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Monday, August 22, 2011

The appeal of Elric



Yay, my first request! Off in the comments, Zach asked me to expound a little on why I like the Elric cycle of stories. Never being one to pass up the opportunity to prattle on at length, here's my "What Elric means to me," post.

I started playing Dungeons & Dragons at about nine years old, and consequently, before I had read a lot of the works that had influenced it, so I still tend to view things through the lens of my first experience. Elric was one of the bigger influences on the mythology of the game, in particular, the Law versus Chaos paradigm Moorcock created. (Or perhaps he just popularized it. I know that he's made the claim that he "created" the concept and the phrase, "multiverse", but that's always struck me as somewhat absurd, as the idea of parallel worlds has been around forever, and once you start thinking about those, multiverse is just about the first term to occur to anyone.)

Moorcock's writing is occasionally beautiful. The stories are seldom complex. When shopping for my plane trip back from the UK a few years back, I picked up a collection of every Conan short story. They are fun stories, but there's not always a lot of variety, and they are best enjoyed in small doses, otherwise you may find yourself doing what I did, which was putting the book down and exclaiming, "Didn't I just read that story?"


Despite the fact that Elric was designed to be as different from Conan as possible (a cultured, infirm albino who topples his birthright kingdom and slays the princess), the framework of individual Elric stories are very, very similar to one another. Taken alone, I think any given story is an entertaining read, but reading them as a part of a collection, they all kind of blur together.

There are some Elric stories that I haven't read, Fortress of the Pearl and Revenge of the Rose that a friend says are very good and show just what Moorcock is capable of writing when he's not churning out stories as fast as he can write them for pulp magazines. I haven't read those, but I did enjoy his Corum cycle of stories. The first I got through the sci-fi book club in the pre-internet days. If I didn't send my response back quickly enough, they would send me that month's selection. I wound up with the shitty Dune prequels that way, as well as a collection of the first Corum trilogy. 

One thing I thought was really interesting was how we had a crossover in one the Elric stories where Elric meets up with two other aspects of the Eternal Champion, Corum and Erekose. Later on in the Corum cycle, we see the same encounter from Corum's point of view. I thought that was really nifty.

Also, I like how he subverted a lot of the fantasy tropes. Corum was a Vadhagh, and much longer lived than a human. He settles down with a human woman at the end of the first trilogy and then the second one picks up seventy years or so later, after she's died of old age. Later on in the second trilogy, the heroes are under seige and Corum goes on a desperate quest within a faerie mound for the Macguffin that will stave off defeat. He returns after an ordeal with the object in hand...only to find that three months have passed in the real world and all of his allies fell shortly after he left. 

It's not great, it's not art, but it's generally a very fun read, best enjoyed a little at a time.

3 comments:

  1. Whoa, Josh -- I didn't realize you were going to devote an entire POST to your opinions on Elric! I'd apologize for making you take the time on it just to satisfy my curiosity, but it sounds like you actually enjoyed writing it, so I don't feel too bad about putting in the request. =P

    Anyway, I've got such a bad memory that I often forget what I like/disliked about a book within months of reading it, though I still usually have a general FEELING of like/dislike. So I had to go to my Goodreads reviews of Elric books to find out what it is I didn't like about them.

    The chief complaints seem to be the dialogue, lack of substance and external influences on Elric's life. The dialogue is just a matter of preference--I always liked Zelazny's fantasy because the characters talked like real people. But in Elric, we have the type of dialogue that I find sorta cheesy (like calling someone "Oh Warrior Priest of Phum!" instead of their first name. This is generally preceded by something like "forsooth").

    The lack of substance was something I took note of in Sailor on the Seas of Fate. The book was split into three parts, and it seemed like each part had exactly one thing of importance that happened. The rest of it was just random adventure thrown in for the sake of adventure. It seemed like Moorcock thought, "What could we run into here? Let's saaaayyyy . . . baboons. Done!" I really felt like a lot of the things that were happening were just "filler" that could have been cut out without losing anything significant.

    And lastly, the external influences. I sometimes liked the pact Elric had with demons/gods/whatever, sometimes hated it. I mean, in some ways, it's cool to summon forth a bug-god to kill your enemies. But at the same time, it seemed like a lot of things happened to Elric either because he'd pissed a god off or a god wanted to save him for whatever reason. It felt like he was just a puppet, which may have been the point, but made for a story where I felt the character's actions didn't mean much because he'd either be thwarted or bailed out as the divine powers saw fit.

    All that being said, I can't deny that Moorcock creates some mighty fine imagery every now and then. And honestly, after reading your review, it kinda makes me want to give Elric another shot. I've always WANTED to like Elric, ever since I saw some pictures of him in InQuest magazine back in the 90s. He just LOOKED cool. And the concept seems cool. But every time I try him out, I wind up disappointed.

    Based on your review, it sounds like I just need to go into Elric thinking of it as a fun, D&D-style fantasy adventure. If I do that, I may like it more.

    Thanks again for taking the time to discuss your opinions!

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  2. Zach: Whoa, Josh -- I didn't realize you were going to devote an entire POST to your opinions on Elric! I'd apologize for making you take the time on it just to satisfy my curiosity, but it sounds like you actually enjoyed writing it, so I don't feel too bad about putting in the request. =P

    You are correct! It took me a while to pull together, but I enjoyed thinking about it. (And I must say, your reply is better put together than my post here!)

    Zach: It seemed like Moorcock thought, "What could we run into here? Let's saaaayyyy . . . baboons. Done!"

    That, sir, is a feature and not a bug!

    Zach: I really felt like a lot of the things that were happening were just "filler" that could have been cut out without losing anything significant.

    I think that's true, and it's probably a consequence of where the stories were originally published. I think it works in a story that's been serialized in a magazine, but it kind of comes apart when those stories are collected, where you get the herky-jerky "Ahhh!! Baboons!" moments that come out of nowhere.

    If you're looking for Elric without Moorcock's signature quirks, you might want to try to hunt down the Tales of the White Wolf anthology. It's a collection of Elric stories by a bunch of different authors. You can't go wrong when a teenage stoner teams up with Elric and Jimi Hendrix to fight evil sorcerers!

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  3. "You can't go wrong when a teenage stoner teams up with Elric and Jimi Hendrix to fight evil sorcerers!"

    lol, that sounds AMAZING.

    "That, sir, is a feature and not a bug!"

    See, this is what I need to get into my head. I need to realize that a story can just be fun for the sake of fun, rather than every little thing having a purpose that advances the plot or fleshes out a character. This is a bug in MY programming!

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