan, and this is just an extension of his racist views from his earlier condemnation of Jews and Turks. The racism of our past is easily forgotten; it can be seen in the writers who have survived - Kipling, Buchan and Haggard, and to a greater extent two of the most popular twentieth century authors of all, Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie - but is even clearer in those who have now basically been forgotten or whose politics have been overshadowed by what they did (such as film director D.W. Griffith).

It is relatively easy to see why Moorcock wanted to write about Pyat despite his lack of sympathy with the kind of views he would give the character. It can be very difficult for those who would be called liberals to understand the way that people like Pyat think, and Moorcock has certainly managed to give an insight into the paranoid world of conspiracy theories these people often espouse. (The title refers to this; Carthage is Pyat's term for the "decadent" Eastern and African influences which in his view were at this time constantly trying to bring down the virtuous white civilization.) Ironically, while constantly bemoaning the way in which most people have been hoodwinked into thinking these conspiracies non-existent, Pyat is constantly being the innocent dupe - assuming his memoirs to be honest - of others who use him to front fraudulent schemes.

The von Bek novels, particularly The City in the Autumn Stars, demonstrated that Moorcock had the ability to write great historical novels as well as atmospheric fantasy. In the Pyat series, this talent is fully realised. In The Laughter of Carthage, we have a meticulously researched insight into the past. There may be similarities to Flashman, but these are mainly because of the antiheroic central character; this series is stronger, more hard hitting.

Michael Moorcock: The Opium General and Other Stories (1984)

Edition: Grafton, 1986 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 861

The immediately obvious strange fact about this collection is that three quarters of it is made up of a (short) novel length Jerry Cornelius story, and that The Alchemist's Question doesn't even provide the title. This comes from one of the other seven pieces, and is about a drug addict living in a dream world, and reads something like a bridge between the Jerry Cornelius stories and the novel Moorcock wrote a short while later celebrating the English capital, Mother London.

The other fiction consists of three below standard stories from the point of view of a Russian agent caught up in a future war; more interesting are the three political essays which round off the collection. The most substantial of these is a discussion of right wing politics in science fiction and fantasy, genres in which some of the most famous writers are in Moorcock's (anarchist, left wing) view extremists - Heinlein and Rand, for example, and, more unusually, Tolkien. I am not convinced that these writers are as pernicious as Moorcock makes out, partly because I don't think my politics have been changed by reading them, no matter how insidiously their views are promoted in their fiction.

One of the other essays is about censorship, and the kind of hypocrisy that destroys those who disagrees while pretending to tolerate disagreement (prosecutions of anarchist bookshops for obscenity), and that is part of the distaste Moorcock felt about Thatcher's Britain which is important in The Alchemist's Question, which is the last Jerry Cornelius story.

The story also draws upon the idea of the battle between Law and Chaos which is important in several of Moorcock's fantasy series, notably those involving Corum. Miss Brunner, who appears throughout the Cornelius chronicles, represents Law, rigidity and authoritarianism - to the extent that the desires to bring on a nuclear winter and make the world more uniform. She has become a figure not at all unlike an exaggeration of Margaret Thatcher. It looks as though the free spirited friends of Jerry Cornelius are about to be defeated, especially as Jerry himself is living in a semi-catatonic state. The ability to move between alternate universes is denied them, and they are trapped into trying a desperate alchemical ritual.

The story is much more pessimistic in tone than the earlier Jerry Cornelius novels; this has a great deal to do with the early eighties and how depressing Moorcock found Britain at that time. It is a savage attack on the pressure to conform, much stronger even then than fifteen years earlier when the quartet of novels was written. It ends up being less successful than its predecessors, mainly because Jerry, though always present, is rendered so ineffectual, so hopeless.