Vengeance of Rome

Michael Moorcock

Description

Byzantium Endures, the first volume of Michael Moorcock’s legendary Pyat Quartet, appeared in 1981. The Laughter of Carthage (1984) and Jerusalem Commands (1992) followed. Now the quartet is complete. Pyat keeps his appointment with the age’s worst nightmare.

Born in Ukraine on the first day of the century, a Jewish antisemite, Pyat careered through three decades like a runaway train. Bisexual, cocaine-loving engineer/inventor/spy, he enthusiastically embraces Fascism. Hero-worshipping Mussolini, he enters the dictator’s circle, enjoys a close friendship with Mussolini’s wife and is sent by the Duce on a secret mission to Munich, becoming intimate with Ernst Röhm, the homosexual stormtrooper leader. His crucial role in the Nazi Party’s struggle for power has him performing perverted sex acts with “Alf,” as the Führer’s friends call him.

Pyat’s extraordinary luck leaves him after he witnesses Hitler’s massacre of Röhm and the SA. At last he is swallowed up in Dachau concentration camp. Thirty years later, having survived the Spanish Civil War, he is living in Portobello Road and telling his tale to a writer called Moorcock.

This authoritative edition presents this work for the first time in the United States, along with a new introduction by Alan Wall.

Sujets

• LGBT
• Controversia
• Philosophy
• Erudition
• Intellectual
• 20th century
• JewishGen
• Jews
• Jewish

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 août 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604868944
• Langue: English

Extrait

MICHAEL MOORCOCK
Winner of the Nebula and World Fantasy awards
August Derleth Fantasy Award
British Fantasy Award
Guardian Fiction Prize
Prix Utopiales
Bram Stoker Award
John W. Campbell Award
SFWA Grand Master
Member, Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame
Praise for Michael Moorcock and The Vengeance of Rome
‘One of our very best novelists and a national treasure.’
Listener
‘ The Vengeance of Rome the final volume in a quartet begun as long ago as 1981 is historical picaresque on the grand scale, a vast and intermittently rambling chronicle of tall tales, brief encounters and expert twitches on the thread of destiny. Dense, louche and terrifying by turns, and the mouthpiece for a view of world history that rarely makes it on to the printed page (Pyat is an anti-semitic Jew who believes in an anti-Christian, anti-Muslim new world order brought about by a revived Roman Empire), The Vengeance of Rome … in the end redeems itself by the sheer vigour of its imaginative attack.’
DJ Taylor, Guardian
‘Moorcock’s writing is intricate, fabulous, and mellifluous.’
Alan Moore
‘He is so easily able to move from contemporary realism to futuristic fantasy; both worlds share the colour of dreams, and follow an imagination that conceives the world in symbolic terms…. He has a mythic, romantic sense of life.’
Peter Ackroyd
‘A final, breath-stopping moment of deeply ironic self-delusion at the end of a grandiose, beautifully modulated quartet.’
Scotland on Sunday

‘It is brave of Moorcock, given the particoloured clothing kits he’s provided his casts over the past forty years, to end the Pyat Quartet in this cul-de-sac 1970 because the end of Pyat is truly finis…. The Pyat Quartet is, in a sense, Moorcock’s Tempest . But he has been more draconian than Shakespeare. Pyat does not recast the oeuvre it terminates as dream; it recasts that oeuvre as untruth. Nor does that recasting focus safely on generalities about the human condition…. The Quartet seems really to be about something else: it is one of the most remarkable presentations yet laid down of the wrongness of the imagining of of the imagination of the twentieth century. It recasts our imagining of this century, which Pyat has been claiming for two thousand pages to represent, into the language of Pyat: it recasts our imagining of this century this century we made up into a tissue of lies: just as the four individual titles of the sequence, as is now well known, amount to conspiratorial racist slander when joined together: "Byzantium endures the laughter of Carthage; Jerusalem commands the vengeance of Rome."
Vengeance is an unrelenting brilliant book; its airlessness for it is stifling to read, though it is at the same time almost impossible not to continue reading is consummate. Though it is not constructed as a crescendo ending in some terrible dawn in Auschwitz (as some passages written decades earlier seemed to hint it would do), the final pages of Vengeance are deeply excruciating. Pyat’s final, inevitable act of betrayal, which nails tight over his soul the naked coffin of his excremental self, is an act of such inconceivable cruelty and stupidity that we know, after two thousand pages, that there is nothing left to say. The book closes, without air. The revelation is that the vision of air was a lie. There is no air to breathe here.
The story of the pain of Colonel Pyat … is the story of the pain we have done to ourselves this time around. The Vengeance of Rome is about lying, about a world laid down by lies. This is very terrifying, because we are caught in the ash. It makes it very hard to see. But we need to remember how to look through. The buck stops here.’
John Clute, Science Fiction Weekly

The Vengeance of Rome
Michael Moorcock
© 2013 by Michael Moorcock
This edition © 2013 PM Press
Introduction © 2013 by Alan Wall
ISBN: 978–1–60486–494–6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012955000
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
Bibliography reprinted with the kind permission of Moorcock’s Miscellany ( www.multiverse.org )
Project editor: Allan Kausch
Copy editor: Gregory Nipper
Cover by John Yates/ www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
Copyright © Michael Moorcock 2006
Cover photo by Linda Steele
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
P.O. Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
PMPress.org
Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
www.thomsonshore.com
To the memory of John Blackwell
Contents
INTRODUCTION BY ALAN WALL
INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL MOORCOCK
The Vengeance of Rome
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Introduction to The Vengeance of Rome
So we finally reach the full extent of Pyat’s lifespan 1900 to 1977. Long enough to have witnessed revolution and terror, war and genocide, the seeming liberation of the young, their creation of their own culture, or indeed their own counter-culture. It was Haeckel’s belief that all micro-organisms repeat in miniature the larger history of the species. This used to be known as the Law of Recapitulation; every individual animal has to climb its own family tree. Pyat does not mention this biological theory in the quartet, but one suspects he might well have gone along with it (Freud certainly did), since as the titles of the individual volumes indicate, what seems to be happening in the twentieth century is a recapitulation of some earlier civilisational cycles, though speeded up, with the assistance of all our modern technology. What goes around comes around, but the orbit accelerates until we end up with the only society in history which has posited a speed as its absolute. And Pyat certainly does believe we are all assigned our fates: ‘There are patterns to our universe. Patterns so vast and at the same time so minuscule that we rarely detect them. They present a problem of unimaginable scale, if we could detect them they could explain the mysterious movement of all creatures across the face of the planet.’
In this final volume Pyat finds himself at the dark vortex of the century whose chronology coincides with his own, since he was born in 1900. It’s the age of the dictators, so he is hardly likely to stand on the outside looking in; we know from all his previous adventures that this would not be his style. He has a penchant for being at the centre of history, not on its margins. He likes to be on the balcony of the palace looking down at the cheering crowds. The editor’s preface tells us that Maxim’s writings here were in effect prose macaronics: ‘… he wrote in English, Russian, French, German, Italian and Yiddish, with some pages in Turkish, Spanish, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew.’ This fellow has put himself about a bit. All his scribblings and oracular statements have now been shaped into an omnivorous English by his dutiful editor, Michael Moorcock. And so here we witness Pyat as he sets out to meet, congratulate and serve the great dictators. He would though, wouldn’t he?
There are precedents for this. In a remarkable story, ‘Deutsches Requiem’, Borges imagined the life of an unrepentant Nazi, facing his execution after the Nuremburg Trials. His name is Otto Dietrich zur Linde, and Borges rewards him for his historic crimes by giving him a kind of grandeur. Too much so, he came to feel later; having met some of the actual Nazi criminals who escaped down the ratline to Argentina after the war, Borges soon realised that their sordid pettiness and self-pity was the exact opposite of that nihilistic metaphysician he had created in his story. The same criticism was levelled at George Steiner’s Hitler in his novella The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H . Here the fellow from Linz took on all the philosophical plausibility of Heidegger. Hitler wasn’t nearly as philosophical as Steiner made him out to be, according to the critics of his story. Steiner had in effect turned the Führer Steineresque; as though one really could have listened to his table talk without yawning for bedtime at the Berchtesgaden. Thomas Mann in Doctor Faustus turns the darkness of history into allegory, a conjoining of modernist artistic technique and a deal with the devil; an overreaching of the human spirit, so that it might ventriloquise itself with heartless brilliance. And in the film Downfall Hitler is given a sort of demented grandeur; though perhaps not as much as Goebbels and his wife Magda, who between them poison their little blond-haired Aryan darlings, before finally executing themselves with a sort of Wagnerian splendour. In this scenario, Medea gets to kill the kids without even having to lose her husband Jason to the princess.
Here we are faced with what might be the darkest question of modern representation. Are some things simply beyond the possibilities of representation altogether? That is what Claude Lanzmann believes in regard to one aspect of this history: you cannot represent the Holocaust according to him, in the sense of ‘imaginatively recreating’ it. That is a kind of sacrilege, a besmirching of the imagination. All we can respectfully do here is to depict the historical traces, which is precisely what he does in his vast film Shoah . On hearing of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List , he said simply: ‘How dare he?’ And yet we might as well collectively own up: there is an endless fascination with all things that wear a swastika. Why? We might answer this question unhistorically by saying that fiction is in love with crime and always has been. Think of Dickens; think of Shakespeare. Crime is never far away from