Customer Reviews

History of the Runestaff (Fantasy Masterworks 35)

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This series is my first experience reading Moorcock. I am usually an avid reader, but I kept finding myself making excuses to do anything except get back to this book. The characters lack sympathy and depth. There are plenty of battles, but the plot stringing them together feels stale and sketchy. I'll probably finish the series out of sheer stubbornness, but I wouldn't recommend this book or the series to someone who is not already a fan of the author.

Michael Moorcock, The Sword of the Dawn (DAW, 1968)

First, to get it out of the way: the worst, absolutely unforgivably worst, thing about the 1968 DAW edition of The Sword of the Dawn is its unforgivably bad cover. It's so bad I actually knocked half a point off the book's final rating. DAW, who usually came up with top-notch artists to do Moorcock covers, really dropped the ball in the Runestaff series, and this is the nadir. Cover it, school-textbook style, before reading.

That said, the book itself is top-notch, one of the better novels in the whole Eternal Champion cycle. Dorian Hawkmoon, reluctant servant of the Runestaff and another incarnation of the Eternal Champion, is off on the quest to find the last piece of the puzzle he needs to strike back at the Granbretanian army, an artifact called the Sword of the Dawn. Needless to say, getting his hands on it will not be easy...

The same cast of characters from the first two novels returns, along with some throwaway characters, a new villain or two, and all the adventure one could possibly want. As well, The Sword of the Dawn is set on a new continent in the purview of the Eternal Champion, Amarehk (yes, it is what you think it is), and Moorcock's descriptions of the city of Nawlin (yes, it's at the delta of the big river) are perhaps the most detailed urban descriptions in the whole series.

The novel could probably stand on its own without too much of the ongoing plot being lost, but aspiring Moorcock readers are encouraged to read the whole series (preferably after those of Elric, Corum, and Erekose, at least). ****

Michael Moorcock created a whole mess of heroic characters, the most indisputably famous being that moody albino, Elric of Melniboné. But there were also Corum and Michael Kane and Jerry Cornelius and a host of others. But above all of them, it was Dorian Hawkmoon von Köln whom I liked best. And it's not because he's more heroic or better or whatever. Maybe it boils down to something as simple as that Dorian Hawkmoon isn't as tragic or alienated a creature as the other Eternal Champions. Hawkmoon is just the easiest to like.

Hawkmoon's exploits are chronicled in The History of the Runestaff and the Chronicles of Castle Brass, seven books in total. The world he inhabits is a post-apocalyptic Earth set in the far flung future, sometime after the Tragic Millennium. In Hawkmoon's time, depraved sorcery and mad science are at work. Europe is brittle, fragmented into warring kingdoms. The detritus of England has evolved into the island kingdom of Granbretan. Called the Dark Empire, Granbretan, ruled by a foul immortal being, has set its eyes on global conquest. It's making it look easy.

In the tiny, faraway province of Kamarg, Count Brass doesn't concern himself much with the insatiable encroachments of the Dark Empire. That is, until he receives a visit from Baron Meliadus, a treacherous emissary from Granbretan. Seeking to worm into Count Brass's good graces and coveting his beautiful daughter Yisselda, the Baron oversteps himself and is unceremoniously ejected from Kamarg. The incensed Meliadus, skulking away, vows bloody vengeance. And he swears this oath on the Runestaff. O crapdiddle.

It must be understood that when one makes a vow on the Runestaff - that ancient artifact said to guard all the secrets of destiny - one then sets strange forces into motion. And so, in the course of time, the unwitting players of Meliadus' revenge play are swept away into a terrifying future, signified by blood and death and hellish war and by foulest black magic and twisted technologies. And the young Duke of Köln, Dorian Hawkmoon, bedeviled by a black jewel on his skull, and who once rebelled against the Dark Empire, will play a central role.

In the 1960s Michael Moorcock became the clear successor to E.R. Burroughs and Robert E. Howard. Moorcock is, honestly, somewhere near the top of my list as a master craftsman of sword and sorcery adventures. In the Runestaff novels, the Englishman's imagination is predictably outlandish and inventive, and his pacing is such on overdrive that you might not even notice that character development hardly ever darkens these pages. Crack these books open and feast your eyes on passages of pure escapism. Moorcock writes some wild images; the landscapes are peopled with marvelously exotic and freakish creatures; the evil empire, with its sinister science and sorcery, seems truly malevolent. And then there are the ghosts and the alternate dimensions. Hawkmoon ends up enduring some really harrowing stuff. Thru the course of four novels, he'll embark on one quest after another, seeking to unearth several peculiar talismans. The Red Amulet. The Sword of the Dawn. And, finally, the destiny-shaping Runestaff itself.

So, yeah, crack these books open and see how Hawkmoon's strange cloak of apathy is pierced. Then see Hawkmoon meet his boon companion, Oladahn the tiny giant. See him also cross paths with the enigmatic Warrior in Jet and Gold and the renegade Frenchman Huillam d'Averc, and also see him soar to the skies on the back of a flamingo (although, hmm, that last one does sound a bit foofoo). The Duke of Köln's fight against the Dark Empire is chronicled in THE JEWEL IN THE SKULL, THE MAD GOD'S AMULET, THE SWORD OF THE DAWN, and THE RUNESTAFF, and these are the four books which constitute The History of the Runestaff. They're absolute must-reads if you're a fan of sword & sorcery epics, although when I mention "epic," I don't mean to imply that these books run at 500 pages each. Back in the day, brevity was the habit and the writer was able to tell a rousing story before your page-flippin' fingers formed calluses. I pretty much hold Stephen King responsible for the likes of Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind.

But blood and thunder, I think, sum up the Hawkmoon chronicles. Actually sums up most of Michael Moorcock's works, come to think of it. The biggest difference is that Dorian Hawkmoon comes off as a likable and comparably uncomplicated guy, his baggage not as crippling as Moorcock's other heroes. Sometimes, the sheer angst gets to me. Really, would it hurt Elric or Corum to smile once in a while?

Not a lot here to really make this book shine, and a few things that let it down.

Very lazy plotting - we just get thrown about here and there. That could be part of the fun, and there is something of the D & D silly campaign where a hundred unlikely events are meant to happen to our intrepid adventurers. Still it gets a bit too silly for me, and I'm getting to not really care that much about the Warrior in Jet and Gold who can just turn up magically along with any era shaping magical item. Same with the deadly foe - far too lazy in just saying, "Oh, sure, they all got routed and defeated, um, and a million of them got killed ... but, ah, NOW there's, um TWO MILLION, and the bad guy didn't really die, and they're back!". I mean, who cares? Either something magical suddenly shows up that will defeat them all, or, even if you do, suddenly they'll just somehow regroup to be back to threaten again in the next sequel. The heroes are embarrassingly standard in the way they can fight all day hugely outnumbered with dwindling remains of their army being cut down around them, but, of course, not suffer a scratch and have nothing more than a bit of fatigue. Yisselda as heroine becomes utterly clichéd: here, let me just stand to one side being feminine and either helpless or emotionally/sexually supportive. Oh, and Hawkmoon starts getting all broody - save me from broody heroes! Ugh.

I was just about never `in' the story, I was always outside looking in, and frequently shaking my head at the level of guff.

The casual background of atrocities gets a bit sickening after a while, and also feels lazy and contrived, "Oh, yeah, THIS guy was so bad, he, um, got people's babies and killed them. (Hang on, I've done that one). And then he ate them! (Oh, done that one too). In front of the mother!!! (Yeah, that'll do)." This gets offensive pretty quick, especially when I think it's meant to be, you know, hard core - Moorcock saying his bad guys are, well, really bad - it's spotty nerds who've never punched someone in their life trying to impress each other with fight scenes. The author feels nothing for these throwaway victims, we're not really meant to either, they're just a bit of local colour (cf. the similarly blithe use of comic atrocity in Goodkind's second rate Wizard's First Rule). Thus D'Averc can simply flip from villain to hero because all those people he blithely killed were, remember, only MINOR characters.

It's all pretty bleak: I could maybe cope with the lazy plotting if we were having some fun on the way (as Fafard and the Grey Mouser at times do without this oppressive background), but the only hope of the book is the action. It's hard to care about the action when we know the author can and will just randomly pull out something from nowhere with no reference to a wider world (oh, hey, here's an ancient civilisation with vastly superior technological weapons we've stumbled onto. Phew, that was lucky).

So, after giving The Jewel in the Skull a bit of a rap I'm not so keen to move onto volume 3 (except to work out whether I should just clear this stuff from my bookshelves altogether).

2½*

Michael Moorcock, The Mad God's Amulet (DAW, 1968)

The adventures of Dorian Hawmoon, last duke of Koln, continue in The Mad God's Amulet, the second novel in the Chronicle of the Runestaff. Hawkmoon, with the immediate dangers of the first novel neutralized, wants nothing more than to return to the Kamarg and his friends. Of course, this is fantasy literature, where nothing is simple. He gets sidetracked a couple of times, we spend some more time in the company of the mysterious Warrior in Jet and Gold, things blow up, old enemies return, new enemies crop up, and then there's the Mad God of the title. All of which, of course, happens at the same time that the full might of Granbretan's army marches on the Kamarg, the last European outpost of independence against the depraved King-Emperor Huon.

Fun stuff. Very easy reading. All the womderful things I said about the first book still apply. Unfortunately, so do the pervasive typographical errors in the DAW editions. Whoever was asleep at the wheel the first time must have lapsed into a coma, because they are even more frequent here. I despair, at this point, of any legibility at all by the time I make it to the seventh book in the series.

Look for corrected editions, but definitely read this series. *** 1/2

Hawkmoon, Duke of Koln, is a resistance leader in the fight against the Dark Empire. Knowing this, the Mad God, with the power of the amulet of the Runestaff, arranges to kidnap Hawkmoon's wife, Yisselda.

The Eternal Champion has no option but to try and get her back, even in the face of the Mad God's power.

Despite Dorian Hawkmoon's best efforts, the Dark Empire is still expanding. It is growing so much he has to take extraodinary efforts to protect his own turf. Doing so, however, doesn't solve the greater problem at hand. Heroes are made to do heroic things, and Hawkmoon is the Eternal Champion, and the Sword of the Dawn calls.

This is the weakest in the Runestaff series, but it's still pretty good. Moorcock's witty and imaginative writing draws you right in and sweeps you along.

A bit slow at the start, but the second half is very entertaining, and Moorcock's imaginative descriptions of strange worlds and peoples is always worth the price of admission.

At least it has the saving grace of being short. Our two heroes wander aimlessly from adventure to adventure in a series of dull vignettes.