I discovered Michael Moorcock about 6 or 7 years ago when, in desperation for anything fresh in the fantasy genre, I picked up what was described as an ‘omnibus’ featuring an effete-looking skinny white dude with the title ‘Elric of Melnibone’ emblazoned in orange-gold lettering just above that decidedly anorexic face.
I was looking for something fresh and I stumbled upon something that was written in the ’60s. Yay, me.
I read and read and read, and couldn’t stop myself reading; the next week, I rushed back to the old MPH in Holiday Plaza and bought the rest of the ‘omnibuses’ on display: one about Hawkmoon (super!) and another about Corum (my fave) in that whole Eternal Champion cycle.
Since then, I pretty much moved away from reading fantasy and started down other paths, which was all well and good, but I never lost the itch for a rousing, good yarn with assorted beasties and technicolor magical effects (heh). So last Friday, my colleague and I took a (long-ish) detour while our bosses were away and found ourselves in this tiny little second-hand bookshop tucked away in a dilapidated, terraced row of shop-houses somewhere along the road from Senai to Johor Bahru town.
We called the shop “Shakespeare” as a convenient shorthand for “Shaik Peer Bombay Bookstore” (the owner suggested it!). The place was no bigger than 20′ x 40′, but we were immediately assailed by decades of accumulated dust thick on the books and shelves.
The books on display looked older than my grandfather, which in turn seemed to be confirmed by our hosts, an Indian Muslim man and his wife, who looked as old as dirt itself. But he had all the charm of my dearly departed grand-dad, and so we got along well, though I was more interested in ploughing through his books.
And boy did I find some gems! Buried deep in a pile of Barbara Cartland-ish pulp romances, I found Michael Moorcock’s Masters of the Pit! Which isn’t saying much since, at the time, I didn’t know just exactly what I had in hand. I had the vague notion that it was a hard-to-find book (if not out-of-print; it definitely looked old enough!), but being a Moorcock it had to be good, lah. I didn’t know or care, I was like a puppy with a freshly-mangled bone :p.
Later that night, I got down to reading ‘Masters of the Pit’, and found it wasn’t all that bad. It’s told in the first person, and written in short, even terse, paragraphs and sentences. Much of it is narrative with bits of dialogue interspersed here and there; it felt less like a book and more like a rehearsal of a plot outline. It definitely lacked the polish of some of the later Elric stories I’ve read, and plot lines quite literally disappeared or were artificially resolved prematurely in some places.
But damn, was it funny! There was one particular part in the book when the main protagonist, Michael Kane, has this sort of interior monologue about society and such:
“Fear,” she said
I nodded, wondering if that deep emotion was not the essential cause of most ills (wah, very like the stuff in the movie ‘Equilibrium’ – ed.). Were not all political systems, all arts, all human actions channelled towards creating that one valuable sense of security we all, in our own ways, sought – an absence of fear? It was fear that produced madness, fear that produced war. Fear, indeed, that often produced the things we feared most. Was this why the fearless man was lauded – because he did not represent a threat to others? Perhaps, though there were many kinds of fearless people, and a total fearlessness produced a whole man, a man who had no need to display his fearlessness. The true hero, in fact – the often unsung hero.
Ok, I must admit, not only did I laugh, I was reminded of that short cartoon in Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine”. I don’t know why.
Imagine a Michael Kane in a ’60s retro-futuristic costume on the set of a faux Mars, intoning the above with dead seriousness (cue cheesy violin set pieces)… you get the idea 
.
Time to start digging into the other books I found!
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