Byzantium endures

Ever heard of an unreliable narrator? I hadn't, so this book was a bit of a shock and a revelation. I must have been 13-15 years old and I'd been devouring Moorcock's fantasies at a rate of knots, without worrying at all about the allegorical or Tolkien-reactionary nature of them, which I didn't really catch up on for a few more years. So I was in the library and came across this book and picked it up without thinking or looking closely, just 'cos it had "Moorcok" written on the spine...it was a surprise, therefore, to be confronted by a historical novel that employs that pretending to be based on real documents technique that there is probably a name for and not a hint of fantasy in sight.

Except there is actually plenty of fantasy, really, as Moorcock plainly states in his foreword, where he introduces the narrator of the book as if he is a personal acquaintance who recently died and says the following narrative is based on recorded conversations between the two of them. Moorcock states that Pyat - a protagonist that could hardly be called a hero - is a liar and moderately demented. But I didn't really get it until 3/4 of the way through the novel, when I realised that Pyat was talking complete BS and probably had been several times before, now that I stop to think about it....

It was tough going, with really long paragraphs, a fairly slow pace and a narrative that would wander between telling the tale and ranting about politics, race and religion fairly arbitrarily. It was educational, though; not only did I learn what an unreliable narrator is, I learned the meaning of "pogrom" and a bit about the history of the Russian October Revolution and subsequent civil war. (Mainly that is was really complicated and confusing and that most of the Big Names didn't have much clue what was going on either.)

Being a glutton for punishment I went on to read the sequel....

Fast-forward about twenty years and the fourth and final volume in the series has been published and I decide I ought to read them and figure out what it was all about.

So here we go again; Moorcock states in his foreword that Pyat is a liar - I think, man, he says right here that he can't be trusted - what an idiot I was! Was the narrative going to be as tough going as I remembered? No. The average paragraph length is quite long by contemporary standards, with some of them longer than a page, but this is worst at the beginning and end. Most of the rambling and ranting is confined to the beginning and end, too, subtly disguising the fact that Moorcock keeps the main portion of the narrative relatively straight-forward. It's not remotely so hard as reading William Langland as I am doing right now and calling it fun. Exactly how much of Pyat's adventures are completely made up, exagerated versions of the "truth" or unadorned "fact" cannot be ascertained - one has to judge for oneself, just as Moorcock says back in the foreword - but the general sweep of history can be relied on, I think, because that seems to be the point:

Pyat was born in 1900 in the Ukraine and lives through all of the most extreme turmoil of the first half of the century, his life being defined by it. Through Pyat, Moorcock gets to talk about all this history - in this volume covering the time from about 1912 up to and inclusive of 1920 in detail. The main strength of the book is how convincing Pyat is as a character and how ironic - Pyat is an anti-semitic ethnic Jew who follows the Christian Orthodox Church, for instance. Pyat is not overly likable - a boaster and liar, spending most of his time pursuing his self interest (or survival, later, which is easier to sympathise with) or his vices and being outrageously racist. But he is not a complete monster either; he genuinely attempts to look after his family and childhood friend when politics deteriorates into revolution and war.

The evocation of social atmosphere whether it be Bohemian Odessa and Kiev or those same cities living amidst famine and destruction only a few years later is excellent and perhaps one of Moorcock's primary purposes - but I'll have to read the other three volumes to be sure.