I definitely preferred this book to its predecessor, The Land Leviathan.  However, with this final entry in A Nomad of the Time Stream, I can say that these Oswald Bastable stories didn’t do much for me.  This was a trilogy I’d been wanting to read for a long time, and one I thought I’d really dig.  Alas.

With the last book, Bastable has hopped alternate Earth histories once again.  This time, the so-called Steel Tsar is the world conquering figure who must be fought.  Bastable travels around a bit, meets various people, and finds out about various ideologies and how they’ve played out in this version of things.  Once again, he crosses paths with Una Persson.  And once again, things build to an explosive conclusion.

I’m not sure what a lot of the world (multiverse) building in this one connects to.  I know Persson is tied into the Jerry Cornelius cycle, so learning more about her and her time traveling friends seems like it’s maybe important to some larger part of Moorcock’s greater literary creation.  It’s been more than 30 years since I tried reading any of the Cornelius stuff, and I’m not sure I plan to change that anytime soon.  I don’t remember enjoying it very much.  A little too “high on glue” for my tastes.

It’s hard to have much to say about this book.  I’m quite sure Moorcock was trying to make statements with each novel in the series, about political ideologies, cycles of violence, exploitation, and all of that.  What was he trying to say?  I don’t know.  It’s bad or whatever.  For message books that are obvious message books, their message is too muddied for this reader.  Bastable is, as is often the case with incarnations of the Eternal Champion, not especially interesting.  His history and set-up at the beginning of the trilogy is cool.  And I’d argue what he becomes by the end of the trilogy is interesting.  But as a character, he seems to simply drift around through various adventures with little input of his own and little in the way of ambition or drive.  It sometimes feels like Moorcock would rather be writing a novel about Una Persson (which he had actually done between The Land Leviathan and The Steel Tsar), but maybe didn’t know what he wanted to do with her, yet.  She’s certainly a more compelling character.

If you’re a fan of Moorcock’s ultra-complex tapestry of multiverse stories, these no doubt have some things to interest you in them.  However, as novels?  They’re not his best.  As a final book in a trilogy, this one just sort of happens.  If you told me he was contractually obligated to write one more Bastable novel, so this was what he threw together over a long weekend, I would not be shocked.  Even though it’s not a difficult read or a long book, it took me a while to finish, only because any time I set it down, I had a hard time wanting to pick it up again.

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