The second book in Michael Moorcock’s A Nomad of the Time Streams, this one is odd.  Michael Moorcock’s Alternate History is a bit heavy handed and maybe not handled as delicately as the subject might have been.  With this trilogy, I’m frequently reminded of Alan Moore, who also tends to deal with sensitive issues in a somewhat insensitive way.  Well meaning, perhaps, but not always well handled.

The intro feels much longer in this, with the fictionalized version of Moorcock’s grandfather being more involved as he tries to track down the missing Oswald Bastable.  Then he acquires a new document that tells the main story of the novel, of Bastable’s adventure in a new alternate Earth.  This time around, an African leader, being called the Black Atilla, has become a grand conqueror, spreading across the world.

Bastable drifts from one faction to another, finding his loyalties shifting with the wind.  Moorcock is walking a fine line with this one.  Bastable is a character of his time and origin, a Brit from the early 20th Century.  He is saddled with cultural and institutional racist views, but is not necessarily a bad or hateful person.  So, he is able to surpass his taught racism when presented with new evidence.  He grows.  He sees race hate and violence as bad things.  But, he’s still a guy from England in the early 20th Century.  I definitely see where Moorcock was going with this, but it doesn’t always work.  Part of it may just be that Moorcock was writing this as a Brit from the 1970s, about as far away from the time period Bastapool is inhabiting as we are from when he was writing this.

Overall, I’m sort of torn on this one.  Again, like Alan Moore’s work, it feels like it’s both a loving homage and a gutting attack on its inspiration, this time the plucky, often imperialist, Boy’s Own type stories of the late 1800s and early 1900s.  It’s that odd mix of extreme progressiveness with thick threads of regressiveness that I see in a lot of writers from the mid-Century (and no small number of them today, for that matter).  I suppose we all try to shake off the parts of us we feel are holding us back, while desperately clinging to the familiar.  That’s sort of what nostalgia uses to trap you, afterall.  I probably wouldn’t have noticed any of this if I’d actually read it when I bought a copy 30+ years ago.  I notice them now.  Again, I have mixed feelings.  The book has messages.  They’re often not subtle.  Just as often, I don’t think they really come across as intended.  

Once again, I get a chuckle out of people (usually people my age or older and typically of a certain political bent) who complain about inserting politics into books, or art, or music, or tabletop RPGs, or whatever.  As though this stuff isn’t all political.  Just because you don’t pick up on it, doesn’t mean it’s not there.

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