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.
No comments:
Post a Comment