he latest exfoliation of Michael Moorcock's immense, 40-year-old saga of the multiverse and its Eternal Champion began in 2001 with The Dreamthief's Daughter. In that volume, we were introduced to Ulric von Bek, last scion of the fabled von Bek name. A retiring, moody, thoughtful young man in late 1930s Germany, Ulric wanted nothing more than to live quietly in his castle, practicing his fencing with the strange black sword known as Ravenbrand. But the arrival of the Nazis, embodied in the form of his evil cousin Gaynor, upset all Ulric's certainties. Before long, Ulric was swept up in Gaynor's mad quest to use Ravenbrand to bolster the Nazi cause and, ultimately, plunge the multiverse into extinction. Meeting underground partisans Prince Lobkowitz and the beautiful Oona, the dreamthief's daughter, Ulric soon found himself embarked on a quest across several planes of existence. When Ulric learned that he was an avatar of Elric himself, and actually merged corporeally with his namesake, the stage was set for a titanic battle between Law and Chaos.
As the newest book opens, the year is 1951. Ulric and Oona, having triumphed over Gaynor, who is physically dispersed across the multiverse, are married and parents. Resting from their labors for global peace at a Nova Scotian cabin, they choose to investigate a mysterious abandoned cottage on a nearby island. This idle whim triggers all that is to follow. Ulric is instantly abducted by a strange breed of Amerindians and carried down a maelstrom. Oona follows as rescuer, and the first third of the book is narrated by her. She finds herself, post-maelstrom, in pre-Columbian America. There she meets two Indians, White Crow and Ayanawatta, the original of Longfellow's Hiawatha. Oona learns that the Indians who abducted her husband are the Kakatanawa, whose main city is a mountain-sized "long house" that shelters the Skrayling Tree, an object that is to some extent coterminous with—and the soul of—the multiverse. The trio set out for the fabled city, facing deadly pygmy Indians and the attentions of Klosterheim, Gaynor's old ally. Finally within sight of the ziggurat-like city, they are stopped by the invocation of a deadly wind elemental, Lord Shoashooan.
The tale now switches to the point of view of Elric himself, contemporaneously sojourning on our plane under the guise of Silverskin in the Middle East. His own desires impel him toward North America, a destination he can reach only with aid of the Norsemen who regularly travel to "Wineland." The notoriously mad Captain Gunnar agrees to bring Elric to North America, but only too late does Elric realize that Gunnar is the reincarnation of Gaynor. When they arrive at the Kakatanawan long house, they encounter the battle between Oona and Lord Shoashooan, and Elric must decide whose side to join.
The final "branch" of the story follows Ulric from the moment of his abduction, which is revealed to be one of necessity, not antagonism. Apprised of the dangers to the Skrayling Tree and rearmed with Ravenbrand, Ulric is dispatched across the mythical North American landscape along with Prince Lobkowitz to save the multiverse. But the price he must pay will fall more on Oona than on himself, and everything hinges on Elric's mad caprices.
A rich world grows even richer
After literally dozens of intricately recomplicated books involving all the various incarnations of the Eternal Champion across all the various dimensions of the multiverse, it's dubious that any reader can possibly have a coherent picture in mind of just who has destroyed what universe, or which city resides in which plane, or which particular avatar of scores of characters has interacted with which other avatar. Even Moorcock, one begins to suspect, who especially in his early career wrote these installments fast and furiously without any eye to continuity, has no comprehensive master plan that labels all the tangled threads.
But such a systematic, nitpicking appraisal of Moorcock's sprawling multiverse of adventures is hardly necessary to appreciate each new installment. As Moorcock has Oona say in the current volume, "We do not tell a simple history with a beginning, middle and end. We weave instead a tapestry. We depend upon repetition but not upon imitation, which is mere corruption, confirming nothing. Each strand must be new, though the pattern might be familiar." Assuredly, those readers who have delved into this saga before will get more out of such resonant references as those to Quelch and Bastable, to Spammer Gain and Tanelorn. But even readers new to Moorcock will be swept up in the core tale, which is full of rich incidents and is vigorously recounted in the manner of such master Victorian storytellers as Stevenson, Kipling and Haggard.
The new book suffers a tad, I think, in comparison with the former one, in having its narrative divvied up three ways. The Dreamthief's Daughter benefited by the unity of voice, as Ulric was a charming character caught in an exquisite bind. And it was refreshing to witness Elric, the most famous Eternal Champion, from the outside for a change. But on the other hand, we do get to inhabit Oona's consciousness here, and she proves an empathy-inducing woman of many talents.
Whichever narrator we're riding, the major attraction of this book is the mythic, storybook image of North America that Moorcock purveys. Like some gloriously demented blend of James Fenimore Cooper, Ernest Seton, Longfellow and John Muir, Moorcock makes the most of the rich Amerindian past of his adopted land. Reminiscent of the fantastical game-playing of Philip Jose Farmer (I'm thinking of Farmer's Time's Last Gift from 1972, among others), Moorcock's talents provide a Winsor McKay-like realm where a giant white buffalo seems no more out of place than a golden city that can contain a multiverse.
One final observation: While the slaughter wrought by Stormbringer and Ravensword is lovingly detailed with a manic delight, any kind of sex is curiously absent from this tale. For instance, Oona's long trek alone with two men she finds potent warriors features nary a stray thought of their sexual attractiveness. Whereas Elric's early adventures were marketed as nearly juvenile tales, it seems that these modern, more mature novels would provide Moorcock with a chance to explore this angle more deeply.
