his volume follows (and perhaps concludes) the newest Elric series that began with The Dreamthief's Daughter (2001) and continued with The Skrayling Tree (2003).
In modern-day England, on a familiar strand of the multiverse reasonably close to the one that holds you, your reviewer and Michael Moorcock, 12-year-old Oonagh Beck is leading a charmed life. She and her loving extended family inhabit a fine old house in the bucolic village of Ingleton, West Yorkshire, whose fields and streams, caves and quarries, shops and ruins provide all that any child could ask in the way of adventure. But Oonagh's life is about to experience a quantum jump in peril and excitement.
First, two disturbing strangers arrive at Ingleton. Named Klosterheim and von Minct, they take an unnatural interest in Oonagh. She seems in danger of being kidnapped for unknown reasons. But that's before some colorful allies show up, chief among them the eerie albino known as Monsieur Zodiac. The new/old friends erect a protective cordon around the Beck household. But unfortunately, the very next morning Oonagh accidentally falls outside their protection—quite literally. She tumbles down the shaft of a cavern, finds herself in the underground world of the Off-Moo, gets adopted by a larger-than-human bipedal talking fox named Reynard, and is soon running for her life.
Oonagh finds herself in Reynard's city, Mirenburg, where she enjoys the shield offered by Reynard's band of rogues. But Klosterheim and von Minct have followed her across the continua and eventually capture her—but not before she has her first meeting with her putative twin and long-lost brother, Onric, who bears an unmistakable resemblance to Monsieur Zodiac.
Shanghaied to another worldline, where the evil empire of Granbretan, based in London, dominates the globe, Oonagh learns the hideous truth behind her capture. It appears that King Huon and his co-conspirators have a plan magically to seize the reins of the multiverse—a plan that involves the ritual demise of Oonagh and Onric.
Moorcock's never-ending story
Like James Branch Cabell, with his immense saga called The Biography of the Life of Manuel, the overwhelming majority of Michael Moorcock's books fold into one grand scheme, the tale of the Eternal Champion, a deific figure around whose actions pivots the destiny of the multiverse (a well-used word nowadays, which Moorcock is generally conceded to have coined). Some books are central, some are pendants. But the pleasure in all of them is generally seeing new avatars of old characters re-enact archetypical feuds among new settings. The cast of well-established characters is now so huge, and the resonances so multivalent, that the reader is best advised simply to resign himself or herself to missing out on some of the associations and just enjoying the current ride.
What makes the volume under discussion a bit different from its predecessors is the introduction of a wonderful new character without any real antecedent. Oonagh Beck is a delightful creation and a perfect viewpoint character. The care that Moorcock lavishes on her portrait (and also the loving portrait of West Yorkshire) invests her with a novelty that the Elric mythos can well use. Her Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole tumble places her in a long line of adolescent fantasy heroines (Moorcock also explicitly evokes the wonderful tales of E. Nesbit), and viewing the cosmic battles with her fresh eyes enlivens them. (It's only natural that Oonagh compare one of Granbretan's armored and masked minions to a robot out of Star Wars, for instance.) Onric, the titular hero, is actually rather bland and offstage for the most part.
Unfortunately, this freshness has the effect of rendering the 100 or so pages told from Elric's point of view a little stale and disorienting. I know Moorcock needed to convey certain information, but this book would have benefited from a consistency of narrative viewpoint. That's how charming and gripping Oonagh's perspective is.
The book ends on a note that seems to bring this trilogy to a close. But in the multiverse, no one is ever really dead, no battles are ever really decisive, and the moonbeam roads between the dimensions go ever onward, so I'm certain we haven't seen the last of Elric, nor, hopefully, of Oonagh.
