Today I finally finshed Moorcock's War Amongst The Angels.
This was a very hard read. If the Cornelius chronicles or the Dancers at the end of time task your sense of linearity don't bother. Worse it combines that chaotic anachronism and sequence confusion with a strong dose of MM's forays into 'mainstream' fiction. Large chunks of it are very much in the realism style of Byzantium Endures (which I found tedious in its utter mundaneness) and Mother London (which I've never gotten more than a chapter or two of for the same reason). Most of the rest is the acid-trip collapsing reality setting of Blood. While the individual scenes seem to follow in a an order that makes sense to the narrative, or to the subjective sequence the current POV character (which changes frequently and with little warning) experianced, that doesn't mean they happenned in that order, or that what happenned stayed happened. I'm familiar with the concept, and can think more or less in that 'eternal now' sense, but translating that concept flow in and out of english is tortuous. The payoff is that after sending 90% of the book training you to follow that braided notion of reality time, the climatic battle switches to very simple linear narrative - but when he throws a phrase like "Sgt Beggs was shifting his scales to penetrate Old Rog's reality perception, and alter his time line" your primed to fill in exactly the chaotic tiem/space view that you've been practicing the first 90%. The net result is the battle of that sort which would be fairly impossible to describe, comes across as the grand reality/multiverse shattering event it is suppose to be, all with little words and simple sentences. Mostly. I won't call it a complete success, but it seems clear what he was trying to do and he got pretty close, the start of the battle worked best, but then he couldn't sustain it to the end. I won't call it a recommend, certainly not fo it's own sake, but if you've read a lot of MM, then this is an interesting piece that shows him continuing to develop himself as a writer, trying to express the inexpressible. Read the recent new Elric novels and compare them to the original series. Wow. I think exercises like this are the reason his writing has steadily improved over the years.
This was a very hard read. If the Cornelius chronicles or the Dancers at the end of time task your sense of linearity don't bother.
Worse it combines that chaotic anachronism and sequence confusion with a strong dose of MM's forays into 'mainstream' fiction. Large chunks of it are very much in the realism style of Byzantium Endures (which I found tedious in its utter mundaneness) and Mother London (which I've never gotten more than a chapter or two of for the same reason). Most of the rest is the acid-trip collapsing reality setting of Blood.
While the individual scenes seem to follow in a an order that makes sense to the narrative, or to the subjective sequence the current POV character (which changes frequently and with little warning) experianced, that doesn't mean they happenned in that order, or that what happenned stayed happened. I'm familiar with the concept, and can think more or less in that 'eternal now' sense, but translating that concept flow in and out of english is tortuous.
The payoff is that after sending 90% of the book training you to follow that braided notion of reality time, the climatic battle switches to very simple linear narrative - but when he throws a phrase like "Sgt Beggs was shifting his scales to penetrate Old Rog's reality perception, and alter his time line" your primed to fill in exactly the chaotic tiem/space view that you've been practicing the first 90%. The net result is the battle of that sort which would be fairly impossible to describe, comes across as the grand reality/multiverse shattering event it is suppose to be, all with little words and simple sentences. Mostly. I won't call it a complete success, but it seems clear what he was trying to do and he got pretty close, the start of the battle worked best, but then he couldn't sustain it to the end.
I won't call it a recommend, certainly not fo it's own sake, but if you've read a lot of MM, then this is an interesting piece that shows him continuing to develop himself as a writer, trying to express the inexpressible. Read the recent new Elric novels and compare them to the original series. Wow. I think exercises like this are the reason his writing has steadily improved over the years.
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