Customer Reviews

The Vengeance of Rome: Pyat Quartet (Pyat Quartet 4)

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I have been following Maxim Arturovich Pyat's adventures for a decade now, and with this final chapter I am saddened to see him go. However, knowing Moorcock, Pyat's eventual death in 1977 could well be chronicled in a future volume (I hope so, I miss him already!) Maxim's incredible meeting with Adolf Hitler is only sweetened further when viewed after the final family reunion at the novel's end. (I won't spoil it for you) As much as I enjoy Elric, Corum, Count Brass and other characters, I believe Pyat to be Moorcock's ticket to literary immortality! A great finish to a great fictional wartime memoir!!

This is the final volume of the Pyat sequence which began with Byzantium Endures, continued through The Laughter of Carthage and Jerusalem Commands, and presents Maxim Arturovitch Pyat, trickster, self-deceiver, anti-semitic Jew and friend of fascism. This has had great reviews in the London Times, The Times Literary Supplement and, by all accounts, the rest of the UK papers. I got mine in Toronto and so far, if you're a US resident, you can only buy the new editions via Amazon. The TLS compared the sequence with Balzac's Human Comedy.

Truly an amazing finish to an amazing quartet. Finishing off a story, especially one as deeply involved as the Pyat Quartet, is a difficult and sticky thing for an author. How many books or series have you read where the ending is somehow unsatisfying or anticlimatic? Well, not this one. Moorcook holds the final epitome of Pyat's self-deception to the very end.

The series itself is so well-written and researched that it truly boggles the mind. I'll give one example for those who have read this final book. Do you remember Pyat's secert weapon that he was developing for Mussolini? Well, during my reading of 'Rome' I got interested in Mussolini so I checked out a Biography video on him at the library. During the video they say that Mussolini always maintained he had a secret weapon, but no one ever found out what it was. It was probably a lie, but Moorcock worked that little fact of history into this fictional life story that spanned the 20th century.

Btw, these books are easy to get from Amazon UK and still only cost $3 in shipping to the US.