Elric in the Dream Realms - Michael Moorcock [2]
Originally identified with a certain small school—which included Morris, Dunsany and Cabell (and with one fine example by Poul Anderson)—as it became a genre, fantasy quite naturally swiftly incorporated all the methods and imagery created by those few writers, including myself, who wrote it. Reader expectations became more fixed. I had been attracted to epic fantasy as a form precisely because it contained so many unexplored possibilities and nobody knew or thought they knew what it “should” do. As with science fiction, I felt I had done pretty much all I could within the form, and now I wanted to write a different kind of fantasy and some more non-generic fiction (I regard Cornelius as non-generic). I completed the fourth book in the original Cornelius tetralogy and it won a literary prize I greatly valued,* so I felt as if most of my often experimental work had, one way or another, been accepted by the public.
With this in mind, I wrote what was intended to be a fantasy swan song, a novel that would be an homage to Mervyn Peake, who had proven such an encouraging friend and continuing inspiration. My first surviving novel (at that time unpublished) was the Peake-influenced The Golden Barge. His work is unquestionably sui generis. It makes use of fantastic landscape, grotesque or at least exaggerated characters and rather melodramatic events, but it contains little or nothing of the supernatural.
Gormenghast has far more in common with Kafka than Kuttner and is closer to the absurdism found in other work by Peake, whether in his drawings, poems, plays or short fiction. Gloriana; or, The Unfulfill’d Queen was an homage to Peake as well as my bow to Jacobean melodrama (the most sympathetic critics realized the language was not Elizabethan but closer to Carolingian). The book was well reviewed as a literary novel and at the same time won the World Fantasy Award (the “Howie”). With the acceptance of the non-generic Cornelius tetralogy as literary (as opposed to generic) fiction, together with Gloriana’s success, by 1977 I had finished everything I had set out to do in 1960. However, as readers of New Worlds issues from that time knew, I was not really satisfied that publishing had changed enough; and it would take a little longer for the mingling of fantasy and contemporary reality to become as familiar to the public as Ballard and I had hoped when we began to talk of finding a new literary form that would be as valid to the year 2000 as Modernism was to 1900.
By 1978, thanks to a bit of self-revelation in the bar of a Russian passenger ship, which I’ve described elsewhere, I was ready to begin what became my attempt to “explain” the Nazi holocaust by looking at Europe, America and the Middle East through the eyes of “Colonel Pyat,” a crazed, terrified Ukrainian Jew who believes engineering (including social engineering) will save the world and who will go to any lengths to deny his Jewish origins. He is what Goebbels described as “that sad fellow, the anti-Semitic Jew.” When you take on such a psychic load, you have no choice other than to go mad, especially when you realize that this acknowledgement of your own survival guilt should also be a comedy. By the summer of 1979, having completed the first volume of what became the realistic Pyat quartet, I had been mad for about a year, researching night and day, learning to read the Cyrillic alphabet and then Russian and Ukrainian, occupying the mind of that terrible character for whom sympathy has to be maintained, creating Byzantium Endures. When I look back, with more guilt, to the domestic carnage the novel helped create, I have to admit that I do so with few regrets. But writing the first Pyat book left me wiped out, and I found I rather enjoyed contemplating the writing of a fantasy novel as a break.