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Oh good lord, am I really reading fantasy novels now? As part of a recent infatuation with fantastic 60s/70s book cover design, I stumbled on a whole pile of 70s Bob Haberfield covers for Michael Moorcock fantasies, and I couldn't resist grabbing at least one (this one). I'm still not convinced that the experimental social critique and psychological disintegration of the 1969 The Black Corridor doesn't constitute Moorcock's sole essential novel, but part of my program of acquiring these covers is that I actually have to read them (though most only take a day or two), so, yeah, now this tale of swords and sorcery. With, granted, an amazing cover:



Beyond the normal mythic trappings, this is a book about frame of reference. Our hero finds himself last of a species superseded by history, or perhaps superseded by a narrowing of perspective, his people becoming complacent and eventually unable to look beyond their immediate world and into the other planes that touch their own. Until disaster, in the form of those narrowest of perspectives, humans, sweeps in and strikes them down (obvious commentary). The natural progression would be for the hero to regain a broader perspective and put it to good use, but the execution here is rather supra-normal, rapidly jumping frames each time they're established and mirroring its themes across time and space. Loss of the protagonist's "old race" to those new upstarts, Humans? Oh that's been happening endlessly throughout time. Even the gods dictating the rules of this world and many others grow complacent and are overthrown, even their perspectives turn out to be killingly narrow in the scope of the universe.

This kind of thought on the place of any one moment in the face of all existence is the best Moorcock has to offer here; the worst are those various essentially throwaway genre moments of swordfights and monsters. Fortunately, a surprising amount of this action unfolds in obliquely poetic moments that remain obscure and unusually memorable -- a giant glimpsed in fog, sweeping its huge net through the sea, for instance, or a cave of flickering phantasms, or the purring garden that greets its visitors with gentle caresses of fronds and flowers, unless it devours them.