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.