The War Amongst the Angels

The War Amongst the Angels concludes Moorcock's Second Ether trilogy, largely returning to the key characters and narrative format of the first book Blood. Although speakers and viewpoints shift throughout the book, it begins and ends in the voice of Margaret Rose Moorcock, and it is "an autobiographical story by Michael Moorcock," whom the tale tells us is Rose's cousin in Texas. (Moorcock was indeed living in Texas when he wrote this book, but he never appears in person in the story. It does feature Rose's uncle Michael, for whom the author is supposedly named.)

The title does accurately reflect the plot as it eventuates in the final arc of the book, with a multiversal conflict in a world where the Chaos Engineers and the Singularity show more vie for the lost ship Spammer Gain on an ectoplasmic sea. Our Eternals (the heroes of the tale) are at least nominally aligned with Chaos, although they are the Just who oppose Law in order to preserve Balance. Readers of other Moorcock fantasies will quickly see the recurring patterns of the Eternal Champion hyperwork, but the travel on the Moonbeam Roads, transiting the axis of scale, is an approach to supernaturalism somewhat peculiar to the Second Ether stories.

Additionally, there are specific evocations of other previous Moorcock books, particularly Stormbringer and The War Hound and the World's Pain, especially in the climactic chapter Libres des Muertes. There may well have been some key references to books that I haven't even read, since I cannot claim complete familiarity with Moorcock's enormous bibliography. The echoes and allusions that I did perceive, however, increased my appreciation for what was happening in this story to the extent that I don't think the Second Ether is a good starting point for prospective Moorcock readers.

The War Amongst the Angels is dedicated to a clutch of 19th-century English authors, all of whom had long fallen out of print in 1996. Their works furnish most and perhaps all of the epigrams that head the chapters of the book. The second Second Ether book Fabulous Harbours was definitely fiction about fiction, and here too the imaginative faculty uses narrative to create and navigate multiple realities. Moorcock muses on politics frequently, albeit in varied voices and within his fantastic setting.

The feint of setting himself up as the "poor Texan cousin" who lends his name for Rose to use as a byline in "her" fiction (18) significantly undermines the book's apparent claim to be Michael Moorcock's autobiography. As mentioned, he doesn't even figure as an immediate character in the plot. But the Rose developed in these books is perhaps either his personified anima or a feminine alter-ego. Decades later, Moorcock would return far more transparently to the enterprise of autobiography through fantasy fiction in his Sanctuary of the White Friars, a series which saw its second volume published last year. show less

This is not one of Moorcock's best. Although part of one of his long cycles (the Von Bek cycle) that are only for true dedicatees, this book can also be read as part of the English fantasy genre that arose out of Milton's Paradise Lost. Every 'goth-minded' schoolboy thrilled at Satan's line, 'Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven'. This isn't the transgression of American libertarianism but is embedded in English culture as the struggle between God and the Light-Bringer. Milton's unintended effect was to build a glamorous lobby for resisting faith-based pretensions in every generation that had grown up under the old school curriculum. Moorcock's book contains the usual oddities and incoherences and assumes more suspension of show more belief than is good for anyone trying to maintain their sanity - but it is worth reading as an entertaining way station to the Pullman trilogy (two parts genius, one part abject failure). This genre may now have exhausted itself but Moorcock has played his role in keeping a dissenting cultural tradition alive as (insofar as the fantasy genre is regarded with disdain) literary samizdat. show less

My reaction to reading this novel in 1998. Spoilers follow.

Moorcock, when venturing outside the straightforward fantasy novel format of his Elric and von Bek series with their straightforward plots, grows on you with his psychedelic, initially incomprehensible plots. This is the culmination of the trilogy beginning with Blood then Fabulous Harbors and also in his Multiverse comic book series which retells and expands on the trilogy. A cynic would view Moorcock’s multiverse with its theoretically endless variations on certain characters, archetypes, plots, symbols as a lazy excuse to constantly recycle the same stories or an inability to collapse the story potentials of an idea via the act of observation, i.e writing, into an artistic show more statement. However, after awhile, the variations (complicated by the non-linearity of time in Moorcock’s Multiverse) become hypnotic.

I liked this bizarre mélange of real, but semi-legendary, characters like Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, and Dick Turpin, gentle artistic and political satire, wry self commentary by Moorcock, gentle English pastoralism, a war in Heaven, the bizarre antics of the Chaos Engineers in the Second Ether, and the ever present struggle to balance Law and Chaos. Mixed in with these are plenty of allusions to fake literary works and histories. I liked his gentle satirical asides on the social function of pulp renditions of outlaws, of monetarism – the mistaking of the symbol of money for real wealth, the Turpin struggle against the privately owned tram system, the slogans of conservatives, and the strange predilection for J.S. Bach amongst Law conservatives.

Moorcock’s political philosophy of seeking a third route between Chaos and Law sounds good and utopic but collapses in detailed examination – for instance freedom being reconciled with public ownership. This is not a trivial point. The book ends with New Orleans being transformed into something of a political utopia, though not perfect, by Sam Oakenhurst. Moorcock’s conflict of Law and Chaos is always interesting since both have points both good and bad and can be reconciled, at least temporarily, in a variety of ways. Michael Moorcock is the crazy uncle of narrator (though some of the novel is narrated by Jack Karaquazian) Margaret Rose Moorcock, the same Rose of the Multiverse comic and Blood though, of course, reconstructing a chronology of her life (and this novel jumps all around in her life) is pointless given the multiverse and slightly differing aspects of the same character.

Moorcock’s fondness for Western pulps is parodied here. The book veers from the pastoralism of Rose’s life to a symbolic struggle between the angelic forces of Law and Chaos at the end and is usually enthralling. I particularly liked the reappearance of Ulrich von Bek (an Elric-like character with a similar, vampiric black blade) aka Count Zodiac and his struggle with the old family acquaintance, Lucifer. (An ersatz grail is a “Fellini Chalice”. Another seeming reference to a real person is to J.G. Ballard in the weapon Ballard 70. Other weapons of a fantastical nature are also, I suspect, named after English sf figures.) I also liked the schoolmaster turned pirate and gunrunner, Captain Horatio Quelch, a figure of shifting alliances and mysterious motives, a trickster out for himself. show less

see http://www.sfsite.com/01a/war48.htm