Mission: Books 12/25
A Book That Is More Than Ten Years Old: The Dreamthief's Daughter by Michael Moorcock.
'My name is Ulric, Graf von Bek, and I am the last of my earthly line.'
As Nazism engulfs the Fatherland, the albino Ulric von Bek battles to keep the occult blade Ravenbrand from being taken by Adolf Hitler. As an inhuman army engulfs the eternal city of Tanelorn, the legendary albino Elric, last of the sorcerer-kings of Melniboné, fights to keep his black sword Stormbringer from the grasp of Gaynor the Damned.
Failure for both puts the entire multiverse at risk, and the separate heroes of two worlds must now become the single champion of all worlds. Elric and Ulric must merge their lives and souls and become one, trusting their destinies to each other - and to Oona, the mysterious Daughter of Dreams . . .
I really wanted to like this book.
I'd been hearing good things about the Elric of Melnibone saga for years. Though I'd also heard that there was a ton of it, and it was never published in chronological order. No one seemed certain where to start. But most people recommended that I start with The Dreamthief's Daughter - since they're all being published again in chronological order, and this one is the first. So I figured it would do as my book that was more than ten years old.
This book is absolutely nothing like I was expecting. It's also really hard to describe. It's something like gritty world war II study - meets Journey to the Centre of the Earth - meets Alice in Wonderland. It didn't always feel like a smooth mix to me - at times it felt like it was throwing crazy stuff at me just for the sake of it (I'm wondering if part of this was due to this book being written much later than the rest.) Long pages of description of one strange thing will be immediately followed by a bare passing mention of the next strange thing. More than once an idea I found genuinely interesting would be immediately discarded for a long description of what a cave looked like.
The hero of the book isn't actually Elric, but rather Ulric, who's significantly more modern and non-fantasy, and though the book starts interestingly enough...being in his pov while insane things are happening doesn't quite work for me. I felt like his confusion at every turn, while very important multiverse things seemingly happened around him, and everyone mostly ignores him, dragged everything back a little. This continues even after he's been inside Elric's head and knows everything he knows. But after the character of Elric of Melnibone is introduced properly Ulric Von Bek seems to completely lose most of his agency and plot in favour of following along on the quest to solve the problem of balance in the multiverse, with only the occasional aside that he really should get back to his own world, and stop the Nazi's. Which I thought did him a disservice, because though fairly subtle I originally found him an interesting character with potential.
Elric of Melnibone was more familiar to me, he felt like another variation of the heroic fantasy mould. He's a wielder of what seems to be an infernal device by any other name, a sword that drinks souls, and absorbs their energy and transfers some of it to him. But the sorcery of the book seems to consist simply of him asking random gods for help, and then immediately being completely helpless with exhaustion, while their assistance does or doesn't get their group anywhere. It seems to be something of a crapshoot??
The villain is hilarious and frustrating. Ulric's cousin, Gaynor, spends the book sliding from good-natured cad to brutal bastard to megalomaniac to insane fanatic. Though we see none of this journey, he's simply a few rungs up the ladder of evil whenever he appears. He shows up constantly to swing a sword, threaten people but not actually do anything, and then escape. In any other fantasy book he would have been easily killed each time. But for some reason he's always allowed to escape so he can come back and frustratingly menace people ten pages later, and then ten pages later, and then twenty pages after that. He's so impossibly disappointing as a villain massing immense power that I actually started desperately hoping he was a misdirection and the real villain was someone else entirely.
I found the book largely frustrating, there were interesting ideas and characters, but they were mostly ignored, and though I was intrigued by the way they were using grail legends, I just didn't find the world-building interesting enough to get invested in the multiverse or any of its worlds.
As for the ending - spoilers for a second - I'd been spending the whole book assuming that Elric and Ulric look very, very similar because the words 'doppleganger' and 'twin' kept being thrown around. But then at the end of the book, the single female character in the book, Elric's daughter, ends up marrying Ulric. Which I found more than a little disturbing.