Unagonising saga
Paul Ableman
Byzantium Endures Michael Moorcock (Seeker & Warburg pp. 400, £6.95) This novel, narrated in the first person, raises an ethical problem. Michael Moorcock, in the signed introduction, implies that the work consists of edited but genuine memoirs and he makes acknowledgements to both real and fictitious characters. Readers familiar with Moorcock's oeuvre will probably soon realise that the cast includes invented people (notably members of the Cornelius clan) imported from earlier books but other readers may easily conclude that Colonel Pyat, the dummy narrator, actually lived and that his memoirs are genuine. I maintain that there should be a clear demarcation between fact and fiction or at least, since it can be cogently argued that the difference is really one of planes of reality, between fact-based and imagination-based works.
The trouble with a first-person narrator is that once he is set in motion CI am a child of my century and as old as the century') he chugs on under his own steam and both author and reader are stuck with his manufactured personality, however bumpy the ride it produces. Since the present book only takes the narrator up to the age of 20 and we are promised further instalments bring the story up to date, it is prudent to ask how roadworthy Colonel Pyat really is. Michael Moorcock has, in fact, lumbered himself with a pretty ungainly and rickety hero, both from the point of view of character construction and the more delicate one of literary convention.
Pyat is supposed to be an engineer with a 'poor, baffled, terror-ridden mind'. He is endowed with three distinct literary styles. The first is a perfectly serviceable narrative prose which carries the bulk of the story: 'Now I reached the most intense period of my whole creative life. During the week, I attended lectures. I read books, years in advance of what was being taught on the official syllabus'. But, to express the alleged demonic side of his nature, he periodically bursts into black rhapsodies, such as: 'But Greece must rise as Christ shall rise: ennobled by sacrifice, strengthened through pain. They beat me with their rods.' And an appendix gives samples of the polyglot raving into which he supposedly plunges from time to time: `Kartago . .
seredy . . preziti . . pamatorati . .
vycitky zid . . . sperk . . . jewels . . . .
lsrail .
The three modes do not fuse convincingly into the evocation of a human mind. But an even bigger impediment to belief arises from Pyat's alleged racial origins. He is portrayed as being violently anti-Semitic but inadvertently reveals that he is the illegitimate son of a dead Jewish father. Since the reader has no difficulty in interpreting the clues that Pyat uncomprehendingly relays, and the man is credited with shrewdness as well as high intelligence, his stubborn naivety strains our credulity. He looks Jewish and is circumsised. Almost everyone he meets assumes he is a Jew but he blunders on serenely unaware of his Semitic blood. A similar but even more complex ambiguity infects his engineering pretensions. At technical college in St. Petersburg his grandiose projects make him a laughing stock and yet he apparently constructs a successful laser-type death ray 50 years before its time and certainly builds up a successful engineering business. The reader is continually forced to filter the truth from a fantasist's muddled claims and it becomes wearisome.
Pyat's mother runs a laundry in Kiev. The fatherless boy early develops an obsession with science and technology. He builds a Heath Robinson flying machine which• either soars majestically or topples down a cliff according to whether the reader accepts his own account or that of some watching soldiers which Pyat, as usual smuggling information to the reader, relates only to refute. He spends time in Odessa learning to drink, make love and sniff cocaine. He then attends a polytechnic in St. Petersburg. He makes great and humble friends. The First World War and, hard on its heels, the civil war engulf Russia and Pyat is soon embroiled in the maelstrom. Surviving by means of his wits, he serves both Red and White forces and tangles with some of the lawless bands roaming the disputed territory. The bulk of the book is a pageant showing the violence and anarchy of the Ukraine at this period. Mr Moorcock's 'Dramatis Personae' comprises more than 60 characters but we only have fleeting encounters with most of them and even the recurrent figures, such as Pyat's mother and her admirer, Captain Brown, remain shadowy. Mrs Cornelius, in the present book a ravishing young adventuress (whom some readers will recall from earlier Moorock novels as Jerry Cornelius's voluble mother) flits in and out of the narrative, talking hyper-Cockney and having affairs with people like Trotsky. The end of the book finds Mrs Cornelius and Pyat, fleeing catastrophe, on a British tramp steamer bound for Istanbul and doubtless, further literary adventures.
The sad truth is I found Colonel Pyat bore and his odyssey unconvincing. Michael Moorcock, fortified by deep researcn, strives to bring a historical epoch to life but almost any single page of Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry conveys more of Russia's revolutionary agony than the whole of this book. Oddly-enough, Mr Moorcock's thirdperson Jerry Cornelius novels are, in their quirky, free-wheeling way, truer and more moving than this massive fiction. There is here a sense of over-exertion, as if Mr Moorcock were striving to demonstrate that he is not just the thinking hippy's bard but, as Mrs Cornelius might have put ,it, a Jenewine orffer'. His Ukraine is conceived as the central arena of history where Rome, Carthage, Greece and Israel pursue their ancient struggles in modern permutations. But this ambitious notion is both too schematic and too diffuse to serve as a satisfactory basis for fiction. Byzantium may indeed endure but Byzantium Endures does not, alas, live.
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