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paracyclops's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
This omnibus contains the four main novels of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius sequence: The Final programme, A cure for cancer, The English assassin, and The Condition of Muzak. Jerry is one of the incarnations of the Eternal Champion, popularly described as a science-fiction super-spy, but he's much more than that. Moorcock describes him as a 'method' rather than a character, and as such was happy for his contemporaries to make use of him in their own work, which some of them did. Jerry was the way that Moorcock got himself from being a professional manufacturer of commercial genre fiction, feeling that he was already washed up in his mid twenties (after writing enough words for an ordinary career), to being someone with a truly unique voice and a demanding creative agenda (which he is still working through today). Fortunately for him, these books were lauded by forward-thinking parts of the mainstream literary establishment in Britain, and he has since been more or less free to pursue his literary interests rather than writing strictly to market.
So, these would be difficult, serious, literary science-fiction novels, then? Well, yes and no. They are quite difficult to follow, if you're expecting a straightforward narrative, they are in some senses extremely serious, and sure, they're 'literary', if by that you mean that they're written with close attention to language, style, character, and atmosphere. They are also fabulously hip, viciously satirical, and full of cheap laughs—'I think I feel a little crook' says an Australian nun, rummaging in the undergarments of Bishop Beesley, one of the recurring supporting cast. Jerry Cornelius is mostly male, but he really has no fixed gender or sexuality—or other kind of identity, in fact, as much of this text concerns his attempts to stabilise an identity, or others' attempts to manipulate it. He moves freely between iterations of twentieth-century history, having sex seemingly at random, murdering people without rancour (in the explicit expectation that they'll crop up again in some later scene), flitting between the forms of a post-colonial soldier of fortune, the owner-proprietor of a vast, impractical flying boat, a working-class layabout in 1960s Notting Hill, a variously bad or good musician, a successful (but definitively cracked) actor, and several others, with no causal relationship to one another. Along the way, somehow, Moorcock invents steampunk, as one of the many versions of the world that Jerry finds himself in. It is quite hard to pin down exactly what Jerry Cornelius's cultural influence has been, but it's real, and on a superficial level it ranges from David Bowie (who basically adopted the Cornelius persona wholesale) to the ersatz groovy spy Austin Powers.
The books are very entertaining, but they are also very disturbing. If they remain faithful to fantastical literature's prime directive of providing escapism (as John Clute says in the introduction), they also provide a continual reiteration of what it is we might need to escape from. There is a constant stream of references to obscenities of the sort that can be read in the news every day—child murders, war crimes, and so forth. The first three books were published during the Vietnam War, and it is a constant presence in the series, as is the general willingness of 'gods and masters' to buy their desires in the coin of terrible suffering. Moorcock is an anarchist, and that political philosophy doesn't emerge in obvious ways here—it's not a story about a group of heroic freedom fighters sticking it to the man. It emerges in much more fundamental, subtle, and dare I say it, structural ways.
Anyone looking for a gripping multiverse yarn (e.g. something accessible, like Bryan Talbot's Luther Arkwright, or Iain M. Banks' Transition) will be disappointed—Moorcock's narratives are as fractured as his multiverse, frequently restarting repeatedly in different iterations of possible twentieth-century histories—and although The Final programme has a coherent plotline, read as a part of the quartet (which Moorcock suggests should be treated as a single large novel), it doesn't detract from the swirling, phantasmagoric confusion of the whole. I found it more or less impossible to follow the narrative threads—in part because I was suffering from a Covid-19 fever when I finished the book. Instead I just floated on it, drifting from scene to scene and enjoying their particular moods and colours. Given that the final volume's title is a witty reference to Walter Pater's assertion that 'all art aspires to the condition of music', this seemed an appropriate way to tackle these books.
So, these would be difficult, serious, literary science-fiction novels, then? Well, yes and no. They are quite difficult to follow, if you're expecting a straightforward narrative, they are in some senses extremely serious, and sure, they're 'literary', if by that you mean that they're written with close attention to language, style, character, and atmosphere. They are also fabulously hip, viciously satirical, and full of cheap laughs—'I think I feel a little crook' says an Australian nun, rummaging in the undergarments of Bishop Beesley, one of the recurring supporting cast. Jerry Cornelius is mostly male, but he really has no fixed gender or sexuality—or other kind of identity, in fact, as much of this text concerns his attempts to stabilise an identity, or others' attempts to manipulate it. He moves freely between iterations of twentieth-century history, having sex seemingly at random, murdering people without rancour (in the explicit expectation that they'll crop up again in some later scene), flitting between the forms of a post-colonial soldier of fortune, the owner-proprietor of a vast, impractical flying boat, a working-class layabout in 1960s Notting Hill, a variously bad or good musician, a successful (but definitively cracked) actor, and several others, with no causal relationship to one another. Along the way, somehow, Moorcock invents steampunk, as one of the many versions of the world that Jerry finds himself in. It is quite hard to pin down exactly what Jerry Cornelius's cultural influence has been, but it's real, and on a superficial level it ranges from David Bowie (who basically adopted the Cornelius persona wholesale) to the ersatz groovy spy Austin Powers.
The books are very entertaining, but they are also very disturbing. If they remain faithful to fantastical literature's prime directive of providing escapism (as John Clute says in the introduction), they also provide a continual reiteration of what it is we might need to escape from. There is a constant stream of references to obscenities of the sort that can be read in the news every day—child murders, war crimes, and so forth. The first three books were published during the Vietnam War, and it is a constant presence in the series, as is the general willingness of 'gods and masters' to buy their desires in the coin of terrible suffering. Moorcock is an anarchist, and that political philosophy doesn't emerge in obvious ways here—it's not a story about a group of heroic freedom fighters sticking it to the man. It emerges in much more fundamental, subtle, and dare I say it, structural ways.
Anyone looking for a gripping multiverse yarn (e.g. something accessible, like Bryan Talbot's Luther Arkwright, or Iain M. Banks' Transition) will be disappointed—Moorcock's narratives are as fractured as his multiverse, frequently restarting repeatedly in different iterations of possible twentieth-century histories—and although The Final programme has a coherent plotline, read as a part of the quartet (which Moorcock suggests should be treated as a single large novel), it doesn't detract from the swirling, phantasmagoric confusion of the whole. I found it more or less impossible to follow the narrative threads—in part because I was suffering from a Covid-19 fever when I finished the book. Instead I just floated on it, drifting from scene to scene and enjoying their particular moods and colours. Given that the final volume's title is a witty reference to Walter Pater's assertion that 'all art aspires to the condition of music', this seemed an appropriate way to tackle these books.
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