Book Review of:
‘THE WOODS OF ARCADY’
by MICHAEL MOORCOCK
(Gollancz 2023, paperback 2024)
cover image by Roy Perring/ Alamy Stock – 482pp
ISBN 978-1-473-21336-4
RETURN TO A PARIS YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN BEFORE…
It’s been a time, what a time it’s been.
The Woods Of Arcady is not a straightforward narrative. I wait to buy this book until the paperback incarnation. My Michael Moorcock shelf is too bulging to capacity to find new space for the hardback edition. It’s worth the wait. Although he now lives in Texas, from where he recently produced a celebration issue of ‘New Worlds’ magazine, Moorcock has a hugely prolific past.
He writes ‘I have too many stories of time and space and not enough time or space to tell them.’ This novel is several of those stories. By the time I’m midpoint reading my way through the first introductory sequence of The Woods Of Arcady – the section titled ‘Emergence’, I realise I’ve stepped inside Moorcock’s own seething brain, a washing together of memory, fantasy, personal history and his own fictional creations all coexisting on an equilibrium.
His ‘Buggerly Otherly’ alias is masquerading in there alongside a namecheck for Zoot Money, Graham Charnock, Meng & Ecker, as well as Barry Bayley who wanders in and out of the text. Alongside his thoughts on Harlan Ellison, Langdon Jones, the life-loving Brian Aldiss, Alfred Bester… and ‘New Worlds’ too. Cool Jazz, and Hawkwind. How he took from Joseph Conrad’s 1920 novel The Rescue in order to write his own The Ice Schooner (1966). What readers unfamiliar with the Moorcock mythos will make of all this is open to conjecture. I get intimations that it doesn’t matter. This novel is a personal journey. The reader is, at this stage, peripheral. The text is a mash-up of musings, a warren of rabbit holes, way over on the quirk-o-meter. He admits ‘linear memory doesn’t work very well for me.’ There are autobiographical ruminations, from ‘I was self-educated like all my colleagues. Horribly ignorant and widely read’ while scripting comic-strips for ‘Tarzan Adventures’, ‘Lion’ or the ‘Thriller Picture Library’, to later ‘I used to claim SF allowed you to learn how to write while selling your mistakes.’ If mistakes they were, they were hugely invigorating and energetic mistakes.
The book’s title is lifted from a WB Yeats poem. ‘Preparing an ambitious novel was like tuning a guitar with a thousand strings,’ he writes. And it’s within the second section – ‘Divergence’, just beyond the hundred-page mark, that he retunes that metaphorical axe. As a sequel to The Whispering Swarm (2016) – and the second part of ‘The Sanctuary of the White Friars’ trilogy, the Michael Moorcock character is reunited with his swashbuckling fictional characters, Claude Duval, and the Three Musketeers, Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D’Artagnan. Although ‘since I never re-read my books, I couldn’t be sure which one it might have been.’ While in Paris with his wife and daughters, the Moorcock character loses his way beside the canals of the Cirque d’Hiver district, and stumbles accidentally into a richly envisioned strangeness that he’s unsure is dream or fractured fantasy ‘When I am dead I shall be dreaming another version of your life… I am dreaming or I am dreamed’?
He finds himself freed from ‘The Whispering Swarm’ – the form of tinnitus that has assailed him since he was the teenage editor of ‘Tarzan Adventures’. But upon waking from a drugged sleep, either into another dream or a confusion of fantasies, he finds himself abducted onto a barge at the behest of a Monsieur Marvell, carried across France by an intersection of canals, from Marseille into the Mediterranean. Menaced by ‘Redbeard’ Barbarossa’s pirate war dhow they seek sanctuary on the fortress island of Las Cascadas where there are lavishly described luxuries and esoteric conversations presided over by the Barbary Rose, who is also Lady Rose von Bek. They discuss the Atlantis myth too. ‘I really was feeling like a character in one of my own Fleetway stories! Living in a fiction with its own chronology.’
There are a multitude of literary references, with the suspicion that for every one I recognise there are others too esoteric for me to identify. Dan Dare & the Therons of Venus rub shoulders with Leigh Brackett, Buffalo Bill, E (Edith) Nesbit, HG Wells (The Island Of Doctor Moreau fused with The Bruin Boys from the ‘Rainbow’ comic!) and H Rider Haggard. Plus Moorcock’s own highly atmospheric story ‘Karl The Viking & The Ghost Of The Tideless Sea’ illustrated by Don Lawrence for Lion Annual 1965. Also Lafayette R Hubbard whose Typewriter In The Sky ‘made an impression on me,’ being about a writer who ‘becomes trapped in his own illogical narrative.’
Escaping to Tangiers, but still pursued by the Arab cut-throats of Barbarossa’s scarlet-sailed pirate vessel, their Jewish guide Isaac-ben-Wahood is wounded by Bedouin assassins, but his place is taken by dashing Arab swordsman hero Sheik Antara-ibn-Sawiyya who leads the disparate group into a strange Atlantean subterranean underworld where they encounter the Mu-Ooria, a peaceful Scholar Perfumier race of rock beings, the last people of Atlantis, and from there via the Moonbeam route, out into the Sahara. Section Three – ‘Submergence’, includes a monstrous creature conjured from a lake of mercury that saves them from their Arab pursuers, just as the Musketeers are about to quit and return to Paris.
There are new wonders and teasing connections in the Sanctuary of Medrasa, in the Zaouia Oasis, with its Great Orrery that spans the multiverse. The ‘Michael Moorcock’ character is caught up with a weird caravan of characters gathered from different historical periods, including Sufi monks and Carmelites plus Professor Consenseo’s diverse menagerie, with whom he battles against conniving puritan Jake Nixer and the deviously scheming Mrs Malady to ensure safe passage to the Blackstone Escarpment of a giant Lovecraftian cephalopod called Spammaldjin. Until the diverse group climb to reach Lord John and Lady Jane Blackstone’s elevated plateau where a conjunction at the Gates of Eden allows the various participants to return to their own planes of the multiverse. Almost inevitably, Lord John is a Tarzan-variant. And the Michael Moorcock character is flown back to his wife and daughters in Paris by Rose von Bek. To brief teasers of yet more strangeness to come.
As all of this suggests, The Woods Of Arcady is not a straightforward narrative. There are many distractions and detours along the way, pleasing perambulations, with wordplay and internal rhyme. It seems that the world, and the teeming multiverse of which it is part, is porous with an interaction of possibilities, in which narratives act as physical roads. And yet, ‘SF writers rarely believe wholly in their speculative ideas’ he muses, ‘that way madness lies.’
There’s a poignant sense of a Last Hurrah, as if ‘we were catching our last glimpses of greatness as our heroes and heroines faded from the world.’ He relates how he wrote ‘The Wrecks Of Time’ for ‘New Worlds’ sitting on a bench in Holland Park while his infant daughters drowse, ‘I yearned to be back there. I would yearn to be back there until my dying day.’ Moorcock gets it wrong at one point, ER Burroughs’ John Carter was picture-strip serialised – by artist Bob Forrest as ‘A Princess Of Mars’, in ‘Sun weekly’ not ‘Comet’ – maybe he hoped to avoid confusion with the tabloid news-rag? or perhaps he just mis-remembers? But this novel seems to me to be a wonderful synthesis of his inner and outer worlds. It proves that a writer is never too old to adopt or adapt techniques with a different slant, or from a warped perception. The Woods Of Arcady is not only fiction, it is about fiction. The process and function of fiction. From one of fiction’s great practitioners.
In this book are stories, ‘they carry millions of narratives. There I found one reality and lost another…’
.
BY ANDREW DARLINGTON
.