Gloriana (1978)

in a far more lush and gothic olde england, a decidedly NOT virgin queen rules over a golden age of expansion, exploration, and harmony. a secret population of those who have slipped into disfavor or diminished in fame live in between the walls of her sprawling palace. her gorgeous reign of peace and prosperity is built upon the blood and misery of her unlamented insane father. she keeps a seraglio of willing creatures of every sort because she loves them too much to ever turn anyone out of her household. court intrigues abound and formal costumed ceremonies usher in every season.

it's a lush, thick, dense sort of gothic sort of stuff here.

prose is overabundantly bursting with descriptions of fabrics that courtiers wear and lists of types of buildings that can be found in the city square; sentences curl baroquely across half a page at a time. it's dedicated to (and, i'm given to understand, a pastiche of) [a:Mervyn Peake|22018|Mervyn Peake|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1206549489p2/22018.jpg], so perhaps if i'd read [b:Gormenghast|39061|Gormenghast (Gormenghast 2)|Mervyn Peake|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1169251311s/39061.jpg|3599885], i'd be more in love with the heavy silken texture. as it is, when a nefarious plot feels the need to show up halfway through the book, i couldn't decide if it was good to get things moving along, or merely a distraction from all the overwrought wordsmithing. it's a strange lovely book, but the fully insanely over-the-top blood & indifferent rape ending just completely lost me.

eat this one in small bites, perhaps with some very light-reading sort of short stories handy as a palate cleanser every few chapters. ( )

steampunk.
*note to self. Copy from A.

I read this for a book club, but it's the kind of book I like anyway.

Moorcock dedicated this book to the memory of Mervyn Peake, and it is indeed very Ghormanghastly. The huge palace with its complex of interlinked buildings and roofed-in alleyways, hidden rooms and secret passages behind the walls is a perfect setting for a tale of courtly intrigue, spying and seduction. I was glad to find that it has a straight-forward narrative, unlike some of his other books such as the Jerry Cornelius novels, where you have to keep your wits about you to keep up with what is going on.
The story is set in an alternative history version of Elizabethan England. Instead of England in the throes of the Reformation, we have Albion where Christianity and Islam do not appear to exist and it is still the pagan feasts of Yule and May Day that are celebrated at court. There are mentions of a 'High Tongue' that presumably is something other than Latin. Gloriana's empire encompasses the Americas and much of Asia, and the American diplomats at her court include representatives of the Sioux and the Aztecs as well as of the Europeans who have settled in Virginia.

"The corruption lies in the fact that a myth was used to manufacture an imitation of reality. Could Albion fall so swiftly if the foundations were secure?" ( )

Moorcock has posited himself as the rebel of fantasy, sapping the high walls built by Howard and Tolkien. He is a well-spoken and thoughtful critic 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 this case. In fact, he's not even being particularly original. In most regards, Gloriana 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, and 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 comparisons 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'. ( )

http://olvasonaplo.freeblog.hu/archives/2007/02/01/Michael_Moorcock_Gloriana_a_k... ( )