Firing the Cathedral

Michael Moorcock

Michael Moorcock has with the Jerry Cornelius stories, been mapping the future for years. Not the distant future, but that in which we live. They're satirical sagas ahead of their time, and reading the Cornelius novel from the sixties and seventies is like reading the present. Their very style like a series of twenty four hour news channels, but rather than concentrating a single day they cover the whole of the twentieth centuries. Not just the one that happened, but the ones around the fringes. So Jerry has finally come of age, whilst being an anachronism at the same time.

He's a faded beatnik, a hippy, a shrewd operator from the seventies who doesn't fit in. Yet Cornelius is already ready to surprise you. Here he finds himself in more contemporary surroundings, arranged amongst news and magazine clippings, never quite finding rest in a particular time or place. This is a novella, the cresendo after a build up found in numerous short stories, covering everything from the apocalyptic cult of Diana (The Spencer Inheritance) to the events in Kosovo (Cheering for the Rockets).

Not one for the easily offended. This one very much tackles current events and it's almost as though Cornelius has once again come into his own. As relevant now as he ever was, a messiah of the twentieth century who has finally made it into the twenty-first. The satire is turned on full, and he unleashes a constant barrage until the end, as fragmentary as the Cornelius novels have ever been. Flipping endlessly from place to place, time to time, personality to personality. Jerry just can't stand still, and nor should he. No one who has died as many times as he has could fail to offer a wry smile at the world and it's perculiarities.

Only in a limited edition unfortunately, but bound to be brought together with the other recent fragments at some point. A fitting continuation of the little sideline that Moorcock has been running since the sixties. Cornelius is dead. Long live Cornelius!