Brilliant completion
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I've just finished reading the two volumes of Elric stories from Elric of Melnibone onwards. I must say they build and build until the final, cataclysmic ending. The ending is stunning. I knew enough about the books to expect them to be different, but not THIS different. These are so much better, richer, smarter than the run of fantasy fiction that there really is no comparison. Moorcock is a genius! I can't recommend this series enthusiastically enough.
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SARDONIC HUMOUR
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There is very little Moorcock which doesn't have a bit of irony. His work has had this same sardonic humour from the very beginning, as you can see from the earliest work in this book which otherwise contains the three best Elric novels out of four and the fourth is The Dreamthief's Daughter. Elric himself has the same sardonic self-mockery. That's what appeals to me. There aren't many modern fantasy writers who can even begin to approach that tone. It's why he remains the best antidote to sentimentality with that self-knowing wink of his.
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The Real Thing
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Marvellous stuff, still streets ahead of anything out there -- but Philip Pullman has the same sort of mindset. Elric, exiled traitor and wife-killer, proud Prince of Ruins, adept sorcerer and swordsman, who carries the bewitched runesword Stormbringer, begins this book in a series of early adventures, clearly written as individual novellas, but then you start getting into the real meat -- Revenge of the Rose is a superb fantasy, head and shoulders above any of its contemporaries, and offers us, as well as poetic parodies and the like, wonderful images of the Gypsy Nation, perpetually trundling round the world and speaking the rhetoric of freedom while having become a total orthodoxy, the gigantic clock made up of human beings who will perish if any one of them makes a mistake -- and Moorcock is off at full throttle. Every scene has ironic meaning. A couple of minor stories (Kings in Darkness, The Caravan of Forgotten Dreams) and we're into the lush, manic rush to Armageddon that is STORMBRINGER! Still the greatest plot on the planet and the best ending in all fantasy fiction! Long before Pullman won the Whitbread Moorcock was offering this mad, bad and thoroughly humane fantasy to the world. He remains a giant. One word of advice -- buy this and not the Fantasy Masterworks edition, which is not good value and doesn't really give you the build-up which Moorcock artfully introduced with intermediary books, all relentlessly leading that dark, astonishing ending. You might want to stop off after Caravan of Forgotten Dreams and read The Dreamthief's Daughter, the latest singleton where Elric takes on the Nazis!
You'll believe it when you read it!
Wonderful energy. Marvellous ideas. Tremendous landscapes. Massive emotions. Yet somehow reality is never far away. In a great British tradition.
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Farewell friend, I was a thousand times more evil then thou
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Moorcock's Eternal Champion Books are a parody unto themselves: on the one hand they are repetative and often tedious, but on the other they are highly imaginative, profound, well crafted and beatifully written. Its always the same; Chaos threatens to overwhelm the world and only the Champion can save it, which he invariably does. Between the lines is where you find the diversity of the stories and the incredible mythology which seems to dwarf even Tolkiens Middle Earth. Hawkmoon might have a better world, and Corum a better story, but no character comes close to Elric. He is our hero and this book is Elric at his best, and the climax..! Read this and read them all
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Word-play more than world-building
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While Moorcock's multiverse is very, very easy to visualise, given its dimensions (or lack of them) there's another element in his work which few people seem to mention -- and that's the word-play. Often through the mouth of his invented poet Wheldrake (Swinburne's pseudonym)
he produces excellent parodies of Swinburne himself and various other (mainly) Victorian poets. Even in his earliest Elric novel he was introducing rhymed couplets into the dialogue and by the time we get to Revenge of the Rose and The Dreamthief's Daughter the level of invention is very high, with some sequences actually written in rhyme but printed as prose. His sophistication is most obvious in Gloriana, where he wrote a variety of qualities of verse in the manner of various
16th century poets or poetic styles, but his relish for full-blooded romantic poets (though there is some good Browning here, too) is usually expressed through his poet character Ernest Wheldrake, who has been appearing in Moorcock's works since The Dancers at the End of Time. This weird sleight of hand, often drawing your attention away from the author's skill, is the work of a gentleman who knows exactly what he's writing, no matter how apparently weird or seemingly simple! Have a look for yourself in
Revenge which, with Stormbringer, is his finest Elric book so far. Once you've read the saga and gasped at the finest ending in all fantasy you can go back and savour the subtleties. Moorcock says these are entertainments. If so, it's a very high level of entertainment.
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