An absurd and profound fantasy about a search for the Holy Grail (original) (raw)

No opening gambit I could concoct for this review would rival the one that opens Michael Moorcock’s “Von Bek,” so I’ll allow its first lines to speak for themselves:

It was in that year when the fashion in cruelty demanded not only the crucifixion of peasant children, but a similar fate for their household animals, that I first met Lucifer and was transported into Hell; for the Prince of Darkness wished to strike a bargain with me.

This sentence, tightly controlled yet maximalist, grotesquely funny, suffused with British understatement and rock star panache, is vintage Moorcock. If you’ve never read him, then “Von Bek,” which collects two of his novels about the Von Bek clan and their participation in the search for the Holy Grail, is an ideal place to start. All his ongoing preoccupations are here: the necessary balance between order and chaos, the absurdity of the everyday world, the limits of reason and of faith, and a subversive approach to the tropes his stories wear and discard like so many costumes at a very elaborate ball.

Moorcock, who turns 85 this month, may be the single most influential figure in English letters of the 20th century, his massive impact obscured only by his toiling away in the until-recently-disreputable salt mines of science fiction and fantasy. He was first influential as an editor of the magazine New Worlds, from 1964 to 1971, where he helped inaugurate the New Wave era of science fiction and ushered in a period of rapidly broadening horizons within the genre.

During his tenure, New Worlds promoted science fiction and fantasy that was more serious in theme, psychologically realistic, transgressive, experimental and politically minded than what came before. In any given issue, one could find the work of authors like Philip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany, Harlan Ellison and Moorcock’s close friend J.G. Ballard. Moorcock’s editorials in the magazine helped to expand his war against convention, as did his essays “Epic Pooh” and “Starship Stormtroopers,” which highlighted the reactionary core in the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and other elder statesmen of the genre.

His anarchic, subversive approach carried over to his work as an author. In 1961, he introduced Elric of Melniboné, his most famous and enduring creation. If you want to know why Daemon Targaryen from “House of the Dragon” and Geralt of Rivia from “The Witcher” look exactly alike, it’s because they both look like Elric. The Melnibonéans are Moorcock’s mockery of Tolkien’s elves and the other conventions of high fantasy that Tolkien and his imitators established. Where the elves are remote, superego-dominated aristocrats who eventually quit the realms of man, the Melnibonéans have enslaved humankind and pursue self-interest and power at all costs. Elric is alienated from his fellow Melnibonéans by his possession of a conscience that shocks and confuses his countrymen. Where the typical fantasy hero seeks after a magic item of some kind, and tries to do what good he can to protect an established conservative order, Elric is a drug-addicted, terminally ill albino whose quests lead him to find and wield a cursed sword. That weapon, called Stormbringer, not only has a will of its own but eats people’s souls; Elric is terrified of it and tries to use it as seldom as possible.

But wait — as the late-night infomercials say — there’s more! Moorcock’s novel “The Warlord of the Air” (1971) was steampunk before the term had been invented. His character Jerry Cornelius, a globe-trotting flaneur, rock star and adventurer in swinging ’60s London, created a template that David Bowie would fill out in his glam-rock era. Cornelius was so influential on Alan Moore that he pops up as a character in “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.” Did I mention that Moorcock also coined our present-day definition of “multiverse”? He’s even got a credit for it in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The multiverse was essential to Moorcock’s grand literary project, the unification of all his various pulp experiments and series under the aegis of the Eternal Champion. Long before “The Dark Tower” was a glint in Stephen King’s eye, Moorcock decided that each of his protagonists was an incarnation of the Eternal Champion, who fights for balance between order and chaos, often from a pragmatic, amoral perspective, and often accompanied by some kind of magic or weird weapon. Elric is one of the Eternal Champions, as are Jerry Cornelius and the Von Beks. Each of them lives in a different reality, and occasionally, a la the Spider-Verse, they cross into one another’s realms. There are more than two dozen Champions, but knowledge of the skein that interconnects them all is not necessary to enjoy any of it.

The Eternal Champion reflects a central facet of the 20th century’s great volume shooters of literature: Their prodigious output is abetted by the recycling of theme and character. Think about all the suburban schlubs divided between capitalist aspiration and a search for meaning in Philip K. Dick, or the various cruel, charismatic manipulators in Iris Murdoch, or the postmodern theme parks of George Saunders. But it also means that Moorcock’s bibliography is bewildering, an infinite, recursive landscape. He has attempted to unify his work in reissues on at least three separate occasions. The guide to the publishing history of Elric included in the latest of these attempts, a series of omnibi published by Saga Press that includes “Von Bek,” reads like a work of fiction by Borges.

Instead of trying to map this labyrinth, one should probably simply enjoy getting lost in it, as Graf Ulrich Von Bek quickly does in “The War Hound and the World’s Pain”(1981), the first of two novels that make up “Von Bek.” Graf is a cynical mercenary who has deserted from the Thirty Years’ War — as pointless and cruel a conflict as any Western Europe faced before World War I — and has been conscripted to help Lucifer in a quest for the Grail. “War Hound” is a thrilling and mordantly funny inverted Grail romance. Instead of a noble knight, we have a cynical sword for hire. His squire is a Kazak raider, as ignorant of the world as he is brutally violent. Instead of a mystical hermit who explains the thematic significance of the story to the knights, we are presented with a maggot-ridden madman whom the antiheroes quickly dispatch. The novel is less than 300 pages long but chock-a-block with ideas that could fuel 10 books. Over the course of one chapter, Lucifer gives Von Bek a tour of hell to rival Dante. The characters wander in and out of pockets of other realities that can be accessed only by the damned. In one of these, they encounter an alternative Europe dominated by Judaism. There, Von Bek is tasked with building a gallows big enough to hang a Titan. The whole episode lasts a paragraph.

Part of the genius of “War Hound” is its setting. The novel is a playful adventure story, a satire of chivalry and a serious philosophical inquiry into the nature of divine justice all at once, set during one of the least thrilling, least noble and least righteous conflicts in the history of Western Europe. Moorcock plays a similar trick in “The City in the Autumn Stars,” the second part of the “Von Bek” omnibus. Written five years after “War Hound,” the novel explores the nature and value of reason through the person of another deserter, Ulrich’s descendant Manfred, who has fled Paris and the Reign of Terror in 1793.

Thisis a less successful work than its predecessor. It adopts a picaresque structure, a tempting trap for writers with more ideas than books to put them in, which often results, as it does here, in a narrative that feels slack and underdeveloped. But its critical examination of reason also falls flat because the experiment is rigged. The Von Bek novels take place in a universe where there are magic, other dimensions, otherworldly beings and monsters. Reason must perforce crumble in the face of this, and so its debates begin to feel like rote exercises.

Humor turns out to be the novel’s strong suit; its greatest creation is the multi-named Scottish con man Colin James Charles, a.k.a. the Orkie of Lochorkie, a.k.a. the Chevalier de St. Odhran, who recruits Manfred Von Bek into a nearly incomprehensible scheme involving a hot-air balloon, forged treasure maps and the faking of his own death. The chevalier is like something out of a Charles Portis novel, a dreamer speaking utter nonsense that has the ring of profound truth. He steals the whole novel right out from under Manfred and the Holy Grail.

If there’s one thing Moorcock understands in his bones, it’s the ability of language to dream a new world into being, or to make us confront the limits of the here and now. Sometimes, as in “Von Bek,”he does both at once, harnessing pulp fiction’s addictive immediacy to subvert the ideas we take for granted in provocative, dizzying ways.

Isaac Butler is the author of “The Method: How the 20th Century Learned to Act,” winner of the 2023 National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction.

Von Bek

The War Hound and the World’s Pain and The City in the Autumn Stars

By Michael Moorcock

Saga Press. 585 pp. $29.99