Customer Reviews

Byzantium Endures: Between the Wars, Vol. 1: Pyat Quartet (Pyat Quartet 1)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Byzantium Endures captures a slice of early twentieth century reality from a very unsuspecting source: That of a Russian youth caught in the riptides of history and his dreams. These forces would eventually cast him out of his homeland into unknown worlds and adventures unimagined by the mainstream. Michael Moorcock builds a story of not just one man, but of an entire civilized world, and the metamorphosis from fledgling western-world hegemony to self-fullfilling prophesy. Moorcock's grasp of world history and the forces that moved chaotically during the early twentieth century is brilliant when captured through the eyes of one character's neurosis. This book is not the climax of his entire story, but a superb entrance into the mindset and the stage of modern humanity, leading to the maturity of the main character, Col. Pyat, in the second of the series, The Laughter of Carthage. I have read the other fantasies by Moorcock, and none compare, to me, with the historical depth created in the Pyat series. It takes more effort and research and countless hours of detailed analysis to write books of this magnitude, and Moorcock is one of the unsung masters of historical fiction in his time, though his notoriety comes from pure fantasy and science fiction. I have grown to appreciate his historical works as I grow older and wiser and look forward to his interpretations of a growing global society.

Moorcock is a writers writer, admired both for his popular vitality and his literary subtlety and as such he is more like Balzac or Zola than any modern novelist. The edition advertised here is the full text. Only the first American edition, as far as I'm aware, was very badly cut. The adventures of the anti-Semitic but very evidently Jewish Colonel Maxim Arturovitch Pyat, self-styled White Cossack officer and scientific genius, but actually a B-picture movie actor and con-man, lying, cheating and stealing his bizarre and somehow heroic way to the very gates of Auschwitz is an Everyman for the 20th century, denying the evidence of his own birth if necessary, trying to reinvent reality with every breath and at every turn reality descends upon him, as it does all who avoid it so thoroughly! This is a chilling comedy of our times in four long, fast-moving volumes, each independent in Moorcock's familiar popular style, but profoundly probing the origins of the Nazi Holocaust. There are few absolute heroes and villains in Pyat's eventful times, but many shades and combinations of both. Moorcock's deconstruction of modern myth figures is subtle and intelligent (look out for a youthful Stalin in Byzantium Endures) and when he gets to America in The Laughter of Carthage and Jerusalem Commands, keep your attention on those cameos and little notes in the margin. Moorcock has a Wagnerian habit of suddenly bringing up the leitmotif to colour and change your whole understanding of what you have experienced before. He is a master novelist, admired around the world, and these books, with Mother London, are his masterpieces. Every educated reader should at least have an informed opinion of them. They should be required reading, both for the vivid and accurate historical pictures they paint and for the example of the European moral tradition in fiction triumphantly alive and well in the hands of a man Angela Carter, Peter Ackroyd and many others among his peers have called the master storyteller of our times.

Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, born in 1900 in Kiev, recounts his early years during the revolutionary period of Russian history. He exalts the purity and grandeur of the Slavic soul; rails against modern Christianity which to him is a Judaic corruption of the rational form founded by the Greeks; and, while bemoaning the effete spirit of the modern age, believes still that Byzantium, the seat of true Christianity, endures in his heart. This is a steady tale of moral and ideological ironies, written in a sure hand that lovingly describes a bygone era. Made me sigh with pleasure.

This remarkable novel suggests what "Doctor Zhivago" might have been like if it had been narrated by Humbert Humbert. The protagonist is "Colonel Pyat," a self-styled scientific genius who becomes embroiled in the chaos of the Russian revolution. Moorcock recreates Tsarist St. Petersburg and Odessa with Balzacan flair and bizarre humor, using characters who previously appeared in his Jerry Cornelius books. Events become very confusing at times, which is probably appropriate to the bedlamite phantasmagoria of the Bolshevik era , but which more likely has to do with the fact that Moorcock's American editors bowdlerized the text. (The unexpurgated novel Moorcock submitted to those foolish self-censors may deserve 5 stars!) Unfortunately, this work has gone out of print in the U.S. I'd like to see it and its excellent sequel "Laughter of Carthage" reissued along with Moorcock's Eternal Champion romances. The latter are fun reading, but not nearly as significant or ambitious as "Byzantium Endures." Check it out!

Amidst the turmoils of Ruussia in the throes of war and revolution, we follow the life of Pyat, an idealistic if misguided youth as he struggles for love, friendship and learning. From kiev to Odessa to St Peterburg we follow him in his "formative" years. What makes this and the following novels a masterpiece is the superb writing, the magnificent athmosphere, the sense of History looming and then unraveling in a magnificvent tapestry of events amd characters, the exile Captain Brown, the innocent Esmè, the devious cousin Shura, Seryozha the Dancer and the flamboyant Mrs. Cornelius, Pyat's companion thorough his life, and mother of Jerry Cornerlius, another famed Moorcock's charachter. And Pyat himself, of course, whose skewed moral judgements, bigotry and ingenuity make an intriguing, interesting character. An historical novel to compare to War and Peace and Ash by Mary Gentle and TStephenson's Baroque cycle. Highly recommended!

This was my first foray into the work of Michael Moorcock, and he doesn't disappoint. The vision and storytelling demonstrated in this series suggests Russian writers of an earlier age. I thoroughly enjoyed this.

This is the first book in Moorcock's Pyat quarter, something that took him quite a while to finish. Not that this is a shock to anybody familiar with this work.

The protagonist in this series is a bit half and half, in JC terms. Half Jerry Cornelius, half John Constantine, and full of a lot of rubbish as a consequence, without being as useful or competent as either.

He is living through some harrowing times in pre WWI Russia, and is just trying to slide on through. He has a fairly serious problem with s*x and dr*gs though, and does some not nice things as a result.

The reader knows from the beginning that Col. Pyat a is disturbed and wounded character. I initially accepted this and watched him gradually lose his innocence as WW1 unfolds and darkness falls on Russia, but when he brutally seduces and attacks two young women while in a cocaine induced psychosis he became just another one of the many criminals littering the landscape. I lost all sympathy for him and closed the book. Perhaps Pyat is supposed to represent the descent into madness that occurred more generally in Europe at that time, but I'd rather examine that horror though the eyes of a morally strong character that I can continue to care about.