Review: Elric of Melniboné

Elric of Melniboné by Michael Moorcock
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read a handful of the Elric books as a kid, and I have forgotten everything except the overall feeling: we have Elric, the drug-dependent, albino king of an ancient superpower who goes everywhere with Stormbringer, a sentient sword with a serial-killer complex.

That vague memory, it turns out, is enough to whet the appetite for a return visit as an adult. The Elric books have lingered like one of those dreams you half remember. As the introduction here by Neil Gaiman suggests, I’m not the only one. Those of us who grew up in the middle 1970s and who stumbled upon the occasional Michael Moorcock paperback – any of the dozens of the Eternal Champion crew but especially Elric – had a similar partial memory of the whole.

This one, the first from what I can tell, but with Moorcock having explored later parts of Elric’s life in earlier works, gives us an epic confrontation. Elric’s cousin, Yyrkoon, regards him as too weak to rule. Given the chance, he betrays Elric inadvertently giving him the key to repair the fraying connection between the royals of Melnibone and the elemental powers.

What follows is a showdown that’s predictable…almost. The two would-be rulers each raise the stakes through their sorcery until, completing much of the origin story, they recover the long-lost dynastic swords, one of which is Stormbringer.

[SPOILER:] That should be it, of course. Elric should kill Yrkoon and head back to rule. But – fun, proto-Game of Thrones atmosphere aside – the best of this series emerges. Elric realizes that he doesn’t want to murder his cousin, even though Yrkoon has tried to murder him. Instead, he recognizes that it is Stormbringer, and by extension the lords of chaos, who want him to want to murder.

In that light, the 1970s-fueled theme of the work comes clear. Elric wants to be peaceful. He wants to lose the cruel traditions of his people and be a philosopher king. Other powers compel him toward vengeance and heartlessness. He’s almost a flower-child who’s been drafted into an army that’s put him at the controls of a fighter jet. He can kill like no other, and the machine makes that feel like something elegant. It’s only his decency, a virtue always under assault by circumstance, that holds him back.

So, good stuff, and lots of fun. I pre-ordered this re-release and looked forward to it for three or four months. It’s a lot of fun – even if it hasn’t figured out how to infuse some of the humor that George R.R. Martin brought to his own amoral version of a similar, more ambitious concept – I am already diving into the next of these pulp classics.


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