Paul Di Filippo Reviews The Woods of Arcady by Michael Moorcock

The Woods of Arcady, Michael Moorcock (Tor 978-0765324788, hardcover, 496pp, $32.99) June 2023

I have always thought that, considered purely as a phrase, William Maxwell’s Time Will Darken It is one of the most poetically philosophical titles in literature. Surely it would be a fitting rubric for Michael Moorcock’s ongoing series The Sanctuary of the White Friars. At age 83, Moorcock is looking down from a ruminative vantage point on his entire literary and personal CV, taking some old fantastika toys out of the cupboard to reconfigure on the playroom carpet in new and more complex ways, while also reassessing his own human path through life. Stuffing all this between the same two covers results in a hybrid metafictional romp which can be enjoyed on many levels, the chief two of which are Multiversal Madness and Autobiographical Revelations.

I reviewed the first volume in this series, The Whispering Swarm, for our beloved Locus Online, and while you might want to refresh your memory of that eight-year-old volume, it’s not strictly necessary. Why? Because—in line with the multiverse’s penchant for myriad timetracks—this installment charts a totally different continuum. In Swarm, the “Moorcock” character was nearing age thirty, and found most of his adventures occurring in a secret corner of London dubbed Alsacia. In this book, our Moorcock avatar is about age twenty-five, and has no access to Alsacia, and in fact is baffled by mention of it and its citizens. Instead, his life is détourned by other means, resulting in a completely different adventure and set of companions.

But before the reader dives into that strand, we are treated to some enigmatic doings of a certain Lord Blackstone and his retinue and family. Blackstone disappears after this introduction from the bulk of the narrative, only to return with major significance at the end.

When Moorcock steps onto the stage, we are treated to his doings as a young writer, in a very vivid evocation of the British SF scene of the early sixties. As before, some Real Life figures—J. G. Ballard, Barrington Bayley, John Brunner—are named outright while others hide under an analogous moniker. For instance, Jack Slade is surely John Sladek. Certainly the most consequential personage to labor under a pseudonym is “Helena,” Moorcock’s first wife. This would in reality be Hilary Bailey.

Moorcock’s unflinching depiction of his marriage—its pleasures and strains, ups and downs—and his portrait of Helena/Hilary is one of the prime accomplishments of this book. If you were to extract all the relevant passages—separated as they are by the fantastika stuff—and assemble them into a standalone novel, you would have a naturalistic “Portrait of a Marriage” that would rival many a mainstream volume. As I said in the Swarm piece: “He is unsparing of his own follies and ambitions, artistic and marital, facing the matter of his somewhat squandered talents and irresponsibility full on.”

Let’s turn our attention to the Multiversal Madness portion of the book.

Moorcock and family are vacationing in Paris. One night, Michael is out walking alone. The streets turn odd, he is hailed by a stranger, and suddenly finds himself entering an antique tavern. And then: “At the bar I recognised the distinctive figures of Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D’Artagnan, the four Musketeers.”

Thus begins a rousing adventure in various venues—mainly the Africa of Burroughs and Haggard—with a host of other famous and obscure literary heroes, of Moorcock’s devising and from the minds of other writers. Rose von Bek, Claude Duval (an actual French Highwayman), the Arab warrior Sheik Antara, Professor Consenseo (a kind of Doctor Doolittle), and some folks from the Second Aether such as Captain Buggerly Otherly. After some side jaunts, the main quest becomes the fraught return of the beneficent alien demiurge Spammer Gain through the Gates of Eden to her home. All the action is delivered with Moorcock the Writer’s patented fecundity of imagination and richness of sensory details. As well, Moorcock the Character layers in some self-reflexive allusions to other fictional adventures by L. Ron Hubbard, Sprague de Camp and assorted canonical figures.

Along with the swordplay, gunfire and explosions, there are many meditative moments which might have been lacking from the works of a juvenile Moorcock. Many of these center around a spectacular idyllic oasis maintained by a religious order. Other such times revolve around the contingent of animals that accompany the human crew.

But the strangest thing about all the animals of this unlikely expedition was the sense of communion we had. Animals and humans shared minds in a way I would then have described as telepathic. We worked in concert, with great consideration, a kind of instantaneous democracy more common to insects than other creatures. Almost entirely unconscious. Even the beasts whose natural prey walked directly ahead of them showed no sign of wanting to attack. The gazelles, zebra or gnu had no fear of the predators, any more than the smaller monkeys, bats or rodents.

Ultimately, the book becomes a kind of portal fantasy, in which our hero achieves much, before returning, like Dorothy Gale, back to his homely existence. It has resonance with much of Philip Jose Farmer’s metafictional writings. But I’d like to offer one last benchmark: Robert Heinlein.

Heinlein was always the bête noire of Moorcock and the New Wave. Yet this book might be construed as Moorcock’s version of Heinlein’s Glory Road mashed up with elements of Have Space Suit—Will Travel (abduction into a larger arena of action). Oscar Gordon’s other-dimensional adventures with Star, Empress of the Twenty Universes, align with Moorcock’s exploits. And as for Spammer Gain, a giant maternal cephalopod, who could not see a resemblance to Mother Thing?

To conclude this trilogy, we are anticipating a final volume titled The Wounds of Albion. We can rest assured that the Moorcock avatar in that book will be just full of startlements, wonders, rueful musings and companionable outreach as his counterfactual peers.

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