his volume of 11 stories—published from 1969 to 2002—forms, in the prefatory words of its author, "a continuous narrative," a bit of a wild-eyed fix-up novel, albeit of a most disjointed, nonlinear sort.
Jerry Cornelius is another avatar of Moorcock's "Eternal Champion," but one with roots in our own contemporary history. An unprepossessing sort—"Six feet two inches tall, rather fat," bisexual, effete, murderous, sentimental, with longish hair and a keen sense of fashion—Cornelius was born in the '60s and survives today as an emblem of that era and its politics and sensibilities. Yet he has not remained untouched by the intervening four decades.
In "The Peking Junction," Jerry sojourns among the Red Chinese, playing Machiavellian games until he can extract with his trusty vibragun the "infinitely precious nucleotides" he needs from one of the Chinese generals. Jerry lives the archaic life of an Imperial rajah in "The Delhi Division," until events force him to make a coward's exit. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia influences Jerry half a world away in Southeast Asia in "The Tank Trapeze." Jerry's role as intertemporal repair man, operating out of his Time Center, is revealed in "The Swatstika Set-up." Miss Brunner, Jerry's comely black widow of an associate, seems to think that black magic rituals will substitute for science when she and Jerry face the quandary of "The Sunset Perspective." "Sea Wolves" brings Jerry fully into the computer age, while "Voortrekker" finds Jerry and crew in Africa.
Twenty-five years will intervene in Moorcock's own life before he revisits Jerry and friends. But when he does, he finds them in fine fettle. The events of "The Spenser Inheritance" revolve around the death of a certain adored Princess of the realm and a plan to steal her corpse. "The Camus Referendum" (or, as it's alternately titled on the contents page, "The Camus Connection") forms a diptych with "Cheering for the Rockets." Both tales find Jerry in the Middle East, dealing with Arabs, the United Nations and American generals amid wartime insanity. Finally, "Firing the Cathedral," a long novella originally published in stand-alone form, brings Jerry back to Europe, where, somewhat despondent, he awaits some signs of a promised rejuvenation.
In Jerry Cornelius,
the New Wave lives on
Much like J.G. Ballard, his co-conspirator in the New Wave that refashioned speculative fiction, Moorcock in these books is concerned with presenting "condensed novels," high-impact anti-narratives that capture impressionistically a sense of the bewildering tumult of life in the 20th and 21st centuries. Symbolism and passion trump realism and logic every time. Jerry's adventures proceed in a series of disorienting jump cuts. The effect is like watching a film that has been spliced together after having had every few yards removed. Or like watching a film spliced together out of an assortment of random pieces from several utterly different films. Yet the overall effect is to drive home in ways that no more conventional tale ever could the deracination and arbitrary ethics of current history and its players. And this method also brilliantly conveys Moorcock's politics. You'll never be in doubt as to where Moorcock's sympathies lie along the left-to-right spectrum.
To achieve his goals, Moorcock employs surrealism, transrealism, gonzo humor, pratfalls, parodies, news quotes, pastiches—in short, the whole postmodern bag of tricks. Identities and appearances flow like soft clocks in a Dali landscape. Jerry and his cohorts all die several times, yet spring back to life for their next adventure, like cartoon cats and mice. Yet these fantastical events are held together with a strong element of narrative, as seen in the several set pieces of action and dialogue that compose each story like beads on a chain. A master storyteller in the traditional manner, as attested to by his numerous other less transgressive novels, Moorcock is a dab hand at staging hilarious little farces and melodramatic encounters among his motley troupe of outlaws—Bishop Beesley, Shaky Mo Collier, Miss Brunner and her daughter Trixiebelle, Una Persson, Colonel Pyat, to name a few—and their enemies. You read these stories in a long, continuous flow, as if hurtling in an inner tube down a series of rapids. You may not have full awareness of what's going on while it's happening, but at the end you know you've been on a hell of a ride.
Jerry's personality in the post-1972 stories is altered a tad from the devil-may-care trickster of the earliest tales. The '80s and '90s—"a deadly dull 20 years," Jerry observes in "Firing the Cathedral"—were not easy on utopian free spirits from the hippie era. But by the end of the last piece, after much tribulation, Jerry discovers that "The world was altogether brighter. He had never felt fresher." Primed to battle Law in favor of Chaos, half in love with glorious entropy, Jerry seems primed, like Moorcock himself, to continue on his madcap path for another four decades at least.
Moorcock and Cornelius have inspired such younger writers as Steve Aylett, Warren Ellis, Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Let him into your life and you'll feel his influence as well.
