The Vanishing Tower

Michael Moorcock The Vanishing Tower (1970)
This is my fourth Elric book and I realise that I've been going at it all wrong. It isn't that I haven't enjoyed them, but I expected to enjoy them more than I have done. I'm not automatically well-disposed towards anything involving either spells, wizards or castles, so I need my occasional fantasy novel to do a bit more than the usual. Elric does a bit more than the usual, but nothing like so much as Moorcock's other novels tend to do. This would be fine in itself but for the scrappily episodic feel of short stories welded together, one quest after another, mystic day-saving gemstone after mystic day-saving gemstone…

Well, it seems these novels actually are short stories welded together, but short stories of such length as to be further subdivided into portions by my customary reading habits - an hour when I wake up and another before I go to sleep, which usually works out at about fifty pages a day with most books. Anyway, being as these things are pretty breezy, I made the effort to read each of the three short stories into which this one divides in single hour-long sittings, and suddenly they were a whole lot more enjoyable. I guess the existence of all those droning fifteen volume sword and sorcery epics has fooled me into the belief that I need to treat this kind of thing as a saga, accordingly remembering all the unpronounceables with walk-on parts for when they turn up later to reveal they still have such and such a mystic dingus in their possession.

It seems that reading each Elric episode in one go without worrying too much over minor points of continuity is the key, additionally meaning one is less likely to be distracted from the profoundly atmospheric weirdness; which is the main reason for reading these things.

So, it seems it wasn't Michael Moorcock after all. It was me. I still say he's written better, but then even the fruits of his occasionally phoning it in tend to be way above the average.