Elric: The Stealer of Souls

Michael Moorcock Elric: The Stealer of Souls

FOREWORD THE RETURN OF THE THIN WHITE DUKE by Alan Moore

I remember Melnibone. Not the empire, obviously, but its aftermath, its debris: mangled scraps of silver filigree from brooch or breastplate, tatters of checked silk accumulating in the gutters of the Tottenham Court Road. Exquisite and depraved, Melnibonean culture had been shattered by a grand catastrophe before recorded history began- probably some time during the mid-1940s-but its shards and relics and survivors were still evident in London's tangled streets as late as 1968. You could still find reasonably priced bronze effigies of Arioch amongst the stalls on Portobello Road, and when I interviewed Dave Brock of Hawkwind for the English music paper Sounds in 1981 he showed me the black runesword fragment he'd been using as a plec-trum since the band's first album. Though the cruel and glorious civilization of Melnibone was by then vanished as if it had never been, its flavours and its atmospheres endured, a perfume lingering for decades in the basements and back alleys of the capital. Even the empire's laid-off gods and demons were effectively absorbed into the ordinary British social structure; its Law Lords rapidly became a cornerstone of the judicial system while its Chaos Lords went, for the most part, into industry or government. Former Melnibonean Lord of Chaos Sir Giles Pyaray, for instance, currently occupies a seat at the Department of Trade and Industry, while his company Pyaray Holdings has been recently awarded major contracts as a part of the ongoing reconstruction of Iraq.

Despite Melnibone's pervasive influence, however, you will find few public figures ready to acknowledge their huge debt to this all-but-forgotten world, perhaps because the willful decadence and tortured romance that Melnibone exemplified has fallen out of favour with the resolutely medieval world-view we embrace today throughout the globe's foremost neoconservative theocracies. Just as with the visitor's centres serving the Grand Canyon that have been instructed to remove all reference to the canyon's geologic age lest they offend creationists, so too has any evidence for the existence of Melnibone apparently been stricken from the record. With its central governmental district renamed Marylebone and its distinctive azure cere-monial tartans sold off in job lots to boutiques in the King's Road, it's entirely possible that those of my own post-war generation might have never heard about Melnibone were it not for allusions found in the supposedly fictitious works of the great London writer Michael Moorcock.

My own entry to the Moorcock oeuvre came, if I recall correctly, by way of a Pyramid Books science fantasy anthology entitled TheFantastic Swordsmen, edited by the ubiquitous L. Sprague de Camp and purchased from the first science fiction, fantasy and comics book-shop, Dark They Were And Golden Eyed, itself a strikingly neo-Melnibonean establishment. The paperback, touchingly small and underfed to modern eyes, had pages edged a brilliant Naples yellow and came with the uninviting cover image of a blond barbarian engaged in butchering some sort of octopus, clearly an off day from the usually inspired Jack Gaughan. The contents, likewise, while initially attractive to an undiscriminating fourteen-year-old boy, turned out upon inspection to be widely varied in their quality, a motley armful of fantastic tales swept up under the loose rubric of sword and sorcery, ranging from a pedestrian early outing by potboiler king John Jakes through more accomplished works by the tormented, would-be cow-boy Robert Howard to a dreamlike early Lovecraft piece, or one by Lovecraft's early model, Lord Dunsany, to a genuinely stylish and more noticeably modern offering from Fritz Leiber. Every story had a map appended to it, showing the geographies of the distinct imaginary worlds in which the various narratives were set. All in all it was a decent and commendable collection for its genre for its time.

And then, clearly standing aloof and apart from the surrounding mighty-thewed pulp and Dunsanian fairy tales, there was the Elric yarn by Michael Moorcock.

Now, at almost forty years' remove, I can't even recall which one it was-one of the precious handful from The Stealer of Souls, no doubt, and thus included elsewhere in this current volume-but I still remember vividly its impact. Its alabaster hero Elric, decadent, hallucina-tory and feverish, battled with his howling, parasitic blade against a paranoiac back-drop that made other fantasy environments seem lazy and anaemic in their Chinese-takeaway cod orientalism or their snug Arcadian idylls. Unlike every other sword-wielding protagonist in the anthology, it was apparent that Moorcock's wan, drug-addicted champion would not be stigmatized by a dismaying jacket blurb declaring him to be in the tradition of J.R.R. Tolkien. The Melnibonean landscape-seething, mutable, warped by the touch of fractal horrors- was an anti-matter antidote to Middle Earth, a toxic and fluorescing elf repellent. Elric's world churned with a fierce and unself-conscious poetry, churned with the breakneck energies of its own furious pulp-deadline composition. Not content to stand there, shuffling uneasily beneath its threadbare sword and sorcery banner, Moorcock's prose instead took the whole stagnant genre by its throat and pummeled it into a different shape, transmuted Howard's blustering overcompensation and the relatively tired and bloodless efforts of Howard's competitors into a new form, a delirious romance with different capabilities, delivered in a language that was adequate to all the tumult and upheaval of its times, a voice that we could recognize.

Moorcock was evidently writing from experience, with the extrav-agance and sheer exhilaration of his stories marking him as from a different stock than the majority of his contemporaries. The breadth and richness of his influences hinted that he was himself some kind of a Melnibonean expat, nurtured by the cultural traditions of his homeland, drawing from a more exotic pool of reference than that available to those who worked within the often stultifying literary conventions found in post-war England. When Moorcock commenced his long career while in his teens he showed no interest in the leading authors of the day, the former Angry Young Men-who were in truth far more petulant than angry and had never been that young-cleaving instead to sombre, thoughtful voices such as that of Angus Wilson or to marvelous, baroque outsiders such as Mervyn Peake. After solid apprentice work on his conventional blade-swinging hero Sojan in the weekly Tarzan comic book or in the Sexton Blake adventures that he penned alongside notables such as the wonderful Jack Trevor Story (and, as rumour has it, even Irish genius Flann O'Brien), Moorcock emerged as a formidable rare beast with an extensive reach, as capable of championing the then-unpublished Naked Lunch by Burroughs (W. S.) as he was of appreciating the wild colour and invention that was to be found in Burroughs (E. R.). Whether by virtue of his possibly Melnibonean heritage or by some other means, Moorcock was consummately hip and brought the sensibilities of a progressive and much wider world of art and literature into a field that was, despite the unrestrained imagination promised by its sales pitch, for the most part both conservative and inward looking.

Growing out of a mid-1950's correspondence between the young writer and his long-serving artist confederate James Cawthorn, the first Elric stories were an aromatic broth of Abraham Merritt and Jack Kerouac, of Bertolt Brecht and Anthony Skene's Monsieur Zenith, the albino drug-dependent foe of Sexton Blake who'd turned out to have more charisma than his shrewd detective adversary. With the series finally seeing daylight in Carnell's Science Fantasy in 1961, it was immediately quite clear that a dangerous mutation had occurred within the narrow gene pool of heroic fantasy, a mutation just as elegant and threatening as Elvis Presley had turned out to be in the popular music of this decade or that James Dean represented in its cinema. Most noticeably, Elric in no way conformed to the then-current definition of a hero, being instead a pink-eyed necromaniac invalid, a traitor to his kind and slayer of his wife, a sickly and yet terrifying spiritual vampire living without hope at the frayed limits of his own debatable humanity.