Stormbringer

Michael Moorcock Stormbringer (1965)
My general view of Moorcock's Elric books has been subject to a seemingly endless cycle of re-evaluation, as follows:

• Suspected that, being fantasy, they were probably shit.
• Read Moorcock and realised they might be all right after all.
• Was told Moorcock wrote them purely for the money, meaning they were probably shit.
• Read the first one anyway and realised that it was actually pretty decent, regardless of having possibly been written for the money.
• Read the next few, and sort of enjoyed them but nothing like so much as Moorcock's other novels. Ho hum.

Stormbringer is the final novel of the original six volume series. I get the impression it was intended to be the final Elric book, but the popularity of the series obliged a continuation. Of the first six, it's the one which reads like a proper novel rather than a series of short stories bolted together. Moorcock's brief introduction introduces it as his first attempt at a full-length book, then thanks David Britton for hanging onto the magazines in which it was originally serialised, and Wikipedia claims it was yet more short stories bolted together, so I guess the conclusion here is that nobody fucking knows.

Anyway, I suppose my problem with the Elric books - not that it kept me from reading these first six - is a certain absence of humour, possibly aside from the sort of humour which occasionally smashes wooden flagons of ale together with a hearty ha ha! Then again, I can see the sense in preserving the mythic thrust of these tales by avoiding knowing winks to camera, and they're all about the mythic. Stormbringer wraps everything up nicely by pushing its mythic agenda to the border of philosophy, or at least something deeper than routine chivalry and stuff about dragons. It draws back a little, at least compared to the others, to reveal the bigger and significantly weirder picture, and in doing so making Tolkien seem positively pedestrian. I now understand that Jack Vance's Dying Earth books may have been an influence, and this feels very much like a distant relative inhabiting the other end of human history, or prehistory to be specific.

So what I'm saying here is that, Stormbringer really is sort of mind-blowing by some definition, and if the previous four weren't quite so startling as the first, this grand finale rewards the effort of having read them. Even if Moorcock's principal motivation was paying off the mortgage, it doesn't really matter because this one justifies the hype.