The Bull and the Spear - Michael Moorcock

 Sometimes we need something different, a palate-cleanser, short and sharp.   The Bull and the Spear did the job for me.   I have long been curious about Michael Moorcock and his work.   I have previously read (and reviewed on this blog) a variety of books by him, and enjoyed them all.   This is the first volume of the Chronicle of Corum and the Silver Hand (1973-4), successor to what is known as the Swords Trilogy (1971-2).   We don't need to have read the first trilogy, Moorcock begins with a useful summary.   The Chronicle begins eighty years later.   Corum, who is virtually immortal, has survived his beloved human wife Rhalina and skulks in his castle, bored and troubled by dreams in which a group of humans is calling him.   His old comrade Jhary-a-Conel turns up to tell him these are humans on another plane of the multiverse (yes, Moorcock was using that term as early as 1973) who regard Corum as their sleeping champion who will rise and save them from annihilation.   That moment has come.   The magic of these particular humans is not strong, and Corum has to be willing if he is to transcend to their plane or dream.   Why not, thinks Corum.

The plane he finds himself on is like his, but not the same.   Corum's Castle Erorn is indistinguishable from the rock on which it stands, because Corum left it a thousand years ago.   The people who summoned him are being frozen out of existence by the Fhoi Myore, seven monstrous beings who have escaped from the void between the planes of the multiverse.   To defeat them, the people must regain two lost treasures, the spear Bryionak and the Black Bull of Crinanass.   The former will allow them to control the latter.   The problem is, the spear is with its maker, the smith Goffanon, the last of Sidhi, and he lives on the mystical island of Hy-Breasail which no human has ever visited and returned from.

Corum is not entirely human.   He belongs to one of the races which preceded humans.   He is one of Moorcock's eternal champions.   As a youth he was mutilated, losing his left hand and his right eye.   In the Swords trilogy he was given magical prosthetics but these have gone now and he uses a silver hand of his own making and wears an eyepatch embroidered by Rhalina.

The book is only 150 pages.   It races along, packed with ideas and amazing twists.   Goffanon, for instance, considers himself to be a dwarf - but is in fact eight feet tall and four feet wide, a dwarf giant.   Lots of the mythos is ancient Celtic slightly adjusted -  the British Atlantis, Lyonesse, is here Lwym-an-Esh, homeland of Rhalina.   The bull is both the bull of the Irish Tain bo Cuailnge and the bull cult of Crete.   But there is also Moorcock's personal, self-created mythology.    Jhary-a-Conel, the companion of champions, is obviously an echo of Moorcock's first eternal champ, Jerry Cornelius, the Swinging Sixties dandy.   How Moorcock manages to achieve so much story in something little more than a novella is astounding, and what keeps drawing me back to his work.