A City Haunted by Itself
Having rescued his wife, Yisselda, from an alternate dimensional timeline, Dorian Hawkmoon struggles to explain the concept of the multiverse to his friends even while he has trouble believing it himself. Nonetheless, he is now preoccupied by the notion of the Eternal Champion and how he is connected to it. On his way to seek advice and answers from powerful and sagacious supporters, Hawkmoon find himself harassed by inhuman forces and pulled into Limbo, where allies from across the multiverse tell him he must find his way to the mystical city of Tanelorn to defend it and all of creation from ravenous, extradimensional forces. He finds himself in the company of several similarly displaced warriors including Erekossë, Corum, and Elric of Melniboné. While focused on the fate of his family and his world, Hawkmoon begins to wonder at the role he has to play among these incarnations of the Eternal Champion and whether even their combined might is a match for the forces arrayed against them.
Champion of Dreams
For readers invested in Moorcock’s expansive tales of the Eternal Champion, this book provides something of a capstone. It brings together multiple versions of the hero from across the early decades of the author’s writing career to face an apocalyptic threat. There is also a fair bit of surreal imagery that can leave the characters and readers feeling unbalanced. A type of Alice in Wonderland irrationality suffuses sections of the novel, and the characters and the reader tend to fare better when they accept the lunacy. However, the harsh, stressful, and violent journey to confront Agak and Gagak in Tanelorn is a real highlight of the novel, filled with adventure and danger.
In Tanelorn
Unfortunately, the novel spends a lot of time treading water. A disproportionate amount of the book is spent with the characters waiting around and not understanding where they are, where they are going, or what they’re supposed to do. On the occasions when some erudite secondary character shows up, they frequently speak in a manner so full of obfuscation that even the characters get fed up with the futile attempts at dialogue. This pointless mystification comes to an end near the story’s conclusion when, all of a sudden, another character shows up to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to explain the whole of the multiverse, the Eternal Champion, and foundational ideas for all of humanity. The effect is that the reader realizes it was all better when it was unexplained, as is often the case. This sophistry and metaphysical drivel is a poor replacement for a strong central plot or character development.
Speaking of characters, it is difficult to know who is supposed to be the central figure of this novel and not even in the typically confusing way of some Eternal Champion stories. Nominally, this is a book about Dorian Hawkmoon, but as with The Champion of Garathorm, he really takes a back seat for much of the novel to other incarnations of the Eternal Champion. A reader might be forgiven for believing this book is really about Corum, or Erekossë, or even Elric who shows up and broods before, during, and after his bouts of violent assistance. Readers unfamiliar with all these other characters may be disinterested or even confused by the constant name-dropping and allusions to Moorcock’s other stories that can sometimes seem like references for their own sake. Readers primarily interested in Hawkmoon are likely to be disappointed, and it also feels unsatisfying as a finale to the whole Eterneal Champion saga.
Concluding The Chronicles of Castle Brass
In theory this book serves as the end to at least three different series for the Moorcockian Multiverse, but there is little to recommend about it. The author added other books for the Eternal Champion series in the following decades, so while this might be something of a chronological end, Moorcock certainly had more to print later. There is some resolution for Hawkmoon, but he is a secondary character for so much of the page count that The Chronicle of Castle Brass hardly feels like a continuation of The History of the Runestaff. Diehard fans of Moorcock and completionists for the Eternal Champion will get something out of this.
Source
Moorcock, Michael. The Quest for Tanelorn. Berkley, 1985.
© 2024 Seth Tomko