7/10 for the first two parts, 4/10 of the third part.
It is 2022 and Michael Moorcock returns to his most popular creation, Elric, to give us a new and probably last ever novel of the sword and sorcery hero. The timing and release of this publication is very calculated. Saga Press had just released three fat Elric omnibus editions (reviews here and here), and my guess is that the publishers asked Moorcock to give them some new material to publish in the wake of these rereleases. Moorcock probably answered something to this effect: "Sure, I have these two old novellas lying around of Elrics earlier adventures. Let me just rework them a bit and then add a third novella to round it off and then we fix it all up into a new novel."
The three novellas that make up the three parts of this book are still separate adventures, and an Elric novel consisting of three parts is very much in style with the old Elric books from the 1970s. And, while those two earlier novellas were first published in 2008 and 2010 in anthologies, they are written in a style that hews close to Moorcock's style from the 1970s. Moreover, the two novellas are set somewhere around the time of the fifth book, The Bane of the Black Sword (1977), so that all fits together very neatly in style and chronology. It is the third part of this book that is the odd one out, in the sense that it is written in a different style.
So, the three stories see Elric again united with his favourite sidekick Moonglum, always a fun time. Elric travels to the other side of the world and I mean literally the back side of what they call the World Egg, the "World Below", chasing rumours that there are ancient Melniboneans living there. He meets his dragon-shifting aunt and has a proper sword and sorcery adventure in the jungles at an overgrown temple surrounded by cannibals. And always there are hints of the greater conflict of the multiverse on the horizon.
If you have read the Saga Press omnibus editions, you might have noticed that all the Elric novels from the 1970s have a style that is fresh and energetic, fast-paced and a bit rough around the edges. But the novels from the late 1980s and early 90s, The Fortress of the Pearl (1989) and The Revenge of the Rose (1991), were slow, philosophical and generally went on for far too long. Moorcock's writing had changed a lot in 20 years, and not for the better in my opinion. And keep in mind that Moorcock's Elric stories, at their best, are superficial fantasy stories, with simple writing that lacks flair and little thematic depth. It is therefore very good news that in The Citadel of Forgotten Myths, Moorcock imitated his old style for the first two parts, but a little bit more polished so that these stories form an excellent middle ground where they have good pacing and fluent narration. And so he delivered two readable, fresh sword and sorcery tales. And it is bad news indeed that the third part is like his later stories, slow and far too long.
So, let's talk about that third story. It covers two-thirds of the novel's page count, so it is double the length of the first two stories combined and therefore dominates the book and your reading experience. Elric and Moonglum try to find a way back to their own world, but the Lords of the Balance have other plans for them. The problem is that the story is severely overwritten. Whenever we are in the middle of some scene, Moorcock dives into huge descriptive infodumps or endless introspection about Elric's mood and his past, which is for one thing very repetitive, and for another breaks the flow of the story. Often once these descriptions are done, the scenes aren't wrapped up well, so there is sudden confusion about location and setting and what the characters were talking about in the first place.
Elric and Moonglum meet some Princess who guides them back to their city of amazon warriors who mine some kind of magical honey from magical bees. Fine. Not the most exciting storyline, but fine. The exposition to explain all this and the dialogue between Elric, Moonglum and the princess feels incredibly unfocused and scatterbrained, jumping from topic to topic without any narrative reason for all this information. Dialogue devolves into abstract rambling, like this example:
"Did not the Faraway speak of this to you? In that dream? Was there a point to our detour to the Inarondu Oracle?" "You make impossible structures upon unbelievable alliances! Why should our food providers fawn and flatter, eh? Your power wanes; it was never enough to forever listen to our circulating melodies. The variations accumulate. No dream has one meaning."
This is word salad. What is the Faraway? What dream? Structures and alliances? Which food providers, the amazons? They fawn? Look, none of this is ever explained and I have no idea what they are discussing, or the context of this conversation or even which two characters are in conversation here. Writing like this goes on for pages and then circles back to another repetition of Elric thinking about his old lover and old city, and then maybe if we are lucky we get another hint as to the setting and what was going on with the story. Towards the end of the novel, there are whole chapters of stream of consciousness introspection that could have been shortened to a single paragraph or cut out altogether.
To be fair, the story evolves into a siege story that isn't half bad. During the siege the narration becomes clearer and exciting things start to happen. We get appearances of a Goddess who makes a grab for power, satisfyingly epic, and parts of the story tie back to earlier events in the book to make this fix-up affair more of a whole. Also, Elric is confronted with a potential partner who reminds him too much of Cymoril, and basically offers him to regain his old place as Emperor, which is an emotional struggle for him. A struggle that is solved with the discovery of unnerving secrets. All of this had potential and feels like good material for an Elric novel, but by that time I had already checked out mentally because the writing was such a struggle to get through.
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