After three books of tall tales that often completely conflict with history, genius "inventions", rampant drug use, rape and more unnecessary and arbitrary insults directed at Jews than there are Jews in the world, what's left for a potentially insane and completely unlikeable protagonist to go? Why, by doubling down on all such things by involving the one group that pretty much everyone can agree was just no darn good: Nazis!Yes, it's that rascally fellow Colonel Pyat back again, telling us the story of what he did in those fun years between the two World Wars in such a way as to make us doubt almost every single thing he tells us. Having taken us through World War One and its immediate aftermath, a tour of the US with the KKK and stops in Morocco and France along the way, we're nearly up to the point where the idea of "between the wars" no longer applies as the Second World War is getting ready to start. To that end, Pyat decides to finally do something about all those comments he's been making all along about Mussolini and Hitler and embarks on setting out to meet them, one deliberately, the other not so much.Very deliberately, as it turns out, as Pyat has a giant man-crush on ol' Benito and there are moments when the book reads like one long love letter to Fascism written by a deranged person and thus the last person you actually want to sell Fascism to people. But just when you're ready to insist that Pyat get a room with the cheery dictator (and thus create his own fairly unique category of slash-fiction), he winds up getting sent to Germany, where he gets to hang out with a whole new cast of people whose names are generally seen together as a list of defendants in the Nuremberg trials (if they managed to survive that long) and while he's not so big on Nazism, he does quite enjoy hanging out with SA leader Ernst Rohm. And by "hanging out" I mean, "indulging in sexual relations" while also praising the leader of the Brownshirts to the high heavens as well.By this point in the series, you pretty much know what to expect from Pyat and while he doesn't say anything as grossly shocking as he's shown he's capable of previously (amusingly the one aside that did catch my eye was a so-out-of-left-field-that-it-must-be-thrown-from-right-field-in-the-wrong-direction comment that John Wayne had a sex change) sticking Pyat amongst a group of people who are collectively responsible for more death and destruction than is comfortable to think about, and then have him more or less being all for their ideals, ups the ante quite a bit and while not surprising if you're been paying attention to the series, is still a bold move on Moorcock's part, even moreso than having him hang with the KKK in the earlier novel, especially since, as extraordinarily unpleasant as they were, the Nazis tend to make almost everyone else look like kindergarteners when it comes to racially cleansing everything in sight based on flimsy notions of purity.To some extent having real (and very notorious) historical figures in the novel should unbalance it slightly and after three books of him claiming meetings with various obscure historical figures, having him encountering both Hitler and Mussolini (and Rohm, repeatedly) only a few chapters apart does seem to lather on another strange layer of unreality onto a suspect narrative to begin with since it seems even more likely that he's simply making it up (or convinced himself that it was true, as he does with several events in earlier books that he clearly told as lies and now seems to accept as completely true). It doesn't suck any of the power out of the book, if anything watching him revel in Mussolini's presence and claim intimate relations with Hitler only proves how delusional he potentially is.Beyond that, it's Pyat-as-usual, with the typical mix of inventions that conveniently never seem to work due to the fault of others, out of nowhere racial swipes, the rationalizing of various untoward acts such as coveting minors and the downplaying of what can only be a rampaging cocaine habit (there must be a mountain snorted over the course of this series) . . . Moorcock mixes it up enough so it never seems repetitive (even when it is) but the clear racing toward the end of the narrative adds another level of intensity to what before had become old hat, echoing the disintegration of an entire culture, even as Pyat insists this is clearly the best place to be.But he still makes for the perfect vehicle to view the madness that was the Nazi regime and the gradual unraveling mess that was Europe in the late 1930s before it all really went to hell, as he gets arrested and treated as Jewish despite his protests that, gosh fellows, he hates them too, and is shuttled from prison to prison and ultimately to a concentration camp (some of the novel's most intensely scathing scenes are here, oddly in the guise of a Nazi commander who starts to pick apart Pyat's haphazardly constructed persona) before finally becoming the person we first meet him as, an old man railing about crackpot things, insisting that every decent invention of the 20th century was somehow stolen from him and selling old clothes like he's doing everyone a favor.To that end, the final scenes in the novel are the most powerful and a culmination of everything the series has been building up to, and even when you expect it the moment is just as satisfying and surprising and sad as anything Moorcock has ever written, with Pyat's insistence on illogical delusion mirroring our century's sometimes dogged insistence on rewriting history to convince ourselves that it wasn't as bad as the scars and the endless fields of corpses seem to suggest. In that fashion he functions almost as the opposite of Jerry Cornelius, who lived in an elaborately constructed fantasy (unlike his mother, who is a complete realist and even more of a survivor than anyone else in the series) that was gradually stripped away and scaled back, revealing a young man who was more than slightly sad. Here Pyat also inhabits his own fanciful construction but when faced with the borders of his own creation his response is to turn away and burrow deeper inside, insisting that it's the epitome of contentment and secure in his rightness (despite no evidence beyond what he manufactures), and that winds up being an even sadder fate. At least when it's all torn down and you're left with nothing you can recognize that and build again. But when you've surrounded yourself with thick walls of your own dreams, there will be no one around to help when the collapse finally comes and leaves you trapped inside the remains of your own wreckage.
Originally published on my blog here in April 2006.After twenty-five years, the final volume of the Pyat Quartet has now at last appeared; it has spent almost all that time listed at the front of Moorcock's publications as "in preparation". The quartet as a whole must rank as one of the most ambitious novel series of the period, as well as one of the most slowly written; not content with being a historical narrative of the first half of the twentieth century, Moorcock has immersed himself in the repellent personality of Maxim Pyat and produced a study of how such a person appears to themselves while making it clear how others perceive them at the same time.The story of The Vengeance of Rome takes Pyat from a fugitive in Morocco - the ending of the previous volume - to friendship with Mussolini in Fascist Italy, and then close links with the Nazi hierarchy in thirties Germany (extremely close in some cases), through imprisonment in the camp at Dachau to eventually meeting the young Moorcock while running a second hand clothes shop near Notting Hill in the sixties.Like many historical novels, a lot of the fascination in this series lies in the way in which Pyat's story is threaded into the major events of the time. Though the most obvious counterpart to the quartet may seem to be George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series, the tone here is much more serious, and Pyat's character and role in history are both far more ambiguous. At the heart of the whole series, and emphasised particularly in this final novel, is the conflict between Pyat's anti-Semitism and his appearance: being constantly taken for a Jew is not a good thing in thirties Italy and Germany.The conceit of the series is that the novels are in fact memoirs edited together by Moorcock from Pyat's papers and memories of conversations the two of them had. There is an introductory page, which suggests that the main task of the (fictional) editorial hand has had to try to harmonise conflicting accounts. One of the usual characteristics of Moorcock's fantasy genre writing is that he positively revels in incompatible versions of stories; this is particularly clear in the recent Second Ether trilogy, each of which treats incompatibility in a different way. So this is a somewhat ironic statement, one of many in The Vengeance of Rome of various different kinds.One of the most interesting of these, because it reveals a lot about the character and the author's attitude to him, occurs when Pyat is interrogated by the SS about his career as an inventor: "I invented it all", he says, apparently without realising what this suggests about his history; and yet Moorcock also states in the introduction that he found corroborating evidence for many of the incidents that initially seemed most fabulous; this is clearly a deliberate contradiction. The reader, of course, knows that this is fiction, but it is being presented as true as any memoirs - with hints like this that it is at the very least, significantly embellished.Moorcock fans may have wished to see the quartet completed more quickly, but there are obvious reasons why the novels would be difficult to write (and those obvious reasons may not of course have affected the author, no matter how strongly the novels may suggest them). These are the requirements of historical research and the repellent personality of Pyat already mentioned, together with the difficulty of writing from the point of view of an individual whose opinions in almost every subject seem to be diametrically opposed to those of the author. (Moorcock's own views can be read in the essays in The Opium General, for example, or on his website, Moorcock's Miscellany - currently down after attacks by hackers, an event that is itself something of a commentary on his views.)It is possible to see the Pyat quartet as a sustained attack on racism. Indeed, the idea that an anti-Semite is so unable to see that Jewish people are just as human as he is leads him to be unable to perceive his own Jewishness is a barbed comment on the stupidity of such a view. But there is much more to it than that, and ranks as Moorcock's literary masterpiece, as The Dancers at the End of Time is its equivalent in the science fiction genre.
Do You like book The Vengeance Of Rome (2007)?
So, at the end of the fourth volume of Moorcock's Millennium Quartet we get confirmation of something we've suspected since early in the first volume. But the way we find out brings home quite how dishonest, disloyal (to everyone except Mrs Cornelius) and self-obsessed Pyat really is. As usual, there are plenty of unbelievable (probably because they're untrue) coincidences to rescue our clay-footed golden boy from his absurd involvement in the major historical events of the mid nineteen-thirties. As things settle down after the war, he becomes more secure in his invented persona. What will happen if somebody challenges this? Read the book to find out...
—Gordon
