The Vengeance of Rome

MICHAEL MOORCOCK

Winner of the Nebula and World Fantasy awards

August Derleth Fantasy Award

British Fantasy Award

Guardian Fiction Prize

Prix Utopiales

Bram Stoker Award

John W. Campbell Award

SFWA Grand Master

Member, Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame

Praise for Michael Moorcock and
The Vengeance of Rome

‘One of our very best novelists and a national treasure.'

—
Listener

‘
The Vengeance of Rome
—the final volume in a quartet begun as long ago as 1981—is historical picaresque on the grand scale, a vast and intermittently rambling chronicle of tall tales, brief encounters and expert twitches on the thread of destiny. Dense, louche and terrifying by turns, and the mouthpiece for a view of world history that rarely makes it on to the printed page (Pyat is an anti-semitic Jew who believes in an anti-Christian, anti-Muslim new world order brought about by a revived Roman Empire),
The Vengeance of Rome
… in the end redeems itself by the sheer vigour of its imaginative attack.'

—DJ Taylor,
Guardian

‘Moorcock's writing is intricate, fabulous, and mellifluous.'

—Alan Moore

‘He is so easily able to move from contemporary realism to futuristic fantasy; both worlds share the colour of dreams, and follow an imagination that conceives the world in symbolic terms…. He has a mythic, romantic sense of life.'

—Peter Ackroyd

‘A final, breath-stopping moment of deeply ironic self-delusion at the end of a grandiose, beautifully modulated quartet.'

—
Scotland on Sunday

‘It is brave of Moorcock, given the particoloured clothing kits he's provided his casts over the past forty years, to end the Pyat Quartet in this cul-de-sac 1970—because the end of Pyat is truly finis…. The Pyat Quartet is, in a sense, Moorcock's
Tempest
. But he has been more draconian than Shakespeare. Pyat does not recast the oeuvre it terminates as dream; it recasts that oeuvre as untruth. Nor does that recasting focus safely on generalities about the human condition…. The Quartet seems really to be about something else: it is one of the most remarkable presentations yet laid down of the wrongness of the imagining of—of the imagination of—the twentieth century. It recasts our imagining of this century, which Pyat has been claiming for two thousand pages to represent, into the language of Pyat: it recasts our imagining of this century—this century we made up—into a tissue of lies: just as the four individual titles of the sequence, as is now well known, amount to conspiratorial racist slander when joined together: “Byzantium endures the laughter of Carthage; Jerusalem commands the vengeance of Rome.”

Vengeance
is an unrelenting brilliant book; its airlessness—for it is stifling to read, though it is at the same time almost impossible not to continue reading—is consummate. Though it is not constructed as a crescendo ending in some terrible dawn in Auschwitz (as some passages written decades earlier seemed to hint it would do), the final pages of
Vengeance
are deeply excruciating. Pyat's final, inevitable act of betrayal, which nails tight over his soul the naked coffin of his excremental self, is an act of such inconceivable cruelty and stupidity that we know, after two thousand pages, that there is nothing left to say. The book closes, without air. The revelation is that the vision of air was a lie. There is no air to breathe here.

The story of the pain of Colonel Pyat … is the story of the pain we have done to ourselves this time around.
The Vengeance of Rome
is about lying, about a world laid down by lies. This is very terrifying, because we are caught in the ash. It makes it very hard to see. But we need to remember how to look through. The buck stops here.'

—John Clute,
Science Fiction Weekly

The Vengeance of Rome

Michael Moorcock

© 2013 by Michael Moorcock

This edition © 2013 PM Press

Introduction © 2013 by Alan Wall

ISBN: 978–1–60486–494–6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012955000

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Bibliography reprinted with the kind permission of Moorcock's Miscellany (
www.multiverse.org
)

Project editor: Allan Kausch

Copy editor: Gregory Nipper

Cover by John Yates/
www.stealworks.com

Interior design by briandesign

Copyright © Michael Moorcock 2006

Cover photo by Linda Steele

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PM Press

P.O. Box 23912

Oakland, CA 94623

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Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.

www.thomsonshore.com

To the memory of John Blackwell

INTRODUCTION BY ALAN WALL

INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL MOORCOCK

The Vengeance of Rome

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BIBLIOGRAPHY

So we finally reach the full extent of Pyat's lifespan—1900 to 1977. Long enough to have witnessed revolution and terror, war and genocide, the seeming liberation of the young, their creation of their own culture, or indeed their own counter-culture. It was Haeckel's belief that all micro-organisms repeat in miniature the larger history of the species. This used to be known as the Law of Recapitulation; every individual animal has to climb its own family tree. Pyat does not mention this biological theory in the quartet, but one suspects he might well have gone along with it (Freud certainly did), since as the titles of the individual volumes indicate, what seems to be happening in the twentieth century is a recapitulation of some earlier civilisational cycles, though speeded up, with the assistance of all our modern technology. What goes around comes around, but the orbit accelerates until we end up with the only society in history which has posited a speed as its absolute. And Pyat certainly does believe we are all assigned our fates: ‘There are patterns to our universe. Patterns so vast and at the same time so minuscule that we rarely detect them. They present a problem of unimaginable scale, if we could detect them they could explain the mysterious movement of all creatures across the face of the planet.'

In this final volume Pyat finds himself at the dark vortex of the century whose chronology coincides with his own, since he was born in 1900. It's the age of the dictators, so he is hardly likely to stand on the outside looking in; we know from all his previous adventures that this would not be his style. He has a penchant for being at the centre of history, not on its margins. He likes to be on the balcony of the palace looking down at the cheering crowds. The editor's preface tells us that Maxim's writings here were in effect prose macaronics: ‘… he wrote in English, Russian, French, German, Italian and Yiddish, with some pages in Turkish, Spanish, Greek,
Arabic and Hebrew.' This fellow has put himself about a bit. All his scribblings and oracular statements have now been shaped into an omnivorous English by his dutiful editor, Michael Moorcock. And so here we witness Pyat as he sets out to meet, congratulate and serve the great dictators. He would though, wouldn't he?

There are precedents for this. In a remarkable story, ‘Deutsches Requiem', Borges imagined the life of an unrepentant Nazi, facing his execution after the Nuremburg Trials. His name is Otto Dietrich zur Linde, and Borges rewards him for his historic crimes by giving him a kind of grandeur. Too much so, he came to feel later; having met some of the actual Nazi criminals who escaped down the ratline to Argentina after the war, Borges soon realised that their sordid pettiness and self-pity was the exact opposite of that nihilistic metaphysician he had created in his story. The same criticism was levelled at George Steiner's Hitler in his novella
The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H
. Here the fellow from Linz took on all the philosophical plausibility of Heidegger. Hitler wasn't nearly as philosophical as Steiner made him out to be, according to the critics of his story. Steiner had in effect turned the Führer Steineresque; as though one really could have listened to his table talk without yawning for bedtime at the Berchtesgaden. Thomas Mann in
Doctor Faustus
turns the darkness of history into allegory, a conjoining of modernist artistic technique and a deal with the devil; an overreaching of the human spirit, so that it might ventriloquise itself with heartless brilliance. And in the film
Downfall
Hitler is given a sort of demented grandeur; though perhaps not as much as Goebbels and his wife Magda, who between them poison their little blond-haired Aryan darlings, before finally executing themselves with a sort of Wagnerian splendour. In this scenario, Medea gets to kill the kids without even having to lose her husband Jason to the princess.

Here we are faced with what might be the darkest question of modern representation. Are some things simply beyond the possibilities of representation altogether? That is what Claude Lanzmann believes in regard to one aspect of this history: you cannot represent the Holocaust according to him, in the sense of ‘imaginatively recreating' it. That is a kind of sacrilege, a besmirching of the imagination. All we can respectfully do here is to depict the historical traces, which is precisely what he does in his vast film
Shoah
. On hearing of Spielberg's
Schindler's List
, he said simply: ‘How dare he?' And yet we might as well collectively own up: there is an endless fascination with all things that wear a swastika. Why? We might answer this question unhistorically by saying that fiction is in love with crime and
always has been. Think of Dickens; think of Shakespeare. Crime is never far away from either, any more than it is ever far away from the popular cinema. There is something even more disturbing in Saul Friedländer's thoughts on Nazism and kitsch; they do appear to have been made for one other. The
Liebestod
seems to waft over the Chancellery. Göring would display his cyanide capsules, freely distributed amongst the faithful, and declare them to be ‘the shortest road to Valhalla'. Like Keats, the Nazi command seemed ‘half in love with easeful death'.

So what is Pyat going to do in re-crossing the same territory once again? And if Adorno fretted that there could be no lyric poetry after Auschwitz, is there really any intellectual space for a picaresque novel? It might be one thing to allude, obliquely, to the dark besuited fascinators, as Don DeLillo does in
Running Dog
and
White Noise
, but can one go marching in, back through the mighty bronze doors of history as if it were a fictional baptistery? And if one does this, what precisely is to be achieved by the endeavour? What swag might we bring home?

We might remember at the outset that a lot of people thought Hitler was a good thing at the beginning, and an even larger number were keen on Mussolini. Here's Churchill to Mussolini himself: ‘If I had been an Italian I am sure I would have been with you from the beginning to the end …' He held on to that position pretty much until 1938. Lord Northcliffe wrote a leader about the Nazis in Germany in the newspaper he owned, the
Daily Mail
, in 1933. It was entitled ‘Youth Triumphant'. So there we are then; or there we were, anyway. Lord Beaverbrook was assuring the press in 1939 that there would be no war with Hitler, Hitler being no Napoleon. He would be appointed Minister of Aircraft Production, then Minister of Supply, in Churchill's wartime government, shortly after. Ezra Pound became so enamoured of Il Duce that he normally referred to him as Muss or The Boss. He even broadcast on his behalf over Rome Radio while his country was at war with Italy. This would place him firmly in the bin for many years after 1945; he was lucky to escape with his life. So Pyat's initial enthusiasm here might be a trifle more forgivable than history's first backwards look suggests. Except of course that we are looking steadily backwards, having no choice. Kierkegaard reminded us that the problem with biographies is that they are written backwards, whereas life has to be lived forwards. But going back (fictionally) we can hardly pretend that we are really going forwards (existentially). So what does Pyat learn as he goes back and then forwards, back to Rome and Berlin, before coming back to Notting Hill with an aged Mrs Cornelius? Does he manage to perform some useful historical service
at least, as Kurt Vonnegut's Howard W. Campbell does in
Mother Night
? Or is it simply a case that my enemy's enemy is my friend? Churchill thought Mussolini behaved as a hero in battling the Bolsheviks. Eamon de Valera was still smarting so much at British oppression over the centuries that he presented his condolences in person at the German embassy in Dublin, on hearing one morning of the Führer's unfortunate demise over in the Bunker. There was diplomacy indeed. So what exactly is Pyat likely to discover on our behalf?