Blood: A Southern Fantasy
Michael Moorcock
247 pages
published in 1994

I like Moorcock, he has written some of my favourite novels ( Byzantium Endures), but he can be bloody awfuyl at times. And I'm not talking about his early work, when he was still a hack writer, but about some of his later novels, where he disappers up his own arse in pretentiousness.

Case in point: Blood: A Southern Fantasy. It is always dangerous for any writer to think just having a neat idea is enough to sustain a novel on, much more so if the idea is not very new and the writer's fascination is not shared to the same extent by his audience... In Moorcock's case this is his old obsession with the idea of a multiverse.

Blood takes place in Southern America, in a world in which the Middle East ruled the world, rather than Europe. Energy is won from bubbles of "colour", energy pools which seep through from another dimension. At one particularly large colour spot, engineers managed to drill through the walls of the multiverse, which seems to have sort of doomed the Earth, with reality becoming fragmented and decadent.

The main characters, Jack Karaquazain, an aristocrat gambler, Sam Oakenhurst, a man transformed by machine ghosts and the Rose, half woman half plant and who might be familiar from other Moorcock novels, are on their way to the Fault to do something, but what exactly they plan to do never becomes clear.

Intertwined with this story is a second story, which at first is presented as pulp fiction read by Sam Oakenhurst, but later turns out to have as much reality as the first story. This story takes place in the mysterious "Second Ether", beyond the fault and reads like some of the more frantic superhero comics published in the mid-nineties, complete with the same sort of ridiculous names.

Neither story comes to any conclusion, which is not surprising, as this turns out to be just the first in a trilogy. I don't think I will make the effort to read the rest of it. All of Moorcock's obsessions are here: metafiction, by having one strand of the narrative being a pulp story in the other strand, the Multiverse, increasing entropy and a corresponding decadence, the resulting breakdown of society and ultimately, reality, but it just doesn't gell.