Pyat is one of the recurring characters of the Jerry Corneilius books, a lover to Ma Corneilius, or Mrs Corneilius, and also a friend to the Corneiliuys pantheon of recurring characters. Each with a patina of familiar histories and yet different, some in small ways, some not so small.
Pyat is born in Kiev on the cusp of a century of change. Ukraine seems cursed to be the epicentre of "interesting times", with pogroms, famine and wars. All man made,off course, all taking place in the "bread basket " of the world.From Odessa to Kiev and way beyond, Micael Moorcock crafts a fascinating fiction against a back drop of actual history. The pendulem of history swinging violently across the years, cloaking Ukraine and the world it is attached too, in a veil of tears, punctuated with happier times, moments grasped and rememb ered all the more because of their passing. With Precision detail, brought fleetingly back through the words laid down like the contents of a lucid dream. This book is mostly fixed on the first couple of decades of Pyat's life.Innocence and aspiration abound, like an inversion of a piece by William Blake, with futurity blooming in the rubble of yesterday.
This is the first volume in a series of Pyat memoirs. He is a character I was only aware of in the periphery of louder characters, and there are a lot of those in the Corneilius family. My memory of him was as a friend and past lover to that force of supernature Mrs Corneilius, I did not see the possibility I was only witness to a fraction of the characters life. Its that way with old people the way we lazily allow them small walk on parts in the epics of our lives. PyatNow I am one I experience the invisibilty that comes with white hair.
Pyat's early years in the Ukraine fairly mirror the current ones, another restless era where borders blur and war runs rampant.I had been thinking there might be a degree of unreliable narration here as we view history through a distorting lens of history in fluid mobility. The characters, after all, do not on the whole consider themselves as players in another person's story.The POV is subject to the whims of such lived truths. Each one neccessarily different to the other, like a group of people witnessing an action or an event play out, each one seeing that same event only from their own perspectives. The wide eyed relatively innocent young Pyat is a very different Pyat from the slightly more worldly one who returns to an equally different and changed Odessa. Every living thing is subject to change, why should a city be any different to a single being inhabiting a city. We shape the cities we live in as much as we are shaped by them.In his earlier days Pyat dreamed of becoming an engineer, an inventor, a patriot. He is at first wary of Judaism while all the while being mistaken and treated as a jew.I was aware of some of the bullet points of Ukranian history but the complexity of its history and its people escaped me. Its vast , for one thing, but that is hardly an excuse. Across its vast land mass the place names have at times changed, to protect the guilty as much as the innocent. What a thing it was to be young and finding oneself in a bohemian Oddessa, a very heaven, depending on your point of view.At that time the young Pyat had dreams of flying.He even describes an Icarus like flight above a dreaming Kiev and all too like Icarus he finds himself grounded by reality. A mirror to the painting b y Brugel the Elder, a small splash that all but goes unseen by the wider world.
Really enjoyed Byzantium Endures and can only marvel at the sheer girth of Michael Moorcock's abilities.What a Faustian gift it must be to see through his eyes, where all the fatefull collisions and impacts of history ripple out shaping his muliverse, the excruiating agregate of humanity, Galactus would devour us. Michael Moorcock gives us back what we gave away.
