Customer Reviews

Fortress Of The Pearl

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

 

 

Takes place back in time before Stormbringer killed a loved one. I would read it after the first or second Elric book personally. Elric's father's shade is introduced, and it also should be read before The Dreamthief's Daughter. I really need to reread the other books before making a judgement, but would probably rate this as my 3rd favorite Elric book. I like Moorcock's books because I can get thru them quickly, yet they are still magnificent works that are different than 90% of the fantasy out there. I like his writing style better than about every other fantasy/science fiction author except maybe George R.R. Martin. But I don't get that soap opera pull from Moorcock; I can leave his books for a while and know they will always be there when I need a new adventure to escape into. While Tolkien appeals to a wide range of readers, most Moorcock works wouldn't appeal to religious folk, or anyone who doesn't like reading about death. While Elric constantly tries to save humanity in his own way, his sustenance comes to him by sacrificing souls to his patron Duke of Hell - Arioch.

Reading The Fortress of the Pearl after Elric of Melnibone is a bit of a downer. The Fortress of the Pearl had no character development, and no events that pertain to the grand scheme of things. It's a mediocre adventure and is not redeemed by the characters. Elric is brooding and sycophantic, prim and proper. One second he is sucking up to someone, the next minute he is threatening to kill everyone. The main part of the novel is made up of the dream world where the pearl is located which is mostly metaphysical, and not very exciting. The only good thing about the novel is that it is short and simple, otherwise I would have never finished it. I hope the rest of the series is as good as the first novel was, and not like The Fortress of the Pearl. Big disappointment.

I read this book as the seventh book, but it really is supposed to be read earlier, after the first or second. It fits in nicely after either one of those, really. But regardless of when you read it, it is a great book!

Elric has to go inside a girl's dreams to regain a pearl that the countryside is fighting for. It has "dreamcatchers" and stuff like that in it...really a lot like american-indian and african aborigine tribal stuff. I really liked it, and I hope that if you are an Elric fan you'll pick it up!

Michael Moorcock has the power to draw us into a fantasy world like no other. You won't be able to put this book down as you travel through the universe with the main character Elric. HIs emotional journey is spellbinding. Action, adventure, romance and comedy are perfectly blended in this series.

I found the first Elric book entertaining and it piqued my interest. After reading this novel, however, I can say that I am sufficiently hooked on Elric. Although this is the eighth novel in the series (according to Goodreads), I read this one immediately after the first because I am reading the Elric stories in order of their internal chronology (see this list:[...]

In the first one-third of this novel, Elric finds himself in the scorched desert realm of Quarzahasaat some unspecified amount of time after first adventuring forth from his home island. Here he makes a deal with a crafty trader for his life, only to end up enslaved to the trader and thus embarking upon a quest for an unknown object (the "Pearl at the Heart of the World") in an unknown location (the "Fortress of the Pearl"), with just a riddle to guide him and his freedom and very life (plus one other's) at stake. I enjoyed this portion of the novel because Elric quickly finds himself in a situation that seems insurmountable.

Along the way, Elric befriends a dreamthief: an adventurer-sage (though not your typical sage, as this one is young, and attractive, and female) that travels the multiverse by way of others' dreams. Of the world of dreams, Moorcock writes via one of his characters, "There is an infinity of worlds and some are yet unborn, some so old they have grown senile, some born of dreams, some destroyed by nightmares." Here Moorcock is employing his concept of the multiverse -- an idea that there are many universes -- which is even now finding favor amongst modern theoretical physicists (at least the "multiple universes" part, not the "reality of dreams" part).

Elric ventures from the desert realm to the dream realm where, like in the previous installment of Elric's saga, he embarks on a surreal adventure through another dimension. About the dream world, one of Elric's companions explains: "Supernatural worlds... obey none of the laws we are familiar with in our own... They exist only as satellites to those realms we call 'real'... There is even a theory that our worlds are the satellites and that these supernatural worlds are the birthplaces of all our realities." Let your mind chew on that one for awhile!

Elric's journey through the dream world is reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. For one, it is host to many strange denizens: a three-headed crow, a vampiric house cat with the wings of a bat, a ghostly pale rider on a pale horse that haunts them like an ephemeral apparition of the imagination, a Queen that speaks in riddles. There are even shades of another dream world, that of the Wizard of Oz (instead of following the yellow brick road to an emerald city, at one point Elric and his companions follow a marble road to an ivory fortress). However, Elric's tale is darker and bloodier than Alice's or Dorothy's.

The dream world is divided into seven consecutive parts, each a reflection of those dreams and ambitions we (the readers) all experience and which threaten to drive us to complacency and inaction. Likewise, Elric struggles through each dream world as it tempts him with his own unattainable desires. Elric may be like Alice lost in Wonderland, but this grim vision of Wonderland is laced with a heavy dose of Dante's Inferno.

In the all of the dream lands, Elric finds he has need for neither food nor sleep. And yet he experiences fatigue. His sage companion explains: "Your weariness is not physical here, but manifests itself in your moods. You must seek spiritual sustenance as assiduously as you would normally seek food and water." As with much of the dialogue pertaining to the travelers' dream world experiences, these words are a metaphor for living in our own world.

As another example, in the Land of Old Desires the inhabitants are trapped in an endless melancholy over lost ambition. Multiple characters (one of them Elric) remark, "Better not to seek that which can only disappoint," to which Elric's companion counters, "When you set out to discover fulfillment... then you achieve stature in the world." This is the classic story of a sage leading a pupil through the world of the mind and spirit, and in so doing, teaching the pupil how to succeed (much like Yoda and Luke, or Morpheus and Neo, or the kung fu master and student that inspired both of those, all of which are examples that came along after Elric).

In this way, each phase of Elric's journey through the dream world presents a different parable for life and the contest against regret, melancholy, ambition, hopes, desires, fear of failure. And as in the first novel, and like Alice or Dorothy or Luke or Neo or Grasshopper, the protagonist of this story often finds himself struggling without an answer or solution for what ails him.

This book was written more than three decades after the first, and I think Moorcock's writing improved during the interim. As before, his prose isn't always extraordinary and some passages are downright clumsy. But I think he really shines in his character dialogue and occasionally with his descriptive passages. He also delivers a romance that subtly sneaks up on the reader (and Elric) in a way that is far more realistic than the overused "love at first sight" or "love for a princess" tropes.

This fantasy seems cast in the same mold as the tales of Carroll, Baum, and Dante that came before it. I really enjoy fantasy stories that invoke the surreal and the metaphorical, and I found myself inescapably drawn into the imagination of this novel.

While Michael Moorcock has written scores of novels over the years, only in the past decade has his work met with approval outside of fantasy and sci-fi circles. While this recognition is belated to say the least, it has to be admitted that Moorcock's talents have continued to blossom as time has gone by. While "The Fortress of the Pearl" is in the heroic fantasy genre, it seems, much like the Von Bek series, to be a transitional work as Moorcock drifted from fantasy and sci-fi to his current literary works. As such, the book contains an excellent plot revealed by some of Moorcock's best writing.

Unlike some of the other books in the Elric series, "The Fortress of the Pearl" is a full novel, not a collection of short stories thrown together as a book. This does not pose a problem for Moorcock who is able to balance the story while offering great depth to some of his usual archtypes (the Eternal Champion, the Companion, etc). The story takes place between the first and second books of the Elric saga and Moorcock still seems to find new facets of his flagship character to explore and reveal. It's also one of the funnier and more through provoking books in the Elric series and, unlike some of his earlier works, Moorcock provides an excellent supporting cast to his main character. Any Moorcock fan and most lovers of heroic fantasy will enjoy "The Fortress of the Pearl" though those readers who are familiar with the other Elric books may take more out of it than others.

This novel was published in the late eighties, but comes in around second, chronologically.

Elric is in trouble, and when he arrives at the mysterious city of Quarzhasaat he is easily convinced to undergo a quest in return for aid.

He must find the Pearl at the Heart of the World. It ain't that easy though, as it is in a fortress. But Elric is still Elric, and having recovered his strength, he still has Stormbringer along with his other talents.

This book took a while to get into,but once it got going it definatly had potential. After reading books by Terry Brooks, Mark Anthony and Anne Mcarfrey, this book was quite a change. At times the way that Michael Moorcock described things was decidedly vague and lacking using words like "stuff." Another thing i found was that the adventure seemed to roll on by and there was a lack of depth to the adventure but in all honesty the fight scenes were worth the wate. I certainly enjoyed the novel once it got going and although hard to follow at times it left me with a sence of light hearted entertainment. Maybe the book would have made more sence if i had read the other Elric novels before this one. A nice twist at the end but there was definatly an opening for another book, does Elric ever return to lay his claim to the Ruby Throne?

This book adds a great chapter to the Elric Saga.. Elric ventures into a child's dream's to uncover a giant pearl., He has been poisned and forced into the mission, by a power hungry politician. He retrives the Pearl, Gets the antidote, and well I don't want to give away everything.. This book is a Must READ!!!

I admire Elric, what can be seen in my review of the first book of this series, but reading "Fortress of Pearl" fails to show what is it exactly that I admire. Now, this may sound egocentric too much, but I'm writing this as my personal experience of this book, not as an objective account into the ways of the text or its narrative. It is perfectly plausible, and in a way expected, that someone else will find here what I did not, but that's the beauty of reading, and once again it shows how text can lead independent life, away from its author and away from its reader.

"Fortress of Pearl" is second book in the series, that is if we follow inside chronology of story itself. From perspective of publishers, it came out during the eighties, over a decade since first book, and after some other Elric stories has been written. Elric is still trying to find a way back to his homeland, trying to free his damsel in distress, and trying to learn as much as possible about the world out there, showing his famous sacriligious trait (at least in the eyes of his fellow countrymen). This search will lead him to yet another adventure, to place that is deeply similar to Melniboné, place which has been building it's own illusions of grandeur over spans of the centuries, place without any significant power but yet occupied with power struggle and plot-weaving to comical extent. All of this is Elric as it has been, it is both critique of sword and sorcery genre, and critique of similar practices of outside world. But Elric will not delve in this place for too long, his destiny of a hero calls him and bides him to a quest, to dream travel in search of a mysterious pearl which becomes symbol of power to warring parties of the new land. And this is where genre kicks in. From this point onward we could raplace Elric with Conan without loosin anything. There are battles, there is magic, there are mysterious and powerfull characters and there are enemies who must be overcomed. And in that jumble, it seems that Moorcock forgot what was the Elric all about. There is no more subversion, there are no tongue-in-cheek comments on genre paradigms, all that is left is mere adventure, going from place A to place B, and doing stuff in between.

Problem is that in that aspect Elric doesn't shine, it's average at best. Comapred to other genre novels it's almost predictable and unimaginative. It still has that uniqe feeling of things that aren't as they're supposed to be, but that that hardly be excuse for anything now. One could think that in years of writing Elric adventures Moorcock would evolve into better author, if not storyteller, but it seems to me that he did exactly opposite of that. "Fortress of Pearl" resembles things that Elric was running from, and in a way it can be looked upon as going back to mother womb. Is this retreat something from which Moorcock and Elric will emerge reborn it remains to be seen (people who read ahead should already know an answer). I can only recommend this Elric-adventure to those people who learned to like Elric and it's peculiar ways. To any other, this may seem pointless at best.