The Weird of the White Wolf

Michael Moorcock The Weird of the White Wolf (1977)

There were six books in this first cycle of the Elric saga. I'd read the first two; then tracked down the three I didn't have with plans to read them in order, one through to six, mainly because it's been a couple of years since I read Elric of Melniboné and The Sailor on the Seas of Fate and felt I should get reacquainted. The books are mostly slim, about one-hundred and fifty pages give or take - about as long as they need to be. So I re-read the first two then tackled this one, and realised that a little goes a long way where Elric is concerned. The first book is mostly wonderful. Sailor has its moments but is somewhat episodic with our boy moving from one scrape to another without it really feeling like it's adding up to anything in particular, and The Weird of the White Wolf is the same.

This isn't to say that the saga ever begins to bore or tread water, because Moorcock always kept things lively, avoiding almost all of the clichés we've come to expect from sword and sorcery, writing as fiction should be written rather than just recycling the usual bollocks about persons who do aquesting go. So regardless of ghastly apparitions and soul-stealing swords, the Elric books have a distinctly punky edge which really keeps you on your toes; and the magic is that this spikey, almost post-modern quality somehow emphasises the mythic power of the tales - as distinct from being mechanically reclaimed Tolkien with Star Wars jokes bolted on*. Elric works like the real world, albeit under extraordinary circumstances, and not even mythology itself is beyond scrutiny.

Elric Smiled. 'Oh, it's nothing more than a folktale, probably, the story I told you. This Saxif D'Aan could be another person altogether—or an imposter, even, who has taken his name—or a sorcerer. Some sorcerers take the names of other sorcerers, for they think it gives them more power.'

Both Sailor and White Wolf, it could be argued, have a rhythm more closely resembling real life than those housebrick sagas of persons seeking specific mystic items - digressions occur and not everything adds up as it might in a novel written with reference to a wall laden with post-it notes. Of course, I now realise this is also due to a few of these novels comprising sequences of short stories woven together; but for all the many, many, many, many, many faults of Lord of the Rings, it does at least have momentum driven by a coherent goal somewhere near the end of the third book. That which drives Elric onwards is less obvious, at least here, meaning I probably didn't need to re-read the first two, and I'll probably wait before tackling the other three because they seem to work better in short, sharp doses.

Beyond the above observations, Elric remains arguably one of the few things in the fantasy section which is worth reading. It's weird, scary, occasionally disturbing and the thematic opposite of all those cosy quests, bursting with peculiar ideas, like a sleeker, sharper, more chilling heir to Clark Ashton Smith. Each time I pick up a Moorcook I've never read, I notice just how much of the landscape of contemporary science-or-otherwise-fiction has come from him, and in forms which are never anything like so powerful or honest as the original.

*: Referring here to Randy Henderson's Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free which remains more or less the worst thing I've ever read, or at least tried to read. It still hurts three-and-a-half years later.