Onefinemess

The Vanishing Tower (Elric 4) &
The Bane of the Black Sword (Elric 5)
both by: Michael Moorcock

I haven’t even finished Bane yet, but I’m confident enough to write the review ahead of time.

Here’s how it goes: Elric is chasing some guy that wronged him a book or two ago, and in the process has various adventures – almost all of which are resolved rather abruptly by one deux ex machina or another.  It’s very bizarre.  I’m like, “Is there a story here?”  Half the time it feels like a loosely padded outline that still waits for some hefty meat to be flung upon its bones.

It doesn’t really matter what Elric faces in each of the books.  Everything is constant:

• He inevitably fucks up someone he intended not to hurt
• Things are spelled out so bluntly that you know Moorcock accidentally submitted portions of his outline instead of actual story.  Gems like this: “There was an attraction between them which might be strong enough to throw both their destinies along wildly different paths than any the had guessed.” Which is the WHOLE explanation you get for why two certain people fall in love.  I mean, I guess it’s love.  It’s never actually named, but suddenly they are going to get married.
• He is drug ever onward by “fate” or something.  This is actually the only real interesting part to the series for me – wtf is running him around?  His quest is basically the same as the reader’s.  Why am I doing this?  He wonders once in a while. WHY INDEED.  Hopefully the next (and last) book in the series will answer this question.  Then again, I know everything is tied up into the Eternal Warrior saga, so I may have to go digging there.

To be somewhat fair and gracious, each of these books is usually made up of 3 separate (and probably separately published at one point) … short stories?  Novellas?  Whatever, they’re about 60 pages and each, in today’s writing world, would be a separate 300 page-ish book.  So, compression and all that.  Maybe they were published in magazines, and had to be kept short?  I mean, all the elements of good stories are there, I just don’t find them to be fleshed out.

When I say that someday I want to bring back “pulp fantasy” or “pulp sci-fi” this is not what I am talking about – think more along the lines of Saberhagen and Dick, respectively.  I think it would be interesting to write a story in this style, maybe just as some kind of practice excercise… and you know, I think I totally would – IF my writing time weren’t so limited.  Someday!

I think I mentioned this in a previous review, but I’m going to chalk up folks love of this series up to happy childhood memories.  These books are laid out in such a way that I think they would appeal to kids in a way that actual kids books wouldn’t  be – different levels of sex & violence, both of which young boys tend to dig, an adult main character, etc.  Elric may also be one of the earliest anti-heroes (if he can even be called a hero in any sense), which may reserve him a special place in fantasy’s collective unconscious.  His stories certainly read more like tragedy than fantasy to me (I think Moorcock may have said something about this in an interview… hmmm).  Otherwise, I’m just missing something.  Even as pulp, these books are contemporary with some of Philip Dick’s best stuff, so I refuse to believe that there wasn’t a contemporary in fantasy.  Well, maybe there wasn’t?  Yeahhhh, this is telling me that I really need to look into the history of fantasy as a genre at some point.

TWO STARS

Addendum: I think my “read as a child” theory is a good one.  Here’s Neil Gaiman thanking Moorcock, and saying that he read Stormbringer when he was 9.  This makes sense, I think, as being a 9 year old and reading that – especially at a time when there may not have been much fantasy out there – double especially children’s fantasy – I can see that making a big dent in your headspace.  Moorcock does have a ton of good ideas in the Elric books.  I’m mostly sad that he didn’t flesh them out the way author’s do these days – maybe that was due to publishing restrictions, time constraints, etc.

I was spoiled, I suspect, growing up in a time when I could grab stuff like the Sword of Shannara (or Saberhagen’s sword books, or Zelazny’s Amber stuff, McCaffrey’s Pern stuff, Ursula K. LegGuin’s Earthsea stuff, etc.) off the shelf of my school library in 6th or 7th grade.   Lots of good stuff was written in the late 70s.  True, the Elric stuff was first collected in the 70s (I think) – but most of it was written before that – late 60s, early 70s.

Kids these days.  With their Harry Potter’s and whatever that compass series is called, and who knows how many other well written, imaginative kids fantasy series.  Lucky bastards!

Of course, that doesn’t mean they should stop reading the stuff I read, or the stuff Gaiman read :).

Tags: Elric, The Bane of the Black Sword, The Vanishing Tower

This entry was posted by onefinemess on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 2:10 pm and is filed under Book Review, Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.