397 pages, White Wolf Publishing, ISBN-13:
978-1565041820
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. Corum: The
Coming of Chaos was the seventh in this series featuring the character
Corum Jhaelen Irsei, “The Prince in the Scarlet Robe”, and includes the tales The
Knight of the Swords, The Queen of the Swords and The King of the
Swords. Corum Jhaelen Irsei is an incarnation of the
Eternal Champion and the last survivor of the Vadhagh race (perhaps a stand-in
for elves?).
The first novel, The Knight of the Swords, finds Corum as his life of leisure is shattered when Glandyth a Krae, chieftain of the Mabden (Men; Humans; y’know, US), slaughters his entire family. Corum is captured, tortured and mutilated when his hand is cut off and his eye is put out; after his escape, utilizing his racial powers, his quest for vengeance against the Mabden and their creator gods, the Sword Rulers, begins. That’s the book in a nutshell, and I won’t spoil it more with any other details. At a mere 200 pages (in this omnibus volume, at least), Moorcock manages to tell a tale tight with action and detail. There’s precious-little character development or in-depth examinations of anyone’s motivations – beyond Corum’s quest for revenge and the Mabden’s desire for the destruction of all things Vadhagh – for Moorcock has a world to describe and things to destroy. It’s all GO GO GO, man, and get out of my way ‘cause I have yet another poetic imagery piece to get down on paper. There’s a lot of build-up to The Prince in the Scarlet Robe’s revenge-quest: Corum is lost; Corum is rescued; Corum falls in love; Corum loses a fight; Corum wins a fight…and so on and so forth. It does make one wonder why Corum was never revisited by Moorcock in a more significant manner; I guess that some characters just make more of a splash than others, with their creator along with the audience. All of the Corum books were published in 1971, so this collection feels rather more natural than some of the other omnibus editions in this collection; furthermore, as Moorcock had by now several works under his belt at this juncture, his writing seems rather more self-assured in these books.
In the second novel, The Queen of the Swords, we find Xiombarg (a Greater God and one of the Lords of Chaos, known as the “Queen of the Swords”…but then you knew that) winning a battle against the humanoid inhabitants in the planes over which she rules. The fight soon enough spills out into Corum’s plane, sending Prince Gaynor the Damned to direct the barbarian armies. Corum, with gal-pal Rhalina and the just-discovered Jhary-a-Conel (an incarnation of Jerry Cornelius who is also another incarnation of the Eternal Champion. Naturally), crosses the planes and find a world claimed by Chaos and looks it, with adventures and fights and blood galore. As with Knight, Queen is fast-paced in which lots of stuff happens with barely a moment to catch one’s breath; also as with Knight, Queen has precious-little character development or complex ideas. Its strength lies in the descriptions of the strange plain on which Xiombarg fights in which the main action occurs, poetical descriptors being Moorcock’s forte – speaking of which, Xiombarg, as a villain, is pretty lame: for a Greater God of Chaos she doesn’t do much but threaten and shout and appear cool but menacing (if the art is anything to go by), but she is dealt with rather easily…all-in-all a rather weak villain. The other fights in the book were much more interesting, especially the weird stuff with the warrior cursed by Balance. And the take on Chaos in this book seemed to differ from other books in Moorcock’s universe, as Chaos is not necessarily Evil and Law is not necessarily Good; they are merely two opposing forces seeking to dominate in their own fashion; here, Chaos is unabashedly equated with Evil and, thus, threw me for a philosophical loop.
Finally, in the third novel, The King of the Swords, we find that Corum’s peace is destroyed by a great spell – The Cloud of Contention – that sets everyone against each other: the inhabitants of the Sky City turn on each other, the forces of Law are broken again and Corum and his companions must travel in a sky boat across the planes to find out what the hell is happening. This is the end of the first trilogy starring The Prince in the Scarlet Robe, everybody’s favorite Vadhagh Prince (the second trilogy is reprinted in the twelfth book in this series, Corum The Prince with the Silver Hand, which will of course be reviewed in due time). This novel is rather weird as Moorcock really delves the complex cosmology of his Multiverse and exploring just what makes Chaos and Law tick, who and what the Eternal Champion is and how it all is interconnected. Deep Stuff, man. All sorts of different-but-connected dimensions are bounced-into and just as quickly bounced-out of (even more than the 15 actually named in this book) and we also are treated to a variety of Guest Appearances of other incarnations of the Eternal Champion (Corum meeting Elric here acts as a kind of counterweight to when Elric met Corum in The Sailors on the Seas of Fate). Yeah, there’s a lot going on in this short book, as should be expected by now.
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