Author pic – Michael Moorcock
This certainly rambles between autobiography and adventure. Three main stories intertwine and eventually intersect, shifting perspectives from paragraph to paragraph, even sentence to sentence, and almost always without a section break of white space.
The novel begins sometime in the 1930s, with a man names Harold Blackstone reflecting on time, memory, and the English landscape as a train wends its way through the countryside. After a few pages we touch down to the realish world, a rambling account of the life and times of Michael Moorcock, which begins in a realistic mode and slowly grows fantastical. The Blackstone segments of the narrative are sedate and novelistic, while the “second ether” segments are packed full of allusion, wordplay, and abstract references to art and music. The “second ether,” in Moorcock’s complex mythology, is the “origin of old chaos”. It originated in his 1990s ‘War Among the Angels’ trilogy. Every conversation abounds in Dadaist coinage and non sequesters.
Readers of the Angels trilogy or the Moorcock Multiverse comic from 1997, can interpret maybe 30% of this, but how the heck are we supposed to know what a Gatsby Gardenia smells like, or what a Natter lens is? Remember the phrase in Lewis Carroll’s…a Frumious Bandersnatch? – the nonsense is the point. Interestingly, if you don’t care about Mr. Blackstone and the second ether gives you the vapours, there’s still the bulk of the book to consider, as the author’s fictionalised and fantastical life story unfolds. The book reads like a transcript of Moorcock telling the story of his life and craft over a pint with digression piled on top of digression, uniquely the signature of the author. There’s a lot to enjoy….Swinging London, mid-century experimental winters, or Moorcock’s tenure are at New Worlds magazine. All the while, the reader has to pick through the author’s ventures into cryptic aphorisms, score-settling, and self-congratulation.
With Moorcock’s style, you get used to wandering around a 100 pages of a 500-page novel before something resembling a plot appears and the traditional action starts. Quoting from the first chapter “Don’t worry dear, we’ll soon be bringing in the airship and the magic swords.”. When Moorcock enters the stage we are treated to his doings as a young writer and his unflinching depiction of his marriage, its pleasures and strains, ups and downs and his portrait of Helena/ Hilary, an accomplishment on its own. He unpacks his own follies and ambitions unsparingly, facing the matter of his somewhat squandered talents and responsibilities full-on.
Returning to the Multiversal Madness portion of the book finds him and family vacating in Paris. One night, as he walks alone, he enters an antique tavern and there confronts the Four Musketeers, Athos, Portos, Artemis and D’Artagnan . This begins a rollicking adventure in various venues, mainly in Africa with Burroughs and Haggard, along with a hearty band of other famous and obscure literary heroes. All the action is with Moorcock’s signature fecundity of imagination and sensory richness in details. There’s plenty of swordplay, gunfire and explosions, but also meditative moments, many centered around a spectacular idyllic oasis maintained by a religious order.
Ultimately the book retreats in to a fantasy portal, in which our hero achieves much before returning back to his homely existence. I loved this book tremendously, in parts, yet it seems to me to be a synthesis of Moorcock’s inner and outer worlds.
