Elric_ The Stealer of Souls - Michael Moorcock [206]
Mr. Moorcock’s Bright Empire of Melniboné existed “ten thousand years before history was recorded—or ten thousand years after history had ceased to be chronicled, reckon it how you will.” It is far from easy to describe, but it is a kind of primitive myth-land with touches of Victorian Gothick, Wagnerian darkness and even undertones of the Book of Revelations.
The plot is about the battle between the Forces of Law and Chaos for nothing less than the future of the universe. The characters have a kind of human form, but we’re told they are less than men, ghostly epic-types who live only to intrigue and slaughter to settle the shape of quality of the world of real men which is to follow them.
So Stormbringer is an exciting fantasy about the eternal struggle of Good and Evil. The forces of Order are led by Elric, the last ruler of Melniboné, a red-eyed albino who has little real physical strength, but draws it from the soul-sucking sword. With Stormbringer in his hand, he is ten feet tall and a match for any Theocrat called Jagreen Lern, his warrior-priests and the Lords of Hell. Without the sword, he couldn’t take on a reasonably skilled light weight.
Elric is an excellent character, pretty well-rounded and convincing for a myth-figure. He could have been the familiar strong, but lilywhite hero. Mr. Moorcock doesn’t make him any such thing.
Elric and Stormbringer—between whom there’s a skillfully established love-hate relationship; neither can do without the other—take the field in a world ruled by chance, destiny, sorcery, all the supernatural forces that strangle men’s free will. The atmosphere is chilly and oppressive and that’s, perhaps, my only quibble at Mr. Moorcock’s fascinating novel.
I don’t ask for sweetness and light from science fiction, fantasy and its associated literatures, but I wish more young writers like Michael Moorcock would show us characters who are real masters of their fate and not just dancing on a cosmic puppet-master’s strings.
But I wouldn’t have missed Stormbringer for anything. The excitement and blood-letting never lets up, from the moment Jagreen Lern kidnaps Elric’s wife and Elric and his buddies set hot-foot across the Sighing Desert and the Pale Sea to dish the villains of Pan Tang.
Elric himself is no goody-goody, his crimson eyes burning with hate as phantom horsemen bear down on him. “He was capable of cruelty and malevolent sorcery, had little pity, but could love and hate more violently than ever his ancestors.” He’ll lop a man’s head off for sheer expediency and ask questions afterwards.
But slowly he emerges as a lone goodish man in a landscape that drips with blood and hate. And Mr. Moorcock’s landscapes are compelling.
There are dark battlefields where bloody men come screaming out of the night, black-cowled midnight horrors with fixed grins, ghastly wailing winged women running amok with their wings clipped, doom-laden seas where black, rat-infested warships fill the air with fireballs.
Elric fights an army of vampire trees with his vampire sword as they try to tear him apart using branches like superhuman fingers. He takes a journey in time to fight that dead hero of another age, Roland, to get his magic horn.
Is there too much blood? I said the weird inventiveness of it all leaves one gasping. Does it tend to drain one dry? Is there a danger of Mr. Moorcock’s work becoming a parody of itself as this kind of literature often does? On the strength of this one book, he avoids it by a hair’s-breadth and I can recommend Stormbringer. In a tight corner I would rather have Elric’s sword than Arthur’s Excalibur for all its malevolent habit of doing what it likes and standing there, alive, sinister and smiling when nearly every other character has had his chips in some way.
Most of all, I feel that Mr. Moorcock’s battle between good and evil is a sad story. If it did happen in some early world of