"The Whispering Swarm" by Michael Moorcock

 This book is a strange amalgam of memoir and fiction. The protagonist-narrator is 'Michael Moorcock' and I have every reason to suspect that the parts of the story that involve him writing journalism, short stories and novels and living with a host of other literary celebrities fro m late-1950s and early 1960s London, is true. But in his wanderings around London he encounters Alsacia, a quarter of the city hidden behind a great gate which contains a pub and a Carmelite monastery. Here live a strange mixture of characters from history and story including Dick Turpin and Buffalo Bill, Prince Rupert of the Rhine and the Three Musketeers. Slowly, the story becomes more involved with this fantasy until it culminates in a desperate attempt to save Charles I from being executed. 

I quite enjoyed the memoir. I even liked the tension between his everyday life, married with kids, and the seductive lure of Midnight Moll, one of his own characters, with whom he has an affair in Alsacia. Very metaphorical! There was a suggestion that he was succumbing to his own story-telling, perhaps suffering flashbacks from the hallucinogens he was ingesting (this was hippie London), perhaps going mad. But slowly and surely the fantasy began to take over and by the third part of the book the story became a rather silly battle between roundheads and cavaliers, less Moorcock, more poppycock.

Selected quotes:

• "They used to say that Mum would climb a tree to tell a lie rather than stay on the ground to tell the truth." (Ch 1)
• "There's always thieves and troublemakers, people who are predatory and live off the weak." (Ch 1)
• "The stock market depends on our getting into debt. All this cheap gelt, it's making us into addicts. It's a drug culture and we're mainlining money." (Ch 1)
• "I was always a poor liar. I found it easier to lie on paper. You get paid for that." (Ch 4)
• "For all my early experience with girls, I was still a teenage boy." (Ch 4)
• "My Mum said ... I was pale and 'nervy' ... conditions I now know she associated with masturbation." (Ch 7)
• "A great Mervyn Peake fan ... I didn't really think of his work as fantasy. To me he was closer to absurdists like Peacock and Firbank or Maurice Richardson ... Peake had a better sense of narrative than any of them but his grotesque characters dominated his work. There was nothing supernatural about it. Some people called it Gothic, I think because it was set in a brooding castle, while others compared him to Kafka or even Lovecraft. Peake was a vorticist with a sense of humour." (Ch 8)
• "I wasn't the bastard who buggered off. I was the bastard who hung around." (Ch 10)
• "Thatcher smashed protectionism and gave us freedom to choose between a rock and a hard place." (Ch 15)
• "I knew how much American wealth had been built on the backs of dead natives, illegal immigrants, slaves, and destitute refugess from starving Europe." (Ch 17)
• "I knew life was only simple when focused by the beginnings of a love affair or the prospect of sudden death." (Ch 21)
• "As a writer I wanted routine, consistency and quiet more than I wanted sex." (Ch 22) (Although it seems that every time he meets his wife he makes love to her.)
• "The mind is a kind of maze, isn't it? Sometimes it is possible to get lost in it." (Ch 28)
• "Romantic women go in for a certain sort of monster. They think they can tame us the way Fay Wray tamed Kong." (Ch 30)
• "Smoke used to be the sign of industry. Now, with mirrors, it is the sign of political spin." (Ch 33)
• "Logically, distant worlds, somehow parallel to our own, were fiction. Nothing else. I made my living writing that stuff. I never believed it. I knew how easy it was to invent." (Ch 34)
• "We do not own another by virtue of our passion's intensity." (Ch 37)
• "Most artists are part-time Puritans, no matter how many wives or lovers they discard on their selfish way through life." (Ch 49)

January 2023; 480 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

One of the nice things about the book was the name checks of places or people I knew, such as the Princess Louise pub in Holborn where I used to drink with Sean and where he asked me to be his best man. (Ch 7) Other characters include Mervyn Peake, an author I enjoy (Ch 8), and (Long) John Baldry and Reg Dwight playing at the Railway Hotel in Richmond, a pub I have drunk in) and on Eel Pie Island (Ch 9), and Christopher Evans who worked with my dad at the NPL (Ch 15).

In Chapter 48, a Cromwellian trooper warns Prince Rupert that the Frost Fair was "Vanity Fair, indeed!" But Bunyan didn't invent Vanity Fair until 1678 and this exchange is in 1649. A mistake? Or a subtle reminder than chronology is non-linear in this story?