The Dreamthief's Daughter

Michael Moorcock The Dreamthief's Daughter (2001)
I had no plans to read beyond the first six tidily collated Elric books given that everyone's favourite albino sword swinger sits at the very edge of my field of thematic interest, and wouldn't get a second glance from my direction were it anyone other than Moorcock; but I had four of the six and needed to fill the gaps, and this was on the same eBay page as the other two, so fuck it, I thought.

The Dreamthief's Daughter turns out to be a big, fat novel rather than short stories welded together in a slimmer volume, but serves as a good example of Moorcock's tendency to stretch genres beyond breaking point in the name of keeping things interesting. This one inhabits his celebrated and frequently imitated multiverse, without which we probably wouldn't have had the Moore or Morrison versions, and the camera is pulled back so as to reveal Elric as inhabiting just one segment. Another segment, which may or may not be where we live, is occupied by Ulric von Bek, an Elric variant who has the misfortune to witness the rise of Adolf Hitler, which is itself tied in with goings on in the war between the forces of Law and Chaos. If this is sounding a bit familiar, you're possibly thinking of one of numerous cheap, less satisfying imitations, because Moorcock merely joins dots while resisting the temptation to reveal that Hitler was actually working for those outer space robot people, or Cthulhu, or the three-legged bloke on the Manx flag. Nope - these Nazis are the real thing, driven by exactly the same bullshit which seems to have enjoyed a recent resurgence in popularity out here in the real world. This presents a canny balancing act given the celebrated Nazi love of mystical bollocks remaining bollocks in the context of a novel featuring actual magic swords.

Perhaps my overfondness for reading, as a child, had made me too familiar with all the old arguments used to justify the mortal lust for power. The moment the moral authority of the supernatural was invoked, you knew you were in conflict with the monumentally self-deceiving, who should not be trusted at any level.

Thus we get an Elric book which seems to channel Abraham Merritt - given how much time is spent underground - gets the absolute best from its genre, has quite a lot to say, and keeps Nazi Germany in horrifying perspective without turning the fuckers into generically cool bad guys to be booed and hissed like the empire in Star Wars. Possibly ironically, given my opening paragraph, this may even be the best Elric book I've read.