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A review by paracyclops
Dancers at the End of Time by Michael Moorcock
adventurous
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
lighthearted
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Of all Michael Moorcock's 'Eternal Champion' books, this is probably the funniest. It has relatively few overt references to his grand framing narrative, although its protagonist, Jherek Carnelian, is very clearly an incarnation of the spirit that animates Elric, Corum, Hawkmoon, von Bek, and Jerry Cornelius—a recurring joke has other characters deciding to call him Jerry. The story is a multi-levelled satire, lampooning the values of the affluent post-war generation, those of the Victorian era that still loomed large for them, the popular science-fiction idea of a post-scarcity society, and even the liberated values of the 60s counterculture to which Moorcock was largely aligned. Carnelian, a native of the human race's final historical epoch, travels through time, and encounters time travellers in his own epoch, in both cases completely failing to understand the things they do and say, or their reasons for doing and saying them. Moorcock is able to sustain this irony for ludicrously extended sections of his narrative, layering it with daft slapstick buffoonery, until it accumulates an almost unbearable charge of hilarity—or at least it does for me. Humour is a notoriously subjective experience.
The tale is sometimes told in the usual manner of Moorcock's early career—a no-nonsense, pulpy simplicity, that advances the narrative with a minimum of messing about—and sometimes in a baroque accumulation of adjectives and adverbs, evoking the decadence of the End of Time through a parallel verbal plenitude. The action is fast moving and entertaining—except when the characters decide to discuss philosophy for pages at a time. It feels as though he'd reached a stage in his career when he realised his publishers would print whatever he wrote, and so he decided to throw all generic and commercial wisdom to the wind. The three novels collected in this omnibus don't have the more measured, literary tone of his 1980s work (like the von Bek book), but they're a far cry from the brashly psychedelic sword and sorcery romps that preceded them. This is some very clever, and extremely entertaining writing, and the febrile caprice wth which Moorcock imagines the whimsy of the ultimate fin-de-siècle is truly mindblowing.
The tale is sometimes told in the usual manner of Moorcock's early career—a no-nonsense, pulpy simplicity, that advances the narrative with a minimum of messing about—and sometimes in a baroque accumulation of adjectives and adverbs, evoking the decadence of the End of Time through a parallel verbal plenitude. The action is fast moving and entertaining—except when the characters decide to discuss philosophy for pages at a time. It feels as though he'd reached a stage in his career when he realised his publishers would print whatever he wrote, and so he decided to throw all generic and commercial wisdom to the wind. The three novels collected in this omnibus don't have the more measured, literary tone of his 1980s work (like the von Bek book), but they're a far cry from the brashly psychedelic sword and sorcery romps that preceded them. This is some very clever, and extremely entertaining writing, and the febrile caprice wth which Moorcock imagines the whimsy of the ultimate fin-de-siècle is truly mindblowing.