From what I’ve garnered reading his books, Michael Moorcock never saw a boundary he didn’t want to cross, blur or dispense with altogether. So it stands to reason that having played around with notions of time, space and genre, he should do the same with reality and fiction.
The reality in THE WHISPERING SWARM is the life and career of Michael Moorcock, writer, guitarist, Londoner and working-class hero, plus the magnificent city in which he grew up. The fictional elements of the book are, confusingly about exactly the same subjects. It’s fitting that Moorcock should become his own unreliable narrator.
His first memories are of the Blitz and a childhood spent in the tangle of streets that mark the border between the City and the West End. Few children, he recounts, could have enjoyed growing up as much as he did. From the printing presses around Fleet Street to the coffee bars of 1950s Soho, young Michael received an eclectic education on the streets that saw him become, by the age of 16, a published author, aspiring skiffle musician and editor of Tarzan Adventures magazine. And this, as they say, is where the story really begins.
An enchanted fictional enclave called Alsacia has existed in the heart of London for centuries, standing apart from time and adjacent to reality, populated by “white friers” called Carmelites and trafficked by various figures from both history and fiction.
When Alsacia is threatened from the outside for the first time in its history, it looks like the pillars of reality itself might wobble. Bewilderingly, that nifty-sounding gist of the story is buried under layers and layers of wool-gathering, distraction and thinly muted autobiography for the bulk of THE WHISPERING SWARM.
The main character at the book’s heart is the author himself, altered in insolently inconsequential ways, and within moments of stepping into the reading, you find yourself reading pages of what clearly had its DNA as a straight-up memoir.
His early career as a writer and editor of Science Fiction stories, attending conventions and taking writing gigs in among other places, America, where we get his first-person musings in their uncut, jotted-down, raw state, which I prefer as a devoted fan of Michael Moorcock’s huge body of fiction. Others may stave-off the creeping disappointments of THE WHISPERING SWARM by assuring themselves that the author, has been the most intelligent craftsman of the genre. The fantasy elements are so fickle-seeming and suggestive that in a weird way they offer a hint that Moorcock has worked all his stuff out in great detail on his fridge door and a cork board and that the reading pay-offs of the second and third volumes will be commensurately great.
It is here in the hidden quarter of the city, that somehow exists outside time and space as we understand them, that a character called Moll, a brilliant red-head, rides out to steal from the greedy corporations to give to the workers. It’s just such a place where Moll mingles with fictionalised versions of historical people such as Dick Turpin. But even as he establishes his family, the secret world of Alsacia increases its pull upon him, manifested as a multitude of whispering voices, which allude to the title, that only he can hear. Michael is torn between his life in Ladbroke Grove with his wife, Helena, and his two kids, and the fabulously alluring Alsacia with its living legends and the amorous Moll. And always, there are the mysterious monks who may hold the secrets to the universe.
Even as I was enjoying the insights and humour of THE WHISPERING SWARM, I find myself yearning for the even madder and more passionate style that the young Michael Moorcock displayed before he gained literary credibility.
Michael Moorcock’s THE WHISPERING SWARM is published by Hachette Australia.
