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cimoreneThe last time I tried to read a Michael Moorcock book, it was a copy of like... Gloriana maybe? that was lying on my parents' bedroom floor for probably a couple of years, having gone astray between the nightstand and the bookshelves. I read the back cover and the reviews several times, and I was familiar with the name from other book jacket reviews and comparisons and mentions in sff art books and the like. I think I was a teenager, maybe a young teenager? And I couldn't get into the book at all. I remember the writing was a bit stylized, and perhaps that was it.
It's been such a long time that I didn't really know what to expect from this one. In fact, the voice isn't that thick, even though it's set in 17th-century fantasy Europe. The quest and the levels of repetition and mirroring in it were fascinating to follow, the protagonist - a disillusioned soldier - an interesting and rather sympathetic anti-hero.
The main quibble from the beginning of this book, once again, as with nearly everything written by men in this era no matter how celebrated, is the relative paucity of female characters. Women aren't completely absent, and the women there are are not badly done... they just... are a really small percentage of all the characters, who fail to play central or active roles in the plot, in spite of a fairly large number of characters doing things in it. Again, like so many other celebrated genre books by male authors in this era. Oh well, I guess the fact that there are SOME women and the women who are there aren't blow-up dolls is actually a significant point in Moorcock's favor, but it's something I have to consciously overlook in order to enjoy a book.
This book is centrally thematically, and also explicitly in the plot, concerned with Christian theology. God, Satan, and zombie armies of Hell are in play; a Quest for the Grail leads the protagonist through fantastical lands preserved from time, across the breadth of Europe, and into battle with a number of magical creatures, all of which are amusingly enough squished into one cosmology with Satan and God and all that. (There's also an appearance of the Wild Hunt, which is one of my faves. The leader isn't called Herne, and he isn't King Arthur or Satan, he's a sort of old Germanic zombie character called The Wildgrave. Greve is a Germanic word for Count/Earl.) It's basically a good time, with the theology and philosophical and allegorical questions unfolding along the quest, and it certainly has a large body of folklore, medieval romance and fantasy literature in this sort of tradition - smushing pagan beliefs and Christian stuff into one story - to draw upon. Plus it's not like I didn't know what I was getting into. It's just that... I'm kinda tired of the Christian supremacy. I love the pagan folklore elements in fantasy, and I found myself resenting that they were subsumed into Christianity with the bits of Christian mythology made, like, bigger than them. This is really just a sign I should read a different sort of fantasy though, I think. I can try something else by Moorcock perhaps - not immediately, though.
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Date: 14 Jul 2022 02:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 15 Jul 2022 09:08 am (UTC)Weirdly, our teacher chose to do Russian Lit as a unit and she chose all the books in it, and I guess she left out Crime & Punishment deliberately?! We read Solzenitzyn and we saw a Chekhov play but NOT The Seagull. And there were some shorter things I've forgotten now.