Well, it took me a while to find a copy but oh my it was worth the wait. Knowing a bit more about Elizabethan history and understanding Michael Moorcock's multiversal meanderings than i did previously enhanced my enjoyment no end. I remember reading somewhere that this book was a pastiche of Edmund Spenser's "Faerie Queen", a more widely read reader might sagely sigh and take another glug of port ( people who nod sagely tend to lean towards port imbiding.) I found Michael Moorcock's droll and sexually violent fable to be so much more than that. I have, possibly unfairly, believed The Faerie Queen to be one of the great literary suck ups, easily on a greasy par with Machievelli's The Prince, which always struck me a brilliant application for a job he did not really deserve to get.A bit of courtly fawning I suppose. And also Edmund Spenser's fractured and violent relationship with Ireland has always been warily off putting to me. he crafted a "final solution" to the "Irish problem", suggesting that the island of Ireland would never be completely pacified, properly domesticated , until every vestige of its indeginous culture was utterly wiped away. I figured it would be tough to seperate his poetic leanings from his genocidal ones.
As the title of the book suggests Michael Moorcock's er, penetrating narrative high fives Gloriana's inability to achieve sexual satisfaction despite her efforts to do so. No matter the size, quality or fetish she reamins forlornly unfulfilled. And yet, Gloriana is crafted as a mirror to her age, a reflection of her kingdom's aspirations and notions of self. It feels more like an alchemist's scrying mirror , a reflection of a face that never was, beautifully crafted off course. The main threat to her rule is the court corruption and international intrigue, just as Queen Elizabeth the First found herself mired in throughout her life. Oh were it ever so. Her spider like chancellor Mountfallon sets his very worst, or best depending how you feel about bloody outcomes, on the case, setting out to both seduce and reduce Gloriana's state and being. With the sexy and sinister Captain Quire ("Oh Captain, my Captain"), something of a dark King-maker. The Gme is afoot and kingdoms will fall.
This is epic tantasy writ large, steeped in a historical wash that feels as real as anything genuinely Elizabethan. I would be tempted to say this has more to do with Gormenghast that The Faerie Queen and absolutely nothing remotely Tolkienesque. But I wont say that. So you never read that...
Its a heady mix of history and speculative fantasy, complete with courtly ritualism that includes the alchemical dabblings of Doctor John Dee and hand made Golems or Humonculi. In fact it all may very well be true as far as looking down the lens of history may allow. Actually, Michael Moorcock dedecates this book to Mervyn Peake, and quite right too.
As with so much of the work I have read by Michael Moorcock I did feel the tug of mutliverses of possibilities, the gravitational pull offset by my own lack of awareness of the difference between speculation and fact. Especially when those facts are a bit long in the tooth, in a four hundred year old set of gums. The distortion thrown by centuries passed is understandable, look what we do to facts twenty years into this century, if we do not like how they make us feel we discard them. Its a hazardous crumbling Escher-like pathway and we hardly know which steps to trust when makes for great reading but proves to be an unreliable map to follow.
Not in this instance,though. a journey into Gloriana is a splendid endeavour. An illuminated parchment that leads to an embarasment of riches.
Glorious.
