The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 5

The City in the Autumn Stars

Did I call this book a romp? Oh God. It certainly starts out that way. But oh God.

Spoilerish territory ahead. Nothing too specific, but if all you want to be told is "Great book, you should read it!" then you've been told: it is and you should. Just get ready to be put through the wringer.

Von Bek pursues the mysterious Libussa, Duchess of Crete, across Europe. He comes to rest in Mirenburg, an idealized city largely based on Prague: cosmopolitan, tolerant, prosperous, and at peace. There he finds friends and enemies old and new. A multitude of alchemical cultists converge on the city in anticipation of some imminent celestial conjunction. Von Bek's love for Libussa, a woman he barely knows, grows obsessive, while his dreams become bloody visions in which he is both Theseus and Ariadne, threatened by a bloody Beast that might be Minotaur or Kronos, monster or dark god. He becomes involved, much against his nature, in an elaborate scam, which further jeopardizes his already precarious mental equilibrium.

Up to this point, midway through the book, no overtly supernatural event has occurred. One character claims to be deathless, and to have known von Bek's distant ancestor Ulrich, but has shown no proof. Von Bek's dreams might simply be bad dreams, and Moorcock might be writing a naturalistic novel that explores belief in the supernatural and the exploitation of that belief, or one in which apparently supernatural elements will have mundane explanations (the Uncanny mode, per Todorov) or in which tension between natural and supernatural explanations is uneasily maintained (the Fantastic). Von Bek might turn out to be an unreliable narrator, whether deliberate fabulator, innocent madman or something in between.

Big spoiler: Moorcock didn't write any of those books. I mentioned symmetry in my earlier post. Exactly halfway through The City in the Autumn Stars von Bek and company go through the looking glass, from Mirenburg to the eponymous City. And that's when things get both seriously weird - and as serious as a heart attack.

City begins to spiral in on itself, becoming more and more intense and surreal. Von Bek enters a physical labyrinth which mirrors the tortuous maze of his own emotional, ethical and intellectual conflicts. The climax is hallucinatory, harrowing, and ultimately ambiguous; both deliriously romantic and utterly horrific.

City is in at least one sense a more mature novel than The War Hound and the World's Pain. Ulrich von Bek's love Sabrina was a convincingly real character but with an entirely passive role: she waited patiently on the sidelines while von Bek and various other men determined the world's fate. I have written almost nothing about Manfred's love Libussa not because she does nothing but because she does everything. Her character and her decisions are the engine that drives the book. She is a Player, and discovering her is a pleasure I dare not spoil.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 3

The City in the Autumn Stars

According to the blurbery on the back cover City is the "long-awaited sequel" to The War Hound and the World's Pain, but if anyone came to this "sequel" looking for more of the same they were quickly disillusioned. War Hound and City are both narrated by a von Bek (Ulrich, Manfred) and begin in something very like hell on earth (Germany during the Thirty Years War, Paris during the Terror) but the similarities seem to end there. Ulrich von Bek is a wary, weary, cynical mercenary. Manfred is a gregarious dandy with a reputation as a Casanova; an idealist who fought in the American Revolution and whose disillusionment with the new French Republic has just become complete as the novel begins. War Hound is a somber fable, a hopeless quest through an apocalyptic landscape blighted by war and disease. So far City is a romp: fast-paced, romantic and often very funny. In chapter one our hero flees Paris, where he has become persona non grata, pursued by a vindictive agent of the Republic. In chapter two he falls in love with the mysterious Libussa, Duchess of Crete, who promptly disappears. In chapter three he befriends a roguish Scot ballonnier looking for suckers to invest in Aerial Expeditions into those Unknown Lands where Rubies the size of Canteloupes litter the ground. And so on.

The cover. For a while Robert Gould was the Moorcock artist in the U.S., and his stuff is very beautiful, although I don't think this particular image is a good choice for a mass market paperback. A detail from it might have worked better at this size. The Arts and Crafts typeface goes with Gould's stuff like chocolate with peanut butter, and evokes the alchemical mysticism with which Reason's apostle von Bek will be confronted. The image is a rendering of an ikon encountered about halfway through the book, so it might be examined for clues: note that the youth on the left bears a cup, a feminine symbol, while the woman on the right holds a sword. A figure of somewhat obscure gender stands between them, holding both.

Symmetries, role reversal, gender confusion, the union of opposites. Yup, all here.

More tomorrow.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 2

The War Hound and the World's Pain

It's been unbearably hot here. Tomorrow (I mean today, *sigh*) there's a good chance that Seattle will set a new high temperature record. Not for a particular date - the highest temperature ever recorded here. The heat interferes with our lives in various ways. My reading hasn't been affected much. My blogging has, since our tiny portable AC unit is set up in the family room and my computer is in a craft room where temperatures have hovered around 90F the last few days. If I get an early start tomorrow maybe I can catch up before it becomes unbearable.

A contemporary reviewer (possibly Baird Searles in IASFM) pointed out that War Hound is a fable, a short tale with a moral lesson which is more-or-less explicitly spelled out. While it doesn't end with a pithy "Leave well enough alone," or "One good turn deserves another," it is almost that obvious. War Hound is also a metafiction, insofar as it is a fantasy about fantasy. Here are two snippets of dialogue between von Bek and an unusual hermit named Philander Groot.

"And do you understand the nature of the Mittelmarch?" I asked him.
He shrugged. "I do not. All I know is that Mittelmarch could not survive without the rest of the world - but the rest of the world can survive without Mittelmarch. And that, I suspect, is what its denizens fear in you, if they fear anything at all."

...

"Everything that is fantastic leagues against me," I said, repeating Klosterheim's warning.
"Aye. Everything that is fantastic is threatened. Some believe all these marvels you have witnessed to be productions of the World's Pain. Without the Pain, some say, they would not be necessary. They would not exist."
"You suggest that mankind's needs create them?"
"Man is a rationalising beast, if not a rational one," said Philander Groot.

Is there a name for the part of a fantasy novel where the author hits the fast forward button? After meticulously describing progress from Peasantville to Wizardtown to Elfwood the author realizes his characters are only a quarter of the way to Climaxburg, and suddenly our narrator is saying "We continued East in this way for some months. In the Subplot Mountains we were set upon by brigands, who shot my favorite llama. We rested for a while in the Kingdom of Reluctant Allies, where I bedded the Queen. Or a queen, anyway."

At about the 3/4 point, Moorcock hits the fast forward button just briefly. Von Bek has been joined in his quest by Sedenko, a Muscovite soldier of fortune who shares the almost universal antisemitism of his time, and we get this wonderful paragraph:

Beyond Crema we passed again into the Mittelmarch. Save that the seasons were, of course, reversed, the landscape was not greatly different. We were in a kingdom, we discovered, which was the vestige of a Carthaginian Empire which had beaten Rome during Hannibal's famous campaign, conquered all of Europe and parts of Asia and had converted to the Jewish religion, so that the whole world had been ruled by Rabbinical Knights. It was a land so horrifying to Sendenko that he believed he was being punished for his sins and was already in Hell. We were treated hospitably and my engineering experience was called into play when the Chief Judge of this Carthaginian land pronounced a sentence of death upon a Titan. A gallows had to be built for him. In return for aid and some extra gold, I was able to design a suitable scaffold. The Titan was hanged and I received the gratitude of those people forever.

Believe it or not, that's Moorcock's idea of a throwaway. Another writer would milk that idea for a novel, if not a trilogy. To Moorcock it's a bit of color tossed in near the home stretch of a singleton. Your typical fantasy author would turn War Hound's plot into the framework for an interminable series of overplotted doorstops. Moorcock chronicles the End of the World as We Knew It in 208 pages of flawlessly paced adventure fiction and every incident, every word is there in service of his theme. Note to self: Moorcock is a mensch.

It's strange to start this project with this particular book, because it has such a strong goodbye-to-all-that vibe. If Moorcock had gone mainstream after its publication, eschewing swords and sorcery for more literary output, no one would have been surprised, and War Hound would be seen now as both summa and apologia from a man ready to put away childish things.

Thank God that didn't happen.

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 1

The War Hound and the World's Pain

I'm a slow enough reader but when it comes to writing my pace is best described as glacial, so if I'm going to do this at all I'm afraid that composition, as such, will have to go out the window. Sorry.

This is a re-read for me. Besides the bare bones of the plot and its resolution the only thing I really remember after 25 years is the Mittelmarch, various supernatural realms scattered across Europe (and, presumably, the world), visible and accessible only to the damned.

Great cover by Rowena Morrill. The combination of angel's wings and devil's horns strikes a suitably ambiguous note. In the book Lucifer is actually without horns, wings or pants. I like how Rowena restricted her color palette, too. My only problem is that, for me, the shadow under Lucifer's nose keeps turning into a little Hitler mustache. Nobody wants that.

A short book that nonetheless takes its own sweet time getting started. The protagonist (hero?) begins his hopeless quest precisely one third of the way through the book. Don't get me wrong, the time is well spent.

This book has something in common with Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away, Dunsany's The Charwoman's Shadow, and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. This brief excerpt foreshadows that connection. Cynical mercenary Ulrich von Bek has fallen in love with the witch Sabrina. For the sake of her soul as well as his own he has accepted the charge of her master, the fallen angel Lucifer, to find the Cure for the World's Pain, sometimes called the Holy Grail. He prepares to depart.

I returned to draw back the curtains and sit on the edge of the bed, looking down on Sabrina's sleeping face. She started suddenly, crying out, reaching her hand to where I had lain. I touched her cheek. "I am here."
She turned and smiled at me. Then her eyes clouded. "You are leaving?"
"I suppose that I must. Soon."
"Yes," she said, "for it is morning." She began to sit up. She sighed. "When I made my bargain with Lucifer I thought that I was resisting circumstance, taking my fate into my own hands. But circumstance continues to affect us. Can it even affect who we are? Is there any proof beyond ourselves that we are unique?"
"We feel ourselves to be unique," I said. "But a cynic sees only familiarity and similarity and would say that we are all pretty much the same."
"Is it because a cynic does not possess the imagination to distinguish those subtle differences in which you and I believe?"
"I am a cynic," I said to her. "A cynic refuses to allow distinctions of motive or of temperament."
"Oh, but you are not!" She came into my arms. "Or you would not be here."
I held her closely. "I am what I have to be at this moment," I said. "For my own sake."
"And for mine," she reminded me.
I felt a terrible sadness well within me. I suppressed it. "And for yours," I agreed.
We kissed. The pain continued to grow. I pulled away from her. I went to the corner of the room and began to wash myself. I noticed that my hands were shaking and that my breathing had become unusually deep. I had a wish, at that moment, to return to Hell, to summon up an army of all those poor damned souls and set them in rebellion against Lucifer, as Lucifer had set Himself against God. I felt that we were in the hands of foolish, insane beings, whose motives were more petty even than Man's. I wanted to be rid of all of them. It was unjust, I thought, that such creatures should have power over us. Even if they had created us, could they not, in turn, be destroyed?
But these ideas were pointless. I had neither the means, the knowledge nor the power to challenge them. I could only accept that my destiny was, in part at least, in their charge. I would have to agree to play out my role on Lucifer's terms, or play no role at all.

That gives you an idea of the tone of the book. If the characters aren't chasing or fighting each other, or witnessing some supernatural manifestation, they're talking about God, Fate, Chance, Will, Faith, Love, War... the Big Stuff.

More tomorrow. Oops, I mean later today.

"I go out bloggin', after midnight, out in the moonlight..."

The Year of Reading Moorcock: Day 0

I had all but forgotten this blog existed. Maybe a Big Project will inspire me to keep at it this time.

The Big Project is this: read more or less the entirety of Michael Moorcock's oeuvre (hey, got it right the first try!) in one year. Since I've been averaging a book a month for decades now, this represents a colossal opportunity for me to fall on my face. My only consolation is that it seems likely no one will ever know.

This thread from a forum at Moorcock's Miscellany includes a recommended reading order. I intend to follow this plan closely, with one big deviation. The list's author uses Moorcock's Eternal Champion/Multiverse conceit as his organizing principle, and rightly so. Everything that doesn't clearly fit within that framework is lumped together at the end of the list. For the sake of balance and variety I plan to shuffle this material back into the deck, so to speak.

What, this thing is still here?

I mean seriously, doesn't anything ever get deleted anymore?

Oh well...

REBOOT!