Eurovision has come and gone! As usual, the winner would have been maybe my tenth choice. Still, it featured some great performances and plenty of embarrassment and mediocrity made more palatable by touches of sublime bizarreness. That's what the competition is all about!

Here's a look back at Steinbeck's Cannery Row to complement my own.

Michael Moorcock, The Dancers At The End Of Time: An Alien Heat / The Hollow Lands / The End Of All Songs

An Alien Heat begins with its protagonist, Jherek Carnelian, casually fucking his mom, and gets even more awesome from there. The inhabitants of the End of Time (which is exactly what it sounds like -- an ultra-ultra-far future when the universe is finally collapsing) are fairly all-powerful immortals (anyone who is killed can be easily reconstituted) whose post-gender bodies (/species/shapes) are constantly mutable, as is their environment (they can turn deserts to jungles in seconds, and they create detailed reconstructions of Versailles or full reenactments of all the wars in history or whatever when the mood strikes them). As is customary for beings with the power to gratify every whim at will, their only real concern is staving off boredom, and so they are inveterate seekers of sensation, craving novelty over all else. Fortunately for them, there's the accumulated weight of billions of years of barely-remembered history to sift through, yielding countless eras to study, customs to practice, and cultural zeitgeists to recreate. Of course, they get things spectacularly wrong in the process.

Remember the joke in "The End Of The World" when Cassandra takes out the enormous jukebox and and is like, "they called this an iPod," and plays an "old Earth ballad?" Repeat that hundreds of times, because that's what happens in these books. Sounds awful, right? Running a decent gag into the ground? Wrong. The Dancers trilogy [1] gets a rather unbelievable amount of mileage out of this comic technique, and it inexplicably keeps working the whole time. The tone is a perfect mannered deadpan and the delivery is a winning mixture of bored naive conviction and it's just a joy to read, turning Moorcock's characteristically detached narration to effective ends. The flaws come only when the plot forces a change in setting or the introduction of less interesting characters or something else to prevent the story from having people gravely intone their analyses of performances of Shakespeare's greatest tragedy, the tale of Adolf and Eva.

Everyone's a student of history at the End of Time, and Jherek Carnelian's newest interests, at the opening of the novel, are the long-forgotten subjects of virtue and love (and their intersection). These are things his utterly amoral friends (there are some great, memorable names here: Mistress Christia, The Everlasting Concubine; The Duke of Queens; Jherek's aforementioned mother, the Iron Orchid; My Lady Charlotina; Sweet Orb Mace; Gaf the Horse in Tears; and most importantly, Lord Jagged of Canarian, supreme manipulator and puppet master) know very little about; naturally, they are untroubled by their ignorance. Jherek is a scholar of the 19th Century (hence the concern with conduct and morality), and when a denizen of England circa 1896 shows up, he's rather excited to find someone who might be able to offer some vital insight. A little more background: lots of time travelers wind up at the End of Time. This is because you can go forward in time without problems, but the self-correcting time stream tends to repel people who go back in time, sending them to the latest point they've experienced or farther. This is termed the "Morphail Effect," and much of the plot revolves around instances which are exceptions to the rule (this takes most of the characters way, way too long to figure out). The time travelers who do find themselves at the End of Time are summarily scooped up for the nearest immortal's menagerie; this may be acceptable if the immortal who picks you up is one who'll give you free rein with powers and near-immortality and who'll invite you to all the fun parties, but not so much if he/she decides to display you in an exhibit replicating man's various conceptions of Hell throughout human history or if you're used to demonstrate the effects of viruses that cause unimaginably painful rectal bleeding while your skull explodes (and then you are instantly resurrected, with all your memories, forced to relive the moment over and over again).

Anyway, the newest chance arrival is Mrs. Amelia Underwood, a faithful, god-fearing English housewife who's rather uncomfortable seeing the whole of human endeavor end in a mess of thoughtless hedonism and casual sex. Jherek decides to fall madly in love. And that's the real story -- their sweet, unorthodox courtship, which goes back and forth as she initially recoils, expresses interest but is constrained by respect for her vows, returns to her time but continues to have confusing feelings about him, and so on. Jherek constructs an idea of what love is, the model is tested as he evaluates which components are truly necessary (Jealousy? Fidelity? Sexual attraction? A common background? The ability to have an enjoyable conversation?), and he comes out comprehending little more about the nature of love in the abstract but capable of being a decent match for Amelia. She, meanwhile, has her world expanded, takes an understandable amount of time to process her new environment (with moments of understandable denial and backsliding along the way), and negotiates a balanced new way of life. It's painful for both of them but ultimately rewarding. It's by a wide margin the only credible Moorcock romance I've read to this point [2].

The overarching plot is mainly an excuse on which to hang inventive comic setpieces. Early on, a space traveler shows up to warn everyone that the impending collapse of the universe is far closer than any of the Dancers imagine. Nobody cares, save the one guy whose whole schtick is cultivating gloom and despair, and even he loses interest quickly. By the last book, the apocalypse is unignorably nigh and even the League of Temporal Adventurers shows up to help manage things, with appearances by Una Persson and Oswald Bastable (the author tries to draw him into an underdeveloped romantic rivalry with Jherek; the character resists this). Oh, yeah, by the way, these books are as self-referential as the rest of Moorcock's corpus, but the shallowness of the references works here because the comedy relies on the accumulation of pointless data, and they function as parody of all the accumulated Eternal Champion detritus (there's no Tanelorn here, only a senile old city called Shanalorm which is accelerating the total heat death of the universe) [3] or of plot revelations in general (see: the identity of Jherek's father).

Rather than focusing entirely on his winning comedic creations, though, Moorcock feels the need to juggle a number of types of comedy. Thus the back half of An Alien Heat follows Jherek as he goes back to 1896 in search of Amelia and, through his naivete, falls in with a thief named Snoozer Vine, thus dooming us to some social satire of the Innocent Abroad variety we've seen dozens of times before. Outrageous! He knows nothing of their customs! He's arrested and condemned to death and doesn't even realize it's supposed to be a bad thing! The events of The Hollow Lands culminate in a more successfully entertaining visit to the past with a madcap convergence of immortals and wackiness in a cafe, but the book is dragged down by a plot-necessitated sidetrack (see the next paragraph for elaboration) and the Lat, a group of assholish vulgar alien visitors with guns who care only for conquest, pillaging, and raping -- but of course you can't rape the willing, ho, ho, ho. They're injected into the story as low comedy for counterbalance, only they're never remotely funny, especially when the story contrives to separate the Dancers from their power rings to pretend that the Lat might pose some sort of a threat. There's also the time we spend with H.G. Wells, and it's never a good sign when the best thing you can say about something is that it's marginally better than "Timelash." I never want to see H.G. Wells appear as a character in a time travel story ever again.

And then there's the Nurse. In an early section of The Hollow Lands, Jherek blunders into an underground hideaway of children who, millennia ago, were hidden to escape being massacred (they'd have been cast in the terrifying films of the wicked lord Pecking Pa the Eighth in the dreaded Age of the Tyrant Producers). This was accomplished using the time-recycling powers of their nurse-bot, who has them looped on the same week of time. This interlude does serve the progression of the novel (when things are straightened out, the nurse sends Jherek back in time again) but its greater function is to resurface in The End Of All Songs, when everything is falling apart. It's a minor seemingly irrelevant tangent that turns out to be the key to resolving everything, plotting 101, executed in the most drab way possible. When the basic premise is "immortals with all-powerful technology indistinguishable from magic amusing themselves while living on the brink of the inescapable end of time," and the eventual solution is to reaffirm and intensify that premise by allowing everyone to continue forever on a temporal snapshot of those final days, the mechanism by which the solution is reached must be built naturally from the premise. That's not true with the time-recycling Nurse robot, which is only stumbled upon by chance and coincidentally happens to use long-lost technology whose application is exactly what is necessary for things to work out all right (these are events that need to have been engineered by Lord Jagged to be acceptable).

There's a gulf of quality between the self-assurance, the poise, and the rather dazzling display of verbal energy Moorcock brings to his portrait of the world of the Dancers (did he spend years collecting puns and clever portmanteaus before selecting the best?) and the entirely perfunctory, by-the-numbers execution of everything else he introduces. Perhaps his heart wasn't in it but he felt those elements were necessary anyway. I can't help but feel that this could have been a great story and not just a good one if it hadn't been hampered by its adherence to convention. In any case, the strength of these books, despite their flaws, indicate that, through parody, Moorcock is able to approach his recurring themes -- law and chaos, for example, or the role of dedication and self-denial in love -- with far more perceptiveness and potency than when he tries to be sincere and straightforward.

[1] Well, I wouldn't actually classify it as a real trilogy, since the story is continuous, just broken into chunks. It's probably closest to a three-act play.

[2] I'm thinking here of the number of instances where Moorcock's female characters have been little more than rewards for a job well done, not to mention the "tragic romance" which typically boils down to, "Oh, female object, I am so very in love with you -- Oops -- I killed you."

[3] He says in the intro that he's not satirizing his other work. He's wrong. Then he goes on to drastically misunderstand Chaos Theory to the degree that I think he may have just made up his own definition after hearing the term.