Customer Reviews

The Laughter of Carthage: Between the Wars, Vol. 2: Pyat Quartet (Pyat Quartet 2)

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In The Laughter of Carthage Moorcock takes his riotiously unreliable narrator from Civil War Russia and post-war France to America, the Ku Klux Klan (which, of course, he joins), corrupt Washington politicians, stunt flyers, gangsters, engineers, Hollywood and a lot more in between. This is a wonderfully readable series, a War and Peace for our own times, without doubt, and part of a sequence which must form one of the great Anglophone novels. This novel has never been in paperback in the US and Jerusalem Commands, perhaps even better than this, has never appeared at all. We are still waiting for The Vengeance of Rome which, by all accounts, Mr Moorcock has finished but is still polishing! If it is as good as I hope, we will have a great masterpiece on our hands!

Second instalment of Pyat's quartet...and though the writing is great, one feels tired after the hundreth tirade of the whining, self pityoing, self-glamorizing Pyat. his comprehension of hs times is limited, and his mawkish sentimentalism, combined with his frankly unpalatable racism make a very unpleasant combination. I don't know of others, but I prefer a protagonist I can empathize with, not an individual whose endorsement of the abject, evil ku-klux-klan exacted my utter distaste. But I could have overcome this, I suppose, had I not been bored with Pyat's annoying droning on the fact he practically invented everything that's been invented, that modernity is evil, that it's all the fault of the jews and so on and so on and so on....