Tracking Michael Moorcock Through Part of His Multiverse
It is hard to tell when and where Moorcocks's Eternal Champion archetype
emerges. That is wholly fitting given the nature of his multiverse.
There is an argument that The Eternal Champion represents the quintessence of the
concept or at least a clue to its personal and 'philosophical' origins. Erekose
never achieved the fan allegiance that other manifestations of the
archetype achieved, most notably Elric of Melnibone, Jerry Cornelius,
Duke Hawkmoon, Corum Jhaelen Irsei, Pyat or Graf von Bek but then we
might expect that from an early experimental run.
The novel was
published in 1970 but it owes its origin to a Novella of 1962 written
when Moorcock was only 23 years old and already drawing the lineaments
of what many genre writers offer us - a private obsession with a
universe (here a multiverse) and a particular narrative approach. Elric
and Hawkmoon, even Cornelius, would precede Erekose in the canon but
Erekose feels as if it contains the authentic origin of all subsequent
iterations and it has been unjustly neglected perhaps because of its
relative simplicity. There are traces evidently of work from as far back
as 1956. The work starts with a fantasy cliche of the man drawn
from his mundane world into the fantastic. Erekose's alter ego is a
shadowy ordinary man of the twentieth century, John Daker, and he
emerges as the Eternal Champion much as John Carter emerges in Barsoom.
Similarly,
the archetype involves derivative complications of chivalry and
advanced weaponry as the book draws to its close with the Jungian love
triangle that most men will understand between Erekose and two women who
represent different appreciations of noble love. The core of
the book, however, owes a great deal to what we might call the
'Nietzsche Mythos' - the eternal return, man caught between animal and
divine, the price of looking into the abyss, man as blonde beast (though
the hero is black), the aristocratic ethics of choice and honour. The
writing is clear and, for once in fantasy, Moorcock takes us away from
the William Morris of thees and thous and archaisms and presents us with
a brutal aristocratic society and relations between persons that are
surprisingly realistic within the constraints of an alternative world.
The
subject of the novel, is, frankly genocide and duty and it might be
seen as a reflection on the 'morality' of national socialist ideology
without mentioning it once. It is about the struggle for survival and
perception of threat from the 'other'. In this case, the human
race shares Earth with the Eldren, a stoical alien human-like species
that is positioned by humanity as loathsome and dangerous and which
humanity must extirpate if it is tself to survive. The Eldren appear to
lack the will to power of humanity. The Eternal Champion emerges
by sorcery to lead Humanity's genocidal destiny and the dynamic between
the faint remaining traces of John Daker and the aristocratic-warrior
ruthlessness of Erekose drive the plot to a possibly expected but tragic
conclusion.
The reasoning here is that war is intrinsic to
Humanity which is not the case for the Eldren who are perhaps only a few
stages removed from Tolkien's Elves and who are, in fact, more advanced
in many ways than their enemy, defensive by nature and preferring death
to dishonour and crime. Humanity talks of honour but is brutal
and Machiavellian while claiming it is the Eldren that are the very
things that they are - vicious, proud, self-deluding, paranoiac, filled
with blood-lust and murderous. Aristocratic forms are just intruments of
power rather than expressions of value. The realisation dawns
that the human condition is one of eternal strife and that Humanity
needs an enemy to hate in order to be united. If it does not have such
an enemy, then it will war on itself. It is a grim and pessimistic view
of our species that may be disturbingly accurate.
Erekose sloughs
off his John Daker personality but can only do so by adopting the role
of Erekose as Humanity's champion, a role which requires him to become a
cold genocidal figure almost to the end. Millions die to allow him to
discover what is right and what is wrong. The process could be
seen as an existentialist tension between the man who is destined to
become a role by the pressure of his species (or society in our world)
and the man who learns that he can eventually have a choice and cease to
be nothing more than his role.
The love triangle is also
intriguing in this context. His first love is a creature of the social -
a magnificent queen but one whose love is given or not given according
to whether he delivers what society needs or not. If he retains his
genocidal role, he gets the queen as wife. His second love is a
Eldren princess who may be a manipulator (the claims of Humans may prove
to be right in the end) but also represents an unconditional love
apparently resigned to loss and destruction rather than betray its moral
condition.
Jung's argument that alpha men need two women which
may be unpalatable to many has its truth. In this case, we have woman as
social order but conditional in her love or unconditional romance
although Moorcock allows one to win and one to lose which is not in the
spirit of Jung's insight. The psychological core of the Eternal
Champion, written in accessible language yet demonstrated in an alien
world, the classic genre thought experiment, is an appreciation of male
yearning to be hero, to have meaning, to make choices from strength and
to have unconditional love.
The grim and probably justifiable
pessimism about our species is balanced by a coded analogical suggestion
that all these things that are yearned for may not be impossible for
the individual (even though, in the real world, they probably are or at
least only partially achievable). A fine book that helps set the
parameters for the huge corpus of Moorcock's eternal champion stories
under other names and not a bad place to start even before Elric,
Cornelius and Hawkmoon. It should settle on the mind in dreams and
perhaps quietly weave its magic on the ordinary.
If you like this brand of sword and sorcery fantasy, then Elric of Melnibone (who first appeared in a story in 1962 ands so is part of the creation myth of Moorcock's multiverse) is one of
the great texts after Conan and the Old Testament of Tolkien. Even if you
only skim the genre, then this quasi-fascistic fantasy (aren't so many
of them wonderfully politically incorrect) of magic, blood and swords
with names and bloodlines is probably the ones to read. This is, of course, adolescent stuff when it becomes divorced from the sensitivity of The Eternal Champion - but find the inner boy
and enjoy it (especially if you are a girl and fancy yourself in the mode of Red Sonja). Incidentally, Moorcock actively campaigned against fantasy literature that treated women as mere sex objects. He is a grown up in this respect.
Behold the Man would have had Moorcock burnt at the stake alongside Giordano
Bruno if he had written it in the sixteenth century. It postulates a
science fiction explanation of the Passion story that sits alongside the
'Life of Brian' as one of those moments, numerous since that
era of stake-burning, when Western liberal culture removed itself emotionally
rather than just intellectually from the Christian tradition. Already it
seems dated as 'shock' since we now live in times when the shock comes
from a new acceptance of irrationality and faith rather than the collapse of faith - but it is crisply written
and less lost in the sometimes alienating extreme disordered fantasy of some of his other
work.
Gloriana, on the other hand, is another book that shows that Moorcock could both write and think. This
Gothic Elizabethan fantasy shows an alternate world (in which Moorcock
specialises) which clearly, consciously or not in his successors' cases,
is part of the same fantasy complexes of Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman
and the American Tim Powers. This is not steam-punk perhaps but
sail-punk. Hidden within the folds of the story (Moorcock
folds his stories in time and space like the folds of a rose) are some
serious ruminations on power and myth, a theme running through so many
of his works. In this case, the myth is that of Albion and what it is to
be British - things never stated, only entered by stealth into the
readers' soul.
Alan Moore does similar things in his graphic
work. There is a school here of occult trickster nationalism (benign not malign)
exploiting the global market in a world of paradox and mirrors. John
Dee, it would seem, still lives in the darker recesses of Anglo culture. American
capital so often transforms these myths into worldwide phenomena - as
we have seen with Angelina Jolie's appearance in Beowulf - but one day
somebody clever will expose its quiet influence on why so many Britons have
come to think so little of their leaders ... and why Americans still do
not really understand their closest ally. Paradox and trickery ... a
great book.
The War Hound and the World's Pain is another fantasy classic of war and of dealings with the forces of darkness [though with Moorcock's usual ambiguity] in the Eternal Chamion multiverse. The violence of early modern central europe and the reality of knightly values pulls the fantasy-fascism of Elric down to earth and sharpens the sense of what cruelty really is. It is certainly a high point in Moorcock's fluctuating canon. The first of the long Von Beck cycle which weakens with time.
War again. The War Amongst the Angels is not one of Moorcock's best. He does tend to churn them out at times. Although part of one of his long cycles (also the Von Bek cycle) that are only for true dedicatees, this book can also be read as part of the English fantasy genre that arose out of Milton's Paradise Lost with every 'goth-minded' schoolboy thrilled at Satan's line, 'Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven'. This isn't the transgression of American libertarianism but is embedded in English culture as the struggle between God and the Light-Bringer.
Milton's unintended effect was to build a glamorous lobby for resisting faith-based pretensions in every generation that had grown up under the old school curriculum. Moorcock's book contains the usual oddities and incoherences and assumes more suspension of belief than is good for anyone trying to maintain their sanity - but it is worth reading as an entertaining way station to the Pullman trilogy (two parts genius, one part abject failure). This genre may now have exhausted itself but Moorcock played his role in keeping a dissenting cultural tradition alive as (insofar as the fantasy genre is regarded with disdain) literary samizdat.
The Vengeance Of Rome is the fourth of four novels and bear in mind that I have not read the others - but it stands alone as one of the most remarkable attempts to get inside the mind of the idealistic European fascist. It contains one of the most disgusting sex-scenes in contemporary literature and there are occasional moments of obscure linguistic invention but if you get past the first ten pages, I think you are in for a treat and will find it hard to put down. A basic knowledge of early twentieth century European history will help a great deal but is not required. Pyat (another Eternal Champion) is naive, the worst sort of idealist, but only Moorcock can insidiously get away with making romantic fascism and national socialism come alive. A truly transgressive novelist even if the closing pages (no spoilers here) look like a necessary cop-out ...