re:mote voices

Title: Von Bek: "Warhound and the World's Pain", "City in the Autumn Stars", "Pleasure Gardens of Felipe Sagittarius"
Author: Michael Moorcock
Publisher:Gollancz

Ironically, given that the Von Bek omnibus is considered to be the first volume in the Eternal Champion series, Von Bek is one of the few Michael Moorcock characters that I had not read. I read all the Elric, Corum, Hawkmoon, and assorted other Eternal Champion incarnations – the Eternal Champion being a being chosen in each reality to fight in the great fight between order and chaos, normally to redress the balance from the extremes one or the other has attained.

With that Von Bek is the volume set in the most traditional/real environment, the two books which make up the bulk of this volume are both set in historical Europe. The first book is The Warhound And The World’s Pain, in which Ulrich von Bek, a minor German noble, has been fighting in numerous religious wars and border clashes across Europe. Ulrich finds himself surrounded by carnage, tragedy, disease flourishes with the darkness, and he decides to break free from the rut he is in, rejecting this darkness. This is when he is found by Lucifer, the fallen angel who wishes to repair the rift between him and god. Lucifer persuades von Bek that he can heal the world’s pain if he can only find the holy grail. This puts him on a quest across Europe, and alternate Europe of the Mittelmarch, esoteric lands between lands.

A couple of hundred years have passed by the time of The City In The Autumn Stars, and now the young Manfred von Bek is fleeing France, having dedicated himself to the rebirth of a country through revolution, only to see it turn against him. Heading for the city of Mirenburg, which he reckons that of all the places in Europe it is the only he will be safe. However at each step of the way it seems increasingly like there is a plot going on, a conspiracy which looks to pull in the latest von Bek, based on his families history with the holy grail. One of Moorcock’s big and consistent ideas is that of cosmic alignments, where the planets come together, providing a point where perhaps everything can be changed for the next millennia or so. Alchemists and Satanists vie for the holy grail, figuring it central to rituals which will give them key power at this significant time.

The volume is rounded off by a short, The Garden of Felippe Sagittarius, an alternate history, illustrating the idea of multiple realities and existences, which populate Moorcock’s work. Here von Bek is a member of grail based police force, wandering through an alternate Berlin of the 1930’s, where he encounters the like of Hitler and his old enemy Klosterhiem, present in each of the von Bek stories.

Von Bek is probably Moorcock’s most historical Eternal Champion, the others flitting through imaginary and fantastical worlds. Written during the 1980’s, von Bek is one of his most recent characters, much of his other work having been written in the decades before that – often serialised in magazines to be later collected in individual books. Coming from a more accomplished point in his career the writing style in considerably more remarkable, which is no doubt also part of why these books hit the 300 page mark, rather than being barely 200. Particularly in The City In The Autumn Stars, the language really tries to capture a vision of a time period, references to the types of people and the political upheavals of the period. Part of reading this volume was to fill in the gaps in my Moorcock reading, a stable of my teens, but reading at the moment it fits in well with some of the other pieces I’ve covered recently. Covering to some degree the kind of periods which have some significance to Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (the ideas conspiracies, of mystical cloak and dagger) or Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver and The Confusion (the ideas of political machinations, the mudlarks/vagabonds, the alchemists as being amongst the first scientists).