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Moorcock has posited himself as the rebel of fantasy, sapping the high walls built by Howard and Tolkien. He is a of the complete lack of romance in either of these would-be romances, but the love in Gloriana's court is anything but courtly.

There is a delightful Quentin Crisp quote about how innovation is not 'seeing your neighbor to the left has a straight walk and your neighbor to the right a curved and thence making your own diagonal', suffice it to say that contrariness is not the mother of invention.

Moorcock's Elric was, in many ways, written to be contrary; to be the antithesis of the fantasy that came before. However, Moorcock is not being contrary in Gloriana, which in most regards, reads like an abridged Elizabethan take on Peake's Gormenghast books (which, incidentally, are the origin of Crisp's quotation, by way of his introduction).

Gloriana is considered by highfalutin Moorcock fans to be perhaps his most remarkable and original work. It is certainly in no way genre Fantasy, and though the characters may not be easy to empathize with, you certainly won't be stuck resenting them for flimsily facaded archetypes.

Though they are not based upon those same silly cliches, they are still immediately as one-dimensional and unchanging. The book is really nothing so much as an eroticized rewrite of Peake, but Moorcock does not have the capacious wit necessary to evoke Peake. It is more of a fond imitation than a reimagining. That being said, it takes a skilled writer to draw any comparison to Peake, even when that's precisely what they are trying to do.

The book will also teach you the word 'seraglio'; a one which I hope to have more and more a need to use in the future, hopefully in the same sentence as 'odalisque'.