By Michael Moorcock

PS Publishing, out now

Look, right up front let me be straight about this, this book is a bastard to review. I come from a place where I think a good review shouldn’t be about the reviewer, but rather purely about the book. And then I get something like this and I know the only way I can possibly review it is subjectively, my experience with the book, because here’s the thing, 75 pages in to the 150 story I posed on Facebook that I didn’t have a clue what was going on, that I couldn’t actually tell you a single plot point that had happened in the last 75 pages and I didn’t know if it was because I was stupid and in the hands of a post-modern masterpiece or if it in fact just wasn’t very good. But the thing was, despite everyone’s urging to ditch the book, I kept reading, in part because it was Michael Moorcock, in part because I couldn’t shake the feeling that it might actually be a very important book.

So, to get personal for a moment and put the reviewer into the story. Michael Moorcock saved my life, pretty much. Sounds melodramatic, but when I was 20 I was desperately ill. I missed six months of university through it, went through the gamut of tests to try to work out what was wrong, and had to deal with the prospect of repeating the second year of my degree. I wanted to repeat, because frankly I had missed an entire semester. I went in and talked to my professor and convinced me to sit the exams anyway as it couldn’t hurt, and if I stuffed it up we’d talk about doing year two over again, and if I passed we’d make like this year never existed and just move on. So I borrowed essays from a few of my friends and set about (in about six weeks) writing an entire year’s worth of term papers for the six modules I was doing in my politics degree (so we’re talking 24 fully researched undergrad papers, basically one every other day) and cramming for finals. I don’t mind admitting I was on the point of flaming out in a major way, but I got them done somehow, and more miraculously managed to get 2nd class passes on all of them. But the exams were a different beast. I was utterly spent from the papers and knew I couldn’t do another frantic burst like the one I’d just done, so instead I went to Waterstones in Newcastle, and bought a book. It was Elric of Melniboné. A slim little book. Probably only 50 or 60,000 words. Instead of revising that night I read the book cover to cover and found escape. The next day I bought Sailor on the Seas of Fate and sat in my room reading it until I turned the final page. The next day it was time for Weird of the White Wolf, and so on.

In the month of my finals I didn’t read a single essay, text book, study guide, or anything else. I read Michael Moorcock. It was the only way I could detach from the pressure, sure I going to shatter into a thousand pieces. I read all of the Elric stuff, and dove straight into Corum, and after Corum it was Dorian Hawkmoon. In 31 days I read 31 books. Von Bek and Erikose. The only incarnation of the Eternal Champion that I didn’t read in that month was Jerry Cornelius. And I couldn’t tell you why. There was just something about the Grafton cover art and the back cover blurbs that didn’t spark with me in any way – and that was even after a mild obsession with Hawkwind’s Needle Gun.

More interestingly, perhaps, after that frenzied month of Moorcock, I didn’t read another word of his until this week. Pegging the President. My first Jerry Cornelius story. My first Moorcock story in more than half a life time. I’m not entirely sure why he only occupied a month of my life, given I read so many of the books, and maybe I did him a disservice thinking of it as pulpy fun. I can’t help but wonder if the younger me would have devoured Pegging the President in the same way as Elric and the others, or if he’d have hung up on the world around him and the political import of what he was meant to read between the lines?

So, we’re all caught up. Now, one of the first things I noticed on the PS website is that they don’t actually offer even a tease of what the book’s about. I suspect that’s because there’s nothing in the way of traditional conflict and resolution going on. We’re treated to a list of names that by this part of the story of the Eternal Champion should be old friends. We’re spared the character development and even in most cases character description beyond some key markers like Jerry’s high fashion shoes, the car, that kind of thing. What’s actually driving the story are the assembled quotes, citations and articles that accompany each very short scene, and themselves probably account for 30% of the actual book. These, in the main, stem from 2016, and for good reason, I think.

Now, let me try to explain what’s going on here. Time is unravelling. Maybe. There’s a sense of it coming undone, and this is echoed throughout the narrative, with characters slipping from place to place, time to time. One moment we’re being told it’s the Sixties, then there’s a reference to Brexiteers. Stuff like this is very jarring, but with Jerry and his crew seemingly at the apex of the fight back you get the feeling they’re on a journey to find out where it all started to go wrong – hence the 2016 quotes, citations and articles – and in every scene they’re leaping from time and place to time and place, on the weirdest road trip ever. There is no conflict, no traditional antagonist for them to fight or Jerry to whip out his needle gun and do the business, but there is a sense of ‘yet another Armageddon’ going on. At one point there’s a reference to yet another nuclear winter. We hear about the funny stuff like a shortage of Branston pickle post-Brexit, but it being widely available in France. We get sly digs at pop culture and slightly wrong ones like Monty Cobra the famous comedy show. So all the time you think you might understand but you’re not quite sure if you’re getting everything Moorcock is trying to do.

And to add to the sense of the unravelling of time, the book feels like it is unravelling too, with a few of the quotes and epigrams repeating deeper into the text, so you can’t help wonder if it’s deliberate or a mistake or if you’re experiencing it in an almost non-linear way with time undone.

One potentially fascinating aspect of this unreliable narrative is just how fluid the text becomes, and those subtle misrememberings of a world that is almost but not quite ours with its Monty Cobras start to make you doubt, and that in itself is a triumph of more than just an unreliable narrator as it makes us question the nature of truth and its relationship to lies. We live in a world where perhaps the greatest challenge we face isn’t our determination to march toward Armageddon but our wilful belief that our ignorance is worth more than someone else’s knowledge. We trot out truisms like ‘everyone is allowed their own opinion’ and ‘it’s only my opinion’ or ‘well that’s what I think’ as though some unformed or half-formed opinion is worth as much as decades of scientific study. It isn’t. Obviously. But we say it as it gives us comfort in our ignorance. It helps us frame a narrative where, like Michael Gove said, we become tired of experts and chose rather to believe the story as it’s being framed for us by the media.

This leads to a tiny cameo of perhaps the most telling kind, from a film director here who styles himself around perhaps the ultimate showman, Cecil B DeMille, and seeks all the time to reframe the film he’s trying to shoot, to change the story as the viewer perceives it. Donald Moist just so happens to have a similar fake tan problem to another Donald, giving him an orange hue. And Moist seems fascinated with reshaping the truth through the image and staging of his move, not unlike that other Donald, understanding that in an era tired of experts and the truth, it’s easy to brand things as fake news. Repeat that lie often enough and we the viewer may just begin to believe it.

Can we just move the actors around the stage, pan camera right, and change everything? Can we restage a scene we don’t like and reframe the narrative? Is it all just celluloid smoke and mirrors? Is the cult of celebrity worth more at the ballot box than any objective truth?

I turned the final page feeling utterly nonplussed, unsure what I’d actually read, and unable to actually describe a single scene or tell you the narrative thrust of the story. At one point, around page 100 of 150 I thought I’d got a handle on it, that Jerry had identified 2016 as the end of times, and that he’d be going on one last assassination job, to kill the president and undo the harm we’ve slowly been doing to ourselves as evidenced by all the 2016 quotations (many of which I remember reading in their original sources), and then I started to think well, hey, like it or not we’re talking about a seventy-eight year old man, writing one of his most famous characters, perhaps this is going to be it, the final word on the Multiverse and Jerry Cornelius is actually going to give us not ‘yet another nuclear winter’ but something more devastating.

And here’s the thing, I may not be able to describe the plot in any traditional sense, telling you they go to Gaza, and to Berlin and tour war zones doing x, y and z to defeat the President who is ushering in the end of time (and mercifully I can’t tell you that there’s a scene with the Orange One and a Strap-on, there isn’t) but what I can tell you is Pegging the President made me think. A lot. It made me wrestle with the potential political implications of the quotes, and it was harrowing to read the excerpts from It Couldn’t Happen Here (available on Project Gutenberg) and run them in parallel to not just the 1930s rise of fascism but to all of those 2016 moments in time Moorcock had chosen to highlight for us on the road to the end of time.

Look, there’s no getting away from it, Moorcock was one of the earliest purveyors of what we call The Weird, and we are in an era of The New Weird, and he’s still one of the most thoughtful voices working in it, and for a man with considerably more of the past behind him than the future ahead of him, as he says of one of the characters here, that in itself is a remarkable achievement.

But had this been anyone else, had I not had that personal relationship to the Eternal Champion, and those credits already banked by Moorcock during the headier days of my eager youth, I don’t think I’d have finished this. And that, I think, would have been a tragedy because too many books can be swept away as difficult while we search for something lighter. The subjective truth is sometimes we need to be forced to think.

Did I enjoy the experience? Genuinely, I don’t know. I kept reading. I kept turning the page, despite more than once feeling like I was losing my grip and feeling decidedly stupid. Is it a good book? I don’t know. Genuinely. I honestly can’t tell you if Pegging the President is a good book, as in the kind of book you can read in a couple of hours to unwind in the summer sun.

But I have the feeling it might just be an important one.

Steven Savile

Click here to order Pegging the President from PS Publishing