Michael Moorcock: An attractive monster

In January, novelist Michael Moorcock will publish the last volume of his Pyat quartet, about the adventures of a cocaine-loving, bisexual, Jewish anti-Semite. Maxim Arturovitch Pyanitski's life takes him through the great events of the first decades of the 20th century, from the Russian civil war to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

The Vengeance of Rome (Jonathan Cape)--in which the outrageous Pyat travels to Italy to work for Mussolini and thereafter to Germany where he performs sexual favours for Adolf Hitler--will come alongside paperback reissues of the first three volumes, written in the 1980s and 1990s.

Completion of The Vengeance of Rome has been delayed by ill-health: Moorcock has been plagued by illness since leaving London for America 13 years ago, and is currently in the process of recovering from a nasty brush with gangrene, which threatened to cost him a leg. He now says that his move across the Atlantic, to be closer to his wife's family, was a rash one: "I can't stand Texas." London remains home "in my heart", and he plans to spend half the year in Europe from now on.

But Moorcock also delayed completing the quartet due to the sheer effort of occupying the mind of its amusing but vicious anti-hero. "You need a certain kind of moral courage to get yourself into the mindset of that kind of character," Moorcock says. "To be honest, you tend to shy away from it and think of the other things you could be doing. I am trying to show an attractive monster, which means you have to get inside that character and it's not very nice for your nearest and dearest when you get into the role.

"Years ago, I thought the best thing a novelist can do is to try to get inside the people you hate most, know your enemy. I don't want to sound too plummy, but my personal sense of moral duty is to look at the worst aspects of human nature and try to understand it."

The Pyat quartet was first conceived while "travelling on a Russian ship in '76". Moorcock was on one of the "rather unseaworthy" vessels that sailed between Leningrad and New York, stopping at Tilbury on the way. "The Russians and some of the Germans travelling there were still pretty anti-Semitic and there was a distinct sense of the '30s about it. I realised how easy it was not to speak up." He planned the quartet as a way to explore the many different currents which led to the Holocaust, the "ultimate crime".

In The Vengeance of Rome, Moorcock was "trying to deal with the mechanistic view of society which was very strong in fascism and Nazism, the idea that you could create a perfect society. And I show the Nazis were brutes, but often rather charming brutes--the older you get the more you realise that the people who get power and abuse it are often people with charm. They're not swaggering around raving all the time, they are sitting around in drawing rooms persuading people with a smile."

Moorcock is unusual in combining successes in genre fiction (with his many fantasy series) and mainstream literary fiction, in which he has been nominated for the Booker and Whitbread prizes (for Mother London). The character of his writing was formed in the '60s, when, with peers such as J G Ballard and Brian Aldiss, he was hailed as part of a "New Wave" in sf, reflected in the magazine he edited, New Worlds. All three looked to the genre for a new kind of writing, he explains.

"All it was, really, was an attempt to get closer to confronting contemporary issues. The three of us came out of the Second World War: that intensity of experience made you impatient with modern fiction of the day which didn't seem to do very much."

CV

1939 Born in London

Edited his first magazine, Tarzan Adventures, at age 16

From 1964-1971 edited experimental British sf magazine New Worlds.

A prolific writer, his fantasy series include: The Cornelius Chronicles/The Dancers at the End of Time /Erekose/The Books of Corum/Hawkmoon: The Chronicles of Castle Brass/Hawkmoon: The History of the Runestaff/The Elric of Melnibone Saga

Won a World Fantasy Award for his novel Gloriana, as well as the 1977 Guardian Fiction Prize for The Condition of Muzak. 2000 won World Fantasy Award

His literary fiction includes: Mother London (1988)/King of the City (2000)/The Pyat Quartet: Byzantium Endures (1981), The Laughter of Carthage (1985), Jerusalem Commands (1992), and The Vengeance of Rome (2006)

Lives in Austin, Texas with his wife