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books, fiction

Michael Moorcock, Corum: The Coming Of Chaos: The Knight Of The Swords / The Queen Of The Swords / The King Of The Swords

i just finished rereading the CORUM trilogy, the only MMs to survive a cull when aged c.19: they are SHIT.

Corum is a maximum LaYMoR who only wins any battles at all because someone gave the hand of a god and the eye of another, that he can call up the undead with.
His g/f just screams and pokes her breasts about
His sidekick is a "witty dandy" whose entire shtick is a "hat tilted just so" and a small flying cat which continually saves their pitiful arses

His enemies are hopeless: Arioch, Xiombarg and Mabelode, Knight, Queen and King of Swords respectively. Arioch keeps his heart in its own unguarded room. Corum squishes it with his borrowed god's hand. Xiombarg loses her temper and enters a dimension she is not allowed to enter and is dispersed. Mabelode never even gets to face Corum, and dies offscreen: the god whose hand it is comes back, and kills everyone divine in sight, gives the eye back to his brother and disappears.

-Mark S. on ILE

Can't really improve on that summary, so here's my failure to do so. These are the most psychedelic of the books so far, as well as the most schematic (Corum is given three enemy gods to fight, and each book focuses on one, as in Jack Vance's superior Demon Princes pentalogy).

The Knight Of The Swords: Prince Corum Jhaelen Irsei is the last of his race, the Vadhagh (AKA elves, another Eldren offshoot), for some values of "last"; as with Superman, there are a number of survivors and exceptions that I guess don't count and are quickly dispatched so Corum can continue to feel special (even the Vadhagh equivalent of that Kryptonian city in a bottle shows up). The Vadhagh grew peaceful and decadent and removed themselves from the world to concentrate on art and stuff, as did their kind-of-enemy counterparts, the Nhadragh, who could be completely removed from the story without anyone noticing (I will have no reason to speak of them again). This allowed the Mabden -- mankind, but we have to stick to the Celtic naming system here -- to breed and rise and become powerful and ambitious and greedy without anyone noticing until, one day, all those elves get raped and murdered except for Corum, who escapes but loses his eye and his hand in the process. His major motivation is therefore Vengeance. The setup places the Corum books about halfway between Hawkmoon (vengeance against evil empire against seemingly unsurmountable odds, one long story split up for publication purposes / to make more money) and Elric (aristocratic elf, eventually sort of the last of his race, dealing with the human world, needs to use but despises using certain magic tools, feeling that he's doomed and everyone who helps him is also doomed).

Corum is nursed back to health by a widowed Margravine, the Lady Rhalina, and learns in the process that the Mabden aren't all alike, some are good, some are bad, yeah, yeah, he falls for her and she for him and they get over the cross-species thing pretty quickly. When the Earl Glandyth-a-Krae, the blackguard who butchered Corum and his family and household, leads a barbarian horde to conquer Rhalina's people, he's ready to fight for these people, and does, but it's hopeless until Rhalina summons the ghost ship of her dead husband to scare the attackers away. But there's a price for this: She must join them in agony at the bottom of the sea. Corum tags along to appeal to upper management on this point.

Upper management here turns out to be Prince Shool, an aspiring god-sorcerer who set this up to get Corum to do his dirty work. See, Shool needs the Sword Rulers banished (the three chaos-aligned gods who rule Corum's world's 15 planes and caused the rise of the Mabden), and he wants Corum to do this in exchange for the release of his girlfriend. To this end, he gives Corum the super-powered eye and hand of some pre-historical gods. Every time Corum needs to fight, he just uses his eye and is able to summon unstoppable undead versions of whatever he killed the last time he used the eye. The hand automatically chokes anyone who gets close to him with the intent of doing harm. From this point on, Corum faces no genuine threats to his person.

The first god on the chopping block: Arioch, the Knight of the Swords (and Elric's patron Chaos Lord). There is some journeying (Corum makes a friend, then accidentally kills him; he meets some more Vadhagh who are kind of mean so he kills them) to Arioch's court. Arioch welcomes him and gives him a tour, during which Corum notices an intriguing passageway and Arioch is all, NO THERE'S NOTHING THERE IT'S BORING DOWN THERE WHY DON'T YOU GO THIS WAY INSTEAD MY GIRLFRIEND LIVES IN CANADA. Guess where Arioch's heart is hidden? Corum gets it and Arioch is like, yes, I was looking for that, give it, and Corum is like, no, and he squishes it and banishes him. Also this kills the evil sorcerer Shool, too, so Rhalina is freed, and everyone is happy... FOR NOW...

The Queen Of The Swords: Jhary-a-Conel (from Fortress Of The Pearl) shows up with his magic winged cat and doesn't go away ever again. While Corum and company travel around enlisting allies, the bad Mabden summon the supernatural armies of Xiombarg, the Queen of the Swords (she was the kind and helpful ruler of a hidden kingdom in The War Hound And The World's Pain), and her messenger is the immortal Prince Gaynor the Damned, a kind of fallen Eternal Champion who betrayed the forces of Law in a big way at some point and is now doomed to serve Chaos and only desires death.

Corum, Rhalina, and Jhary have to travel to Xiombarg's realm to find the only ones who can save them, the denizens of the Vadhagh city in a bottle. Queen Xiombarg periodically shows up to shout at them in ALL CAPS, but they succeed anyway and return just in time to fight the climactic battle. Corum grapples with Prince Gaynor and sees his face (and into his tortured soul), which banishes him and leads Corum to display the only genuine moment of compassion in the books. Things are still almost lost until, being a woman and ruled by her emotions, Xiombarg loses her temper, breaks an unbreakable rule, appears in Corum's plane, and is instantly banished forever. Just like Hillary Clinton I CANNOT BELIEVE THAT HAPPENED

The King Of The Swords: Things are looking up! The people of the lost Vadhagh city have started to reconstruct their fallen civilization in harmony with the good Mabden. But the most powerful of the Sword Rulers, faceless Mabelode, King of the Swords, is still out there [1], as is Corum's archenemy Earl Glandyth-a-Krae, and when the allies start getting irrationally angry and killing each other, Corum correctly figures they're pulling a nonspecific "Screwfly Solution" on everyone. Jhary decides they need to find (all together now!) Tanelorn, and fortunately, they have a dimension-traveling ship at their disposal.

Visions and adventures ensue, this time more fan service-y than ever. Corum summons Elric and Erekose and eventually gains control of the Runestaff for about two seconds; Elric and Erekose go back to their worlds, but Corum makes it to Tanelorn, finding the aid he needs. He takes his vengeance, his world is freed of gods, and yet again people are allowed to make their own destinies.

These books incorporate all of Moorcock's basic story kinks naturally and believably, and the plot resolution is, for the first time, actually set up from the very beginning in a satisfying way. But even more than before, the majority of the story is devoted to various short disconnected adventures faced while wandering through chaos dimensions (Here they fight a monster! And here they have to cross a dangerous lake! And here they fight another monster!), and the schtick is wearing thin; although every so often Moorcock hits on a memorable image (the plain of blood, the giant castle shaped like Corum's lady love that Gaiman might have thought of while scripting The Doll's House), these incidents do more to pad the page count than they do to serve the greater narrative or reinforce the story's themes (what is the point of the extended alternate-world sequence with the hand manufacturer and the lady's story?), especially when every problem is solved with another use of Corum's magic body parts or Jhary-a-Conel's magic cat. Travels through trippy nightmare worlds would be cool if the writing itself weren't fixated on conventional action sequences.

[1] With a cameo by Yyrkoon as his now-demon vassal.