Customer Reviews

The War Amongst the Angels

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This is one of the richest of Moorcock's novels, full of different themes and relationships, in which he makes increasingly explicit his vision of the multiverse. It is the culmination of the first two books in the series, Blood and Fabulous Harbors. It raises all kinds of philosophical questions about the nature of identity and our ideas about time. It has a love story and several autobiographical elements and, unlike a previous reviewer, I found this one of the best and most original books Mr Moorcock has yet written. The ending certainly makes reference to Milton, but it seems to be an argument with Milton, rather as Gloriana was an argument with Spencer. Moorcock's great talent, since he began with Elric and The Sundered Worlds, is to inhabit the genre itself and bust it open from the inside out. He doesn't borrow from Milton -- he sets up a dialogue with him! Everything he does, including the Bastable and Pyat novels, is an intervention in an existing genre, stereotype or cultural assumption. War Amongst The Angels is one of the richest and most visually mind-blowing books Moorcock, who has already established his own bench-marks, has ever given us. It is nothing less than a masterpiece.

This is Moorcock at his best. "The War Amongst the Angels"
has all the complexity and playfulness that we've come to expect from one of SF's proven masters.Long live the multiverse!

Moorcock is so rich it's possible to compare one of his books to
six books by equally good writers! Like the best work, this rewards a lot of rereadings and above all it's FUN. A fine writer at play.

Moorcock's most ambitious fantasy. Goes with Blood and Fabulous Harbors to form a loose trilogy covering every obsession of a forty year career.

A wonderful autobiographical fiction and spiritual successor to Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Philip K Dick's VALIS, and everything Moorcock, himself, has written before or after this novel. A marvelous achievement in forward-moving sentimentalism and critical enthusiasm, The War Amongst the Angels is unerringly gorgeous and defiantly honest, a topflight example of slipstream fiction at its strongest. The language and structure of the autobiography is simultaneously plain and lush, an embracing embrasure with the cognizance of Kathy Acker's fiction coupled with an earnest impetus resembling the Marryat and Ainsworth works to which it is, in part, a tribute.

Like many lives, honestly examined, linearity and objectivity have less effect than perspective and aesthetic on that of Rose Moorcock (through her times as Rose von Bek, The Rose, Captain Hawkmoon, Michael Moorcock, and so). She lives and recollects her lives as we mostly do, in a affective stream, an atmosphere, and she is effected as equally by the myths, cosmogonies, and fictions of her experience as she is by any stricter redaction. Dick Turpin and Claude Duvall are significant in her life as are horses in fire and unappreciative authority figures, her mother's bounce back to performing just after giving birth, and her father's fly-fishing. The unfairness of her romances do not impede the admitting of them and endings sought are often only ports to leave from on new journeys. An inviting work in a brave voice, its forthrightness does not belie its elegant construction anymore than the careful arrangement of the novel's elements are set against the purity of its shine.

The War Amongst the Angels pretty much makes Fabulous Harbours superfluous, in a lot of ways, as it is considerably better, and very funny at parts. Plenty of lighthearted English political satire, among other things. Some of the fictitious footnotes are hilarious.

Sam, Rose, Jack, Von Bek, Dick Turpin and the Chaos Engineers face off with Lucifer, Quelch and the Singularity over the fate of the Grail, the Multiverse, and the Spammer Game in a climactic confrontation at the end.

Really enjoyable book.