The Eternal Whiner

Let no one be deceived by my last essay into thinking I have less than great respect for the fiction writing of Michael Moorcock. It is the essays of Michael Moorcock I despise.

There are several Moorcock books I like, and, indeed, like a great deal. He is an author that is almost good enough to write pulp like Robert E Howard or Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The idea of Elric is a cunning inversion of all the tropes and stereotypes of Robert E Howard’s Conan. Conan is a healthy barbarian who is basically decent and never complains, whereas Elric is a sickly and overcivilized albino who is basically decadent and never stops whining. The idea of the antibarbarian is a stroke of genius. I wish I had come up with the concept. It is very witty.

Michael Moorcock writes light, escapist fare that has nothing whatever to say about real problems in real life.

Even the ‘conflict’ between Law and Chaos is a rather unimaginative way to exemplify the ‘Happy Medium’ proposed by Aristotle, and promote nothing in excess.

Of course, I just read the passage in G.K. Chesterton’s ORTHODOXY dismissing the gray and watery blandness of pagan moderation, which forms so unsuccessful a contrast with the vividness and adventure of Christian lauds of virtue and condemnations of vice.

I put the word ‘conflict’ in scare quotes because I can bring to mind nothing in the text of any of the dozen or two novels of Moorcock’s that I read and enjoyed that had anything about law or chaos in the plot itself, or had anything to do with the characters. The two sides of the so called cosmic conflict could have been called ‘The Blue Faction’ and ‘The Green Faction’ without any loss in meaning.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.