The English Assassin

...that was painful. I really want to give this 1 star, but i’m going to restrain myself. The basic writing isn’t bad and if i cared even a little bit about anything happening i’m sure it might have been passable.
For me i feel like its problems sort of amplified each other. Firstly, at times it seems to be a grand celebration of the Cornelius books... except there have only been two and only one of those was any good so all those bits felt completely unearned.

Then, this book has almost no Cornelius in it, instead we follow all those other memorable characters from the previous books.. like whathisname, whosthat, weretheyinitbefore and waitwasthatheonewhoorwasthattheotherone . To clarify, i had a hard time distinguishing the show more characters or caring about them.

The first and even the second book are quite surreal at times and so all of this extra detail material on characters.. even if i cared... can only undermine the surreal elements by grounding them. So even if/when it works the surreal is undermined by the grounded bits, or the grounded bits are undermined by the surreal.

But to reiterate, since i didn’t care about any of the characters i simply failed utterly at the mental effort which was needed to follow the tortuously convoluted timeline of flashbacks and flash-forwards. Leading of course to caring even less about what was happening.

There were moments when i thought this could turn into something, mostly those moments when Jerry made his brief appearances but ultimately it went nowhere for me and meant nothing.

Note: There's also one really vile scene towards the end.. which in another book would barely have made me blink but here is so incongruous and pointless that it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
I suppose all the chapters openings with news headlines of real deaths where also in poor taste.. really thought they would mean something or be earned in some way.. maybe for some readers they were but not for me. show less

My favourite of the tetralogy. I heard Moorcock read extracts from it in Devon, before it was published (1972 at a guess). He stopped part way through the reading for quite a few beats and then said, "Sorry, I thought I saw myself come in through the door, but it was just someone else wearing my hat".