“Elric: Song of the Black Sword” by Michael Moorcock

 

 

504 pages, White Wolf Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1565041801

 

Over the course of the mid-to-late 90s, White Wolf Publishing produced this massive omnibus collection of Michael Moorcock’s “Eternal Champion” stories, a recurrent aspect in many of his tales. Elric: Song of the Black Sword was the fifth in this series featuring the character Elric of Melniboné, and includes the tales Elric of Melniboné, The Fortress of the Pearl, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, The Dreaming City, While the Gods Laugh and The Singing Citadel. Elric of Melniboné is without question Moorcock’s most famous character. One of the original anti-heroes, his proper name is Elric VIII, 428^th Emperor of Melniboné, a stagnating civilization that at one time ruled the entire world but that, by the time of Elric, finds itself confined to its original island home, while the rest of the world, called collectively “The Young Kingdoms”, has arisen in the wake of this retreat. In addition to being an incarnation of the Eternal Champion, Elric is an albino: his flesh “is the color of a bleached skull…and the long hair which flows below his shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody, and from the loose sleeves of his yellow gown emerge two slender hands, also the color of bone”. Elric is physically frail and reliant on drugs and sorcery to keep up his strength – and, unlike his predecessors, he has a conscience, which causes him to look upon the Melnibonéan culture and history with a loathing that causes his subjects to loath him in return.

 

Elric of Melniboné is not the first Elric story that Moorcock wrote, but it is the first in the series’ internal chronology; for this reason, perhaps, Moorcock clearly makes an effort to craft this tale as an introductory one for anyone just learning who this albino antihero is. While it may be too much to call these books Pulp Fiction, Moorcock’s prose tends to be…bombastic, perhaps in an attempt to be Dramatic (Over-the-Top). But that’s okay in my book, as the language is lush and the imagery resonant, for the World of Elric really comes alive on the page. Elric of Melniboné is consciously epic in every way, larger than life and proud of it, which shouldn’t came as a surprise when one considers Moorcock’s influences on his most famous antihero: Bertolt Brecht and his Threepenny Novel and The Threepenny Opera (indeed, Elric of Melniboné is dedicated to Brecht; in the same dedication we find that Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions and Fletcher Pratt’s The Well of the Unicorn influenced Moorcock, as well, along with Mervyn Peake’s Steerpike in the Titus Groan trilogy, Poul Anderson’s Scafloc in The Broken Sword, T. H. White’s Lancelot in The Once and Future King, J. R. R. Tolkien’s cursed hero Túrin Turambar and Jane Gaskell’s Zerd in The Serpent (perhaps one day I’ll read all those works to see how Moorcock’s Elric measures up).

 

The Fortress of the Pearl is a novel length tale set between Elric of Melniboné and The Sailor on the Seas of Fate and introduces the concept of the dreamthief to Elric’s world, which he would later revisit in a trilogy beginning with The Dreamthief’s Daughter, which is also set up in the current novel. Fortress is quite different in tone from the earlier Elric novels, as it has a more philosophical bent and shows that Moorcock was capable of moving beyond a straight-forward hack-and-slash epic. While Oone (a dreamthief) and Elric pass through multiple dream realms which Oone explains are differentiated from each other, their adventures in any one realm do not last long enough to be fully explored, although their differences can be seen in Elric’s outlook as they seek the Pearl. These realms and adventures don’t have a dream-like quality for the reader, appearing to be just as real as any of Elric’s other adventures, just as dreams feel real while they are being dreamt. Between writing the main sequence of Elric novels and The Fortress of the Pearl, Moorcock not only underwent a change in writing style, but also a change in outlook, as Oone is Elric’s equal and the Melnibonéan emperor is almost a sidekick to her when she appears in the books.

 

The Sailor on the Seas of Fate is actually made up of three shorter stories; in each, Elric sails to some sort of alternate world and faces a supernatural threat. Others have said that this collection reads like an advertisement for Moorcock’s lesser-known characters, a kind of Elric and his Superfriends collection. I think this was more on par with Moorcock exploring his Eternal Champion concept and showing how interconnected his many characters were in his universe. As should be expected by now, Moorcock’s prose is great and Elric never fails to be interesting a protagonist. The tone is, perhaps, not what many fantasy readers will be used to, what with its dream-like cast, and if one reads it right after Elric of Melniboné they’ll becomes ever-more accustomed to Moorcock’s sometimes (ofttimes) overwrought style. On the other hand, it’s hard to deny that for casual readers who really couldn’t be bothered about the multiverse or what-have-you and expect instead to see some sort of motion in the world Moorcock constructed in the first novel, this sequel may be a baffling disappointment. None of the other Melnibonéans we were introduced to in Elric of Melniboné have anything to do with The Sailor on the Seas of Fate and, indeed, Elric’s meeting with Count Smiorgan is about the only impact Sailor has on the overarching plot of the series.

 

The Dreaming City features Elric’s quest to sack the last standing Melnibonéan city and rescue his lost love from the clutches of his evil cousin Yyrkoon, who has usurped the throne. Moorcock, it would appear, does not believe in Good vs. Evil, as the “heroes” are often as cruel and ruthless as the “villains”, and in City we have no Tolkienesque vision of light vs. dark (M. John Harrison, the English author and literary critic, once described Tolkien’s work as “stability and comfort and safe catharsis” – ouch!). While antiheroes are all the rage anymore, when Elric was introduced in 1961 he must have seemed like a freak; not only is he morally ambiguous, be didn’t follow the prototypes of fantasy heroes – no bulging muscles, brilliant swordplay, taciturn acceptance or virtuous actions. Elric is slight, his swordsmanship comes courtesy of his demon-sword, Stormbringer, he agonizes over everything and always does what’s best for himself. This is dystopian fantasy at its best: dark, bloody and devoid of simplistic moralizing, and I can’t imagine George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones existing without Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné.

 

While the Gods Laugh is set a further year into the future whence Elric has continued to travel the Young Kingdoms, although now as a wandering hermit rather than as an Emperor in search of wisdom. Throughout this rather slight tale (the second written by Moorcock), we find Elric, agent of the Gods of Chaos, seeking a kind of “uberGod” that controlled the warring factions of Law and Chaos (a concept which Moorcock would flesh out more in future stories as the “Cosmic Balance”). Despite our moody albino’s self-declared desire of solitude, his cynicism towards and distrust of Everyone and Everything, he has a tendency to become boon companions with several characters in the course of his adventures – whether Rackhir the Red in Elric of Melniboné, Smiorgan Baldhead in The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, or Moonglum of Elwher in While the Gods Laugh (won’t mention what happens to Shaarilla, though). More adventures, more violence and more morally ambiguous actions on the part of our protagonist awaits the reader within, as the character of Elric can’t help but fascinate and repel in equal measure.

 

The Singing Citadel allows Elric to come face-to-face with some of the consequences of the raid on Imrryr in The Dreaming City; two years have now passed, and Elric and Moonglum are trying to sneak into Dhakos, the capital city of Jharkor whose king, Dharmit, died in the initial attack on Immryr. Although the primary story is about a partnership between Elric and Queen Yishana of Jharkor (sister to Dharmit), in their quest to discover what is behind a strange fortress that has appeared in the hinterlands and is causing damage to cities and Jharkor soldiers to disappear, the real import of the story is that it introduces Yishana’s lover, the Pan Tangian sorcerer Theleb K’aarna, and makes him Elric’s rival, which will have lasting consequences. While it is questionable that the nation’s queen would ride on an expedition as dangerous as the one Yishana, Elric and Theleb K’aarna undertake, at least when Elric leaves Yishana, his reasons are understandable aside from his total disregard for women.

“Bulfinch’s Mythology”, by Thomas Bulfinch, introduction by Stephanie Lynn Budin

 

704 pages, Canterbury Classics, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1626861695

Anyone who wants to know anything about Western mythology must consult two works at least: Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes by Edith Hamilton (reviewed on August 4^th, 2022), and Bulfinch’s Mythology by Thomas Bulfinch, the American Latinist and banker. The book is a prose recounting of myths and stories from three European eras: tales and myths of the Greeks and Romans; Arthurian legends; and Medieval romances. Throughout all of the tales, Bulfinch inserted his own commentary along with quotations from writings by his contemporaries that refer to the myth in question, a novelty for the Victorian era. While many of his comments and observations are often interesting and full of keen observations, Bulfinch often also brings Christianity into the stories to the point of ridiculousness, even tediousness; how Christ and his Church had anything to do with Zeus/Jupiter and his thunderbolts was never made clear and was obviously pointless.

But, assuming one can look past that particular pointlessness, Bulfinch’s Mythology is an excellent collection of the myths that the ancient Greeks and Romans, and later Medieval men and women, told to one another. Bulfinch himself stated that his work was meant for the general reader – “a classical dictionary for the parlour” – and not for the dedicated scholar; in the preface to The Age of Fable he writes that “[o]ur work is not for the learned, nor for the theologian, nor for the philosopher, but for the reader of English literature, of either sex, who wishes to comprehend the allusions so frequently made by public speakers, lecturers, essayists, and poets, and those which occur in polite conversation” (perhaps this is why his Mythology ultimately displaced other, more scholarly works, such as Pantheon, Andrew Tooke’s 1698 translation of Pantheum Mysticum, which was François Pomey’s 1659 work in Latin).

Naturally, all is not well, for Bulfinch did do a lot of editing, and so many of the tales recounted are in fact abridgements of these classic myths; it would also appear that he pinched a great deal from Metamorphōsēs by Pūblius Ovidius Nāsō (Ovid). Nor did everyone appreciate the “poetical citations” he added to the stories, these being those examples of how these myths were used in English literature by some 40 poets, all of which – save for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell and Stephen Greenleaf (Bullfinch’s brother) – were British. But all this rather misses the point: by combining classical learning with then-modern, 19^th Century literature, Bulfinch sought to give his modern-day readers a way to connect such distant information to their contemporary lives, granting his audience a pathway to “useful knowledge” that, in turn, would enhance the pleasure in reading other works.

And…it worked, as sales of his Mythology were brisk then as well as now. Imperfect and incomplete, Bulfinch’s work is still a necessary addition to anyone wanting to know more about the myths of ancient Europeans. I’m sure there are better, more complete collections to be found, but why not start with a classic and move on from there?

“Invisible Man”, by Ralph Ellison

 

581 pages, Vintage Books, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0679732761

Invisible Man was written by Ralph Ellison in 1952 – when Systematic Racism was really a thing – and addresses many of the social and intellectual issues faced by African Americans in the early 20^th Century, including black nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marxism and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington, as well as issues of individuality and personal identity. So there’s a lot going on here. But perhaps its most important detail is its different direction; Ellison himself noted that before Invisible Man many (if not most) novels dealing with African Americans were written solely for social protest – most notably Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Native Son by Richard Wright – whereas Invisible Man’s chief significance was its “experimental attitude” in which the black narrator signals a break from the normal protest novel: “I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either”. Ellison thought of his work not by a black American writer, but rather by an American writer who happened to be black. From an essay he wrote he states explicitly:

 

Why is it so often true that when critics confront the American as Negro they suddenly drop their advanced critical armament and revert with an air of confident superiority to quite primitive modes of analysis? Why is it that Sociology-oriented critics seem to rate literature so far below politics and ideology that they would rather kill a novel than modify their presumptions concerning a given reality which it seeks in its own terms to project? Finally, why is it that so many of those who would tell us the meaning of Negro life never bother to learn how varied it really is?

 

Invisible Man begins with the narrator (an unnamed black man) describing his living conditions: an underground room wired with hundreds of electric lights operated by power stolen from the city’s electric grid. He reflects on the various ways in which he has experienced social invisibility during his life and begins to tell his story, returning to his teenage years where he lives in a small Southern town. Upon graduating from high school, he wins a scholarship to an all-black college but, to receive it, he must first take part in a brutal, humiliating battle royal for the entertainment of the town’s rich white dignitaries. One afternoon during his junior year at the college, the narrator chauffeurs Mr. Norton, a visiting rich white trustee, out among the old slave-quarters beyond the campus where they stop at the cabin of Jim Trueblood, who has caused a scandal by impregnating both his wife and his daughter in his sleep. Trueblood’s account horrifies Mr. Norton so badly that he asks the narrator to find him a drink, and s the narrator drives him to a bar filled with prostitutes and patients from a nearby mental hospital.

The mental patients rail against both of them and eventually overwhelm the orderly assigned to keep the patients under control, injuring Mr. Norton in the process. The narrator hurries Mr. Norton away from the chaotic scene and back to campus, where Dr. Bledsoe, the college president, excoriates the narrator for showing Mr. Norton the underside of black life beyond the campus and expels him. However, Bledsoe gives several sealed letters of recommendation to the narrator to be delivered to friends of the college in order to assist him in finding a job so that he may eventually earn enough to re-enroll. The narrator travels to New York and distributes his letters with no success (the reason becoming clear when the son of one recipient shows him the letter, which reveals Bledsoe’s intent to never admit the narrator as a student again). Acting on the son’s suggestion, the narrator seeks work at the Liberty Paint factory, renowned for its pure white paint. He is assigned first to the shipping department, then to the boiler room, whose chief attendant, Lucius Brockway, is highly paranoid and suspects that the narrator is trying to take his job.

This distrust worsens after the narrator stumbles into a union meeting and Brockway attacks the narrator and tricks him into setting off an explosion in the boiler room. The narrator is hospitalized and subjected to shock treatment, where he overhears the doctor’s discussion of him as a possible mental patient. After leaving the hospital, the narrator faints on the streets of Harlem and is taken in by Mary Rambo, a kindly old-fashioned woman who reminds him of his relatives in the South. Later, the narrator later happens across the eviction of an elderly black couple and makes an impassioned speech that incites the crowd to attack the law enforcement officials in charge of the proceedings; he escapes over the rooftops and is confronted by Brother Jack, the leader of a group known as “The Brotherhood” that professes its commitment to bettering conditions in Harlem and the rest of the world; at Jack’s urging, the narrator agrees to join and speak at rallies to spread the word among the black community. Using his new salary, he pays Mary back the rent he owes her and moves into an apartment provided by the Brotherhood.

The rallies go smoothly at first, with the narrator receiving extensive indoctrination on the Brotherhood’s ideology and methods; soon, though, he encounters trouble from Ras the Exhorter, a fanatical black nationalist who believes that the Brotherhood is controlled by whites. Neither the narrator nor Tod Clifton, a youth leader within the Brotherhood, is particularly swayed by his words. The narrator is later called before a meeting of the Brotherhood and accused of putting his own ambitions ahead of the group, whence he is reassigned to another part of the city to address issues concerning women; there, he is seduced by the wife of a Brotherhood member and eventually called back to Harlem, when Clifton is reported missing and the Brotherhood’s membership and influence begin to falter. The narrator can find no trace of Clifton at first, but soon discovers him selling dancing Sambo dolls on the street, having become disillusioned with the Brotherhood. Clifton is shot and killed by a policeman while resisting arrest; at his funeral, the narrator delivers a rousing speech that rallies the crowd to support the Brotherhood again.

At an emergency meeting, Jack and the other Brotherhood leaders criticize the narrator for his unscientific arguments and the narrator determines that the group has no real interest in the black community’s problems. From there the narrator returns to Harlem, trailed by Ras’ men, and buys a hat and a pair of sunglasses to elude them; as a result, he is repeatedly mistaken for a man named Rinehart, known as a lover, hipster, gambler, briber and a spiritual leader. Understanding that Rinehart has adapted to white society at the cost of his own identity, the narrator resolves to undermine the Brotherhood by feeding them dishonest information concerning the Harlem membership and situation. After seducing the wife of one member in a fruitless attempt to learn their new activities, he discovers that riots have broken out in Harlem due to widespread unrest, realizing that the Brotherhood has been counting on such an event in order to further its own aims. The narrator gets mixed up with a gang of looters who burn down a tenement and wanders away to find Ras, now on horseback, armed with a spear and shield and calling himself “the Destroyer”.

Ras shouts for the crowd to lynch the narrator, but the narrator attacks him with the spear and escapes into an underground coal bin. Two white men seal him in, leaving him alone to ponder the racism he has experienced in his life…The epilogue returns to the present, with the narrator stating that he is ready to return to the world because he has spent enough time hiding from it. He explains that he has told his story in order to help people see past his own invisibility, and also to provide a voice for people with a similar plight: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”

“The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination”, by Daniel J. Boorstin

 

811 pages, Random House, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0394543956

I reviewed The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself by Daniel J. Boorstin on May 21^st, 2019, so it was inevitable that I would get to The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination sooner or later (The Seekers is on my radar, too). The late Daniel J. Boorstin was a professor of history at the University of Chicago and the 12^th Librarian of Congress – and somewhat old school, considering that he praises Western history and thought to the hilt. Unlike The Discoverers, which was an original work of history, The Creators is rather a collation and summation of other sources about Western culture. Composite books of this sort can evoke different reactions in the reader: if one has read up on the subject at hand and has at least a passing familiarity with it, then you won’t learn much new about it; if one has not read up on the subject in question and is coming to it as a beginner, then much of what you read here should prove to be interesting and even revelatory, and perhaps whet your appetite for more. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.

That is the overall vibe I get from The Creators: that it is a rather glorified reference work on the history of ideas, the evolution of music, the development of writing and the progress of painting in the West (the East and all other points on the compass are really not delt with).  However, if one reads The Creators seeking insight into the lives, personalities and motivations of the Creator in question they will be sorely disappointed, for Boorstin’s focus is more on the end results of these artists – the music created, the paintings painted, the works written – than on the men behind them. Oh, don’t get me wrong: the self-contained essays on these giants of the Western Canon – Dante, Shakespeare, Proust, Franklin, Kafka, to name just a few – are as good as you would expect from Boorstin. But while Boorstin is an excellent essayist and gatherer of knowledge, I rather suspect that he was out of his depth in attempting to describe the creative drive of these artists. While the motivations, shortcomings and egos of each subject is examined, they are done so without much input onto their effect on the whole of their work.

If The Creators whets the appetite of a prospective scholar to seek out and discover more on a particular subject then more power to them; indeed, if that was Boorstin’s purpose in writing it then he succeeded. But it is not an end unto itself, and those seeking a more in-depth analysis on any of the people or topics covered therein would do well to look elsewhere.

“Before the Poison” by Peter Robinson

 

368 pages, William Morrow, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0062004796

If it hadn’t been for the Mysteries & Munchies book club at the Fraser Public Library, I doubt very much that I would have even looked twice at Peter Robinson’s Before the Poison, which just proves that I have to expand my literary horizons, for this work, while moseying around at its own pace toward its (not too-terribly shocking) conclusion, was a good read that kept me interested until the moment I closed the cover for the last time. In this, his 31^st novel (if I counted right), we find movie composer Chris Lowndes returning to his native Yorkshire after the death of his wife Laura; upon taking possession of the isolated Kilnsgate House, he finds himself fascinated – if not obsessed – with the previous owner, Grace Fox, who was executed in 1953 for poisoning her husband…or did she? As Lowndes discovers more about the enigmatic Grace, he finds it impossible to believe that this Queen Alexandra’s nurse and recipient of the Royal Red Cross medal murdered her husband, and sets out to discover the truth behind this long-dormant mystery.

As I said earlier, Robinson’s tale moves along at its own, meandering pace, but for all that I never once felt bored or impatient with his tale; perhaps it was because Robinson alternated his story of the present-day – circa 2010-11 – with a contemporary account of Grace’s trial through the first half and with excepts of Grace’s wartime journals through the second. Broke up the story, a bit. But without spoiling the plot, I have to say I found the ending to be…unsatisfying. I don’t necessarily need an M. Night Shyamalan twist at the end of my mysteries, but I do like my mysteries to be…mysterious. And Before the Poison didn’t really feel that way. It just seemed like the tale of a grieving man and his inner-search for meaning, of guilt – both personal and collective – sacrifice and redemption, all of which made for a good story. But not a thriller, or a suspenseful tale. And as for the “twist” at the end…eh, it seemed more tacked-on than the logical conclusion to a mystery – a rather unsatisfying mystery, at that.

So for all that, I found Before the Poison to be a rather interesting if unsatisfying read, and just wish that any future mysteries I read will have more mystery to them.

“Fatherland”, by Robert Harris

 

338 pages, Random House, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0679412731

Fatherland is a detective novel by English writer and journalist Robert Harris. Set in an alternative 1964 in which Nazi Germany won World War II, the story’s protagonist is Xavier March, a U-boat veteran and an officer of the Kriminalpolizei (the Criminal Police, “Kripo” for short), who is investigating the murder of one Josef Bühler, a Nazi government official who participated in the Wannsee Conference, in which the Final Solution to the Jewish Question – that is, the murder of all Jews everywhere – was decided. The central conceit of Fatherland is that the familiar pattern of history – the Allies won, the Axis lost and justice was served – is not necessarily the only pattern; in reality, there is no such thing as destiny, no outcome is inevitable and the forces of evil are just as likely to win as the forces of good.

In Harris’ dystopian world in which the swastika flies over all of Europe, German forces were victorious everywhere, driving what is left of the Soviet Union beyond the Ural Mountains, bringing North Africa and the Middle East under its boot and forcing the rest of Europe into an alliance of satellite states, Britain included, what with its King Edward VIII and Queen Wallis. While the United States cannot be defeated, with the surrender of the UK, D-Day doesn’t happen. The conceit behind the book is a nightmarish one: not only that the Nazis have won, but that, with the old leaders dead or ageing and a smoother new generation taking over, détente with this monstrous regime becomes necessary – monstrous, because with nothing to stop them, Nazi plans and desires carry on to their horrible, inevitable conclusions.

Fatherland was clearly influenced by Orwell’s 1984, every writer’s template for the workings of a totalitarian society: Germany is in a state of perpetual war with the hordes of Russia, while on a personal level March’s son is a Proper Li’l Nazi. But this Nazi state is not the perfect tyranny of Orwell’s nightmares, where even the most private rebellion is inevitably noticed by the authorities: American radio stations are prevalent, the urban youth grow their hair long and wear unconventional clothes and, although pop music is deplored, even the Beatles have played in Hamburg. This is, after all, a work of alternative history, not allegory. Harris also twists the genre of the police procedural in which the police detective has been transposed into a nightmare situation: to find out the terrible truth that has been hidden from Germans as well as from the rest of the world.

The best speculative fiction focuses on the pursuit of small but multiple differences; while Fatherland is not the first work of fiction to imagine the Germans as victors in World War II it is, perhaps, unique in the author’s dedication to fleshing out just what this nightmare world may have looked like. Thank God the Good Guys won in real life.