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"A FIGURE OF REVOLUTIONARY FERVOUR" - MICHAEL MOORCOCK
A starting point for any novelist’s claim to higher significance is at least one �great’ work of commanding scope and ambition. The programme comes as Michael Moorcock is on the verge of publishing the long-awaited final volume of a huge four-novel cycle, the Byzantium tetralogy: perhaps his most personal, and most ambitious work.
Born in 1939, Moorcock began his writing career by ranging himself against the conservative literary establishment of Amis, Larkin, Conquest et al. He has stood resolutely outside literature’s inner circle ever since, “a figure of revolutionary fervour in the British literary world…� (John Clute.)
Along the way Moorcock has garnered a large following as a fantasy writer with a taste for playing rock guitar. But the sword and sorcery stereotype does little justice to a serious novelist whose fundamental aim has always been to confront the deep issues and problems of the age into which he was born.
The programme takes its cue from the opening line of one of Moorcock’s own introductions (Like Shaw’s, Moorcock’s introductions form an integral part of his work.) He tells how as young writers he and JG Ballard would meet regularly to “plot the overthrow of English literature as we knew it.�*
It was to be a revolution nurtured in the territories of genre fiction, the �hyper-realism’ of fantasy and sci-fi, but, as Moorcock himself says, one which “was making a conscious effort to look at the late 20th century in terms of its specific mythologies… We were trying to cope with the realities of life as we experienced them.�
Interviews with Michael Moorcock to take place on location at Lost Pines, near Austin Texas, and London, various.
Part One: “A Figure Of Revolutionary Fervour�
Moorcock’s explosive views on Kingsley Amis and the prevailing literary orthodoxy of the late 50s set the tone: “…his rudeness in person and his idiocy in print… Amis and Co with their homophobia still have their gossip circulating.� (2001) Schooled in writing science fiction and fantasy pulp to demanding magazine deadlines, Moorcock took over the editorship of the speculative fiction publication New Worlds in 1964. Along with JG Ballard, Brian Aldiss, and others, he began to flourish in the revolutionary atmosphere of the 60s. Soon came his first major fictional figure, the mod anti-hero Jerry Cornelius, who straddles alternative or parallel realities (Moorcock’s concept of the “multiverse�) in the four novels that comprise the Cornelius Quartet (the last of which won the Guardian Fiction Prize.) Violent, and sexually amoral, Cornelius was banned in many countries, and became a major influence on post-punk culture – modern-day graphic novelists, iconic film figures such as The Crow, for instance. (Also: influences on Moorcock; his musical persona.)
Interview: in study at Lost Pines. Vision: Amis and 50s scenes. 60s scenes, especially pop art (in particular Paolozzi, Aerospace Editor for Moorcock’s New Worlds), happenings, demos. Rock footage, esp The Who. Research footage of Moorcock playing with Hawkwind, Jet Harris, Peter Green etc. Footage from The Crow. Treated frames from suitable graphic novels. Costume an actor as Jerry Cornelius? – film moody shots against treated backgrounds reminiscent of dereliction or apocalypse? Soundtrack: use iconic 60s tracks from Hendrix, Hawkwind, The Who, Beatles, etc. Supporting interviews: collaborators, colleagues and associates from the New Worlds/ Cornelius/ Hawkwind days - esp Ballard.
Part Two – Mother London
Moorcock’s London is as vividly realised and characterised as any novelist’s portrayal of the capital since Dickens. The detailed topography of Mother London and King Of The City would be the exploratory setting for this part of the interview/programme, though London is a central motif in all Moorcock’s fiction. Moorcock would speak about the nature of its inspiration, its role in his own history and psyche, and its place in what is perhaps his major work, the Byzantium sequence of novels, to which the programme will return in detail in part 4. Among other things, London provides the key to Moorcock’s political, polemical persona – the Swiftian current running through his work.
Interview: London scenes, roving locations. Vision: Location shots + poss recreated bar/asylum scenes from eg Mother London. Soundtrack: natural/recreated sound. Supporting interviews: assessment of Moorcock’s London by Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair.
Part Three – Alternative Realities
The Fantasies. This section of the interview/programme deals with Moorcock’s huge body of fantasy fiction. Can fantasy be �literature’? Well, Moorcock's multiverse could, in print, be seen as the central battleground of the revolution to overthrow English literature. There is plenty of straightforward romance in the Eternal Champion series, if that is what you seek. Yet the hero Elric takes you to uncomfortable places, with uncomfortable consequences, as he lights the spark of the Champion within oneself. Further, in Nomad Of the Time Streams Moorcock explores utopianism, imperialism, scientific socialism. Von Bek is a dark and amoral take on the Grail myth. Gloriana is a luscious Theatre of Cruelty comedy of Elizabethan England. The Brothel In Rosenstrasse portrays the roots of 20th century European politics in a tale of decaying eroticism. Later works such as Dancers At The End Of Time and the dizzying multiverse of the Blood sequence form complex, hallucinated games with interlocking layers of time, truth and morality.
Interview: Lost Pines, Texas, exteriors. Vision: Old airship footage, brooding forests, radically treated to recreate fantasy landscapes. Arthurian images. Location exteriors. Soundtrack: Hawkwind. Supporting interviews: Internet correspondents (the Web-verse)?
Part Four - Dealing With Realities
The Byzantium (Colonel Pyat) tetralogy. The three published, and long-anticipated fourth, novels (Byzantium Endures, The Laughter Of Carthage, Jerusalem Commands, The Vengeance Of Rome) deal through the experiences of a classic �unreliable narrator’ figure of Colonel Pyat, with the profound and disturbing themes of the last century leading up to the Holocaust and beyond. The final volume, many years in the writing, is said to have cost Moorcock a great deal of anguish. The sequence lays claim to be Moorcock’s crowning achievement. Who is Pyat, this resilient wreckage of a century’s psyche? What part of Moorcock, and all of us, is he? This part of the interview would provide the climax to the programme which, one hopes, would draw to the attention of millions of people this challenging work of fiction.
Interview: split between Lost Pines (study) and Portobello Road/Notting Hill (the setting for the near-derelict narrator’s London home, and Moorcock’s West London origins.) Vision: Location, recreated London scenes, Byzantium, Jerusalem, Vatican. Holocaust, Russian revolution archive. Archive of key archetypal figures of the 20th century: Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky; and landscapes: the camps, the Wall, the gulag. Soundtrack: natural sound, period music including classical. Supporting interviews: Fellow-novelists (eg Ballard) and leading critics assessing claims for Moorcock as one of the century's major literary figures.
*POSTSCRIPT. You could stage a face-to-face between Moorcock and Ballard, and build a different programme, around their discussion of what happened to that plot to overthrow literature. It could be made using two separate, intercut interviews, but preferably by actually bringing them together. (How long since they last met?)
Within the work of both Moorcock and Ballard there are plenty of cues for good vision to drive and illustrate the narrative of such a discussion. Some suggestions from which to draw: Ballard - footage from the film of Empire Of The Sun, the film lots of Shepperton Studios, the concrete islands below the Hammersmith flyover, the outer reaches of Venetian lagoons, the anonymous suburbia of Pangbourne or Shepperton, the high-tec computer settlement of Sophia-Antipolis near Cannes. Moorcock - London scenes, particularly Portobello Road and Notting Hill, the dandified mod figure of Jerry Cornelius, airships, exotic locations like Odessa, Memphis, the Nile, the Camargue, footage of Hawkwind playing (research: one of their legendary free concerts beneath the Hammersmith flyover?), Moorcock’s Texan home “Lost Pines�, Bavarian castles, Japanese anime.
A starting point for any novelist’s claim to higher significance is at least one �great’ work of commanding scope and ambition. The programme comes as Michael Moorcock is on the verge of publishing the long-awaited final volume of a huge four-novel cycle, the Byzantium tetralogy: perhaps his most personal, and most ambitious work.
Born in 1939, Moorcock began his writing career by ranging himself against the conservative literary establishment of Amis, Larkin, Conquest et al. He has stood resolutely outside literature’s inner circle ever since, “a figure of revolutionary fervour in the British literary world…� (John Clute.)
Along the way Moorcock has garnered a large following as a fantasy writer with a taste for playing rock guitar. But the sword and sorcery stereotype does little justice to a serious novelist whose fundamental aim has always been to confront the deep issues and problems of the age into which he was born.
The programme takes its cue from the opening line of one of Moorcock’s own introductions (Like Shaw’s, Moorcock’s introductions form an integral part of his work.) He tells how as young writers he and JG Ballard would meet regularly to “plot the overthrow of English literature as we knew it.�*
It was to be a revolution nurtured in the territories of genre fiction, the �hyper-realism’ of fantasy and sci-fi, but, as Moorcock himself says, one which “was making a conscious effort to look at the late 20th century in terms of its specific mythologies… We were trying to cope with the realities of life as we experienced them.�
Interviews with Michael Moorcock to take place on location at Lost Pines, near Austin Texas, and London, various.
Part One: “A Figure Of Revolutionary Fervour�
Moorcock’s explosive views on Kingsley Amis and the prevailing literary orthodoxy of the late 50s set the tone: “…his rudeness in person and his idiocy in print… Amis and Co with their homophobia still have their gossip circulating.� (2001) Schooled in writing science fiction and fantasy pulp to demanding magazine deadlines, Moorcock took over the editorship of the speculative fiction publication New Worlds in 1964. Along with JG Ballard, Brian Aldiss, and others, he began to flourish in the revolutionary atmosphere of the 60s. Soon came his first major fictional figure, the mod anti-hero Jerry Cornelius, who straddles alternative or parallel realities (Moorcock’s concept of the “multiverse�) in the four novels that comprise the Cornelius Quartet (the last of which won the Guardian Fiction Prize.) Violent, and sexually amoral, Cornelius was banned in many countries, and became a major influence on post-punk culture – modern-day graphic novelists, iconic film figures such as The Crow, for instance. (Also: influences on Moorcock; his musical persona.)
Interview: in study at Lost Pines. Vision: Amis and 50s scenes. 60s scenes, especially pop art (in particular Paolozzi, Aerospace Editor for Moorcock’s New Worlds), happenings, demos. Rock footage, esp The Who. Research footage of Moorcock playing with Hawkwind, Jet Harris, Peter Green etc. Footage from The Crow. Treated frames from suitable graphic novels. Costume an actor as Jerry Cornelius? – film moody shots against treated backgrounds reminiscent of dereliction or apocalypse? Soundtrack: use iconic 60s tracks from Hendrix, Hawkwind, The Who, Beatles, etc. Supporting interviews: collaborators, colleagues and associates from the New Worlds/ Cornelius/ Hawkwind days - esp Ballard.
Part Two – Mother London
Moorcock’s London is as vividly realised and characterised as any novelist’s portrayal of the capital since Dickens. The detailed topography of Mother London and King Of The City would be the exploratory setting for this part of the interview/programme, though London is a central motif in all Moorcock’s fiction. Moorcock would speak about the nature of its inspiration, its role in his own history and psyche, and its place in what is perhaps his major work, the Byzantium sequence of novels, to which the programme will return in detail in part 4. Among other things, London provides the key to Moorcock’s political, polemical persona – the Swiftian current running through his work.
Interview: London scenes, roving locations. Vision: Location shots + poss recreated bar/asylum scenes from eg Mother London. Soundtrack: natural/recreated sound. Supporting interviews: assessment of Moorcock’s London by Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair.
Part Three – Alternative Realities
The Fantasies. This section of the interview/programme deals with Moorcock’s huge body of fantasy fiction. Can fantasy be �literature’? Well, Moorcock's multiverse could, in print, be seen as the central battleground of the revolution to overthrow English literature. There is plenty of straightforward romance in the Eternal Champion series, if that is what you seek. Yet the hero Elric takes you to uncomfortable places, with uncomfortable consequences, as he lights the spark of the Champion within oneself. Further, in Nomad Of the Time Streams Moorcock explores utopianism, imperialism, scientific socialism. Von Bek is a dark and amoral take on the Grail myth. Gloriana is a luscious Theatre of Cruelty comedy of Elizabethan England. The Brothel In Rosenstrasse portrays the roots of 20th century European politics in a tale of decaying eroticism. Later works such as Dancers At The End Of Time and the dizzying multiverse of the Blood sequence form complex, hallucinated games with interlocking layers of time, truth and morality.
Interview: Lost Pines, Texas, exteriors. Vision: Old airship footage, brooding forests, radically treated to recreate fantasy landscapes. Arthurian images. Location exteriors. Soundtrack: Hawkwind. Supporting interviews: Internet correspondents (the Web-verse)?
Part Four - Dealing With Realities
The Byzantium (Colonel Pyat) tetralogy. The three published, and long-anticipated fourth, novels (Byzantium Endures, The Laughter Of Carthage, Jerusalem Commands, The Vengeance Of Rome) deal through the experiences of a classic �unreliable narrator’ figure of Colonel Pyat, with the profound and disturbing themes of the last century leading up to the Holocaust and beyond. The final volume, many years in the writing, is said to have cost Moorcock a great deal of anguish. The sequence lays claim to be Moorcock’s crowning achievement. Who is Pyat, this resilient wreckage of a century’s psyche? What part of Moorcock, and all of us, is he? This part of the interview would provide the climax to the programme which, one hopes, would draw to the attention of millions of people this challenging work of fiction.
Interview: split between Lost Pines (study) and Portobello Road/Notting Hill (the setting for the near-derelict narrator’s London home, and Moorcock’s West London origins.) Vision: Location, recreated London scenes, Byzantium, Jerusalem, Vatican. Holocaust, Russian revolution archive. Archive of key archetypal figures of the 20th century: Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky; and landscapes: the camps, the Wall, the gulag. Soundtrack: natural sound, period music including classical. Supporting interviews: Fellow-novelists (eg Ballard) and leading critics assessing claims for Moorcock as one of the century's major literary figures.
*POSTSCRIPT. You could stage a face-to-face between Moorcock and Ballard, and build a different programme, around their discussion of what happened to that plot to overthrow literature. It could be made using two separate, intercut interviews, but preferably by actually bringing them together. (How long since they last met?)
Within the work of both Moorcock and Ballard there are plenty of cues for good vision to drive and illustrate the narrative of such a discussion. Some suggestions from which to draw: Ballard - footage from the film of Empire Of The Sun, the film lots of Shepperton Studios, the concrete islands below the Hammersmith flyover, the outer reaches of Venetian lagoons, the anonymous suburbia of Pangbourne or Shepperton, the high-tec computer settlement of Sophia-Antipolis near Cannes. Moorcock - London scenes, particularly Portobello Road and Notting Hill, the dandified mod figure of Jerry Cornelius, airships, exotic locations like Odessa, Memphis, the Nile, the Camargue, footage of Hawkwind playing (research: one of their legendary free concerts beneath the Hammersmith flyover?), Moorcock’s Texan home “Lost Pines�, Bavarian castles, Japanese anime.
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