The Condition of Muzak

Jerry Cornelius #4

by Michael Moorcock

Civilization as we know it has been annihilated. The decay and chaos of the multiverse have left Europe in a surreal, yet ever-fashionable, mess. Jerry Cornelius finds himself in an increasingly futile series of guises, part of a cast of characters dancing the Entropy Tango towards oblivion. Will the legendary Cornelius ever be united with his true beloved, his sister Catherine? And will balance ever be restored to devastated London?Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, The Condition of Muzak is the fourth, climactic novel in the Cornelius Quartet. But this is by no means the last we will see of Jerry Cornelius—an indelible spirit of counter-culture who continues to inspire writers and artists to this day.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Collections, 20th Century

313 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Michael John Moorcock is an English writer primarily of science fiction and fantasy who has also published a number of literary novels.

Moorcock has mentioned The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Apple Cart by George Bernard Shaw and The Constable of St. Nicholas by Edward Lester Arnold as the first three books which captured his imagination. He became editor of Tarzan Adventures in 1956, at the age of sixteen, and later moved on to edit Sexton Blake Library. As editor of the controversial British science fiction magazine New Worlds, from May 1964 until March 1971 and then again from 1976 to 1996, Moorcock fostered the development of the science fiction "New Wave" in the UK and indirectly in the United States. His serialization of Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron was notorious for causing British MPs to condemn in Parliament the Arts Council's funding of the magazine.

During this time, he occasionally wrote under the pseudonym of "James Colvin," a "house pseudonym" used by other critics on New Worlds. A spoof obituary of Colvin appeared in New Worlds #197 (January 1970), written by "William Barclay" (another Moorcock pseudonym). Moorcock, indeed, makes much use of the initials "JC", and not entirely coincidentally these are also the initials of Jesus Christ, the subject of his 1967 Nebula award-winning novella Behold the Man, which tells the story of Karl Glogauer, a time-traveller who takes on the role of Christ. They are also the initials of various "Eternal Champion" Moorcock characters such as Jerry Cornelius, Jerry Cornell and Jherek Carnelian. In more recent years, Moorcock has taken to using "Warwick Colvin, Jr." as yet another pseudonym, particularly in his Second Ether fiction.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

The Condition of Muzak - Culminating volume of The Cornelius Quartet, a grand finale where, to use a trio of clichés, mighty Moorcock pulls out all the stops, leaves nothing on the table, roars at full throttle so as to give us a novel that's combination Clockwork Orange, Goldfinger, Monty Python sketch and Yellow Submarine. Correspondingly, leading off the long list of component parts that make up main character Jerry Cornelius's fluid identity, there's Alex, James Bond, John Cleese and Mr. Nowhere Man.

Condition carries this epigraph, a quote from great 19th century literary/art critic and connoisseur Walter Pater: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other works of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.”

And there’s a whole lot of obliteration going down in this Michael Moorcock 400-pager. No big surprise - we're talking serious post-nuclear, post-apocalypse here, a world where the streets of London hop to the drums of Pakistani love songs before shifting to a few bars of Rolling Stones, a world where the countryside beyond Dover returns to its medieval state and the people of Kent are happy at last since they've reverted even further, going back to their natural state of being down and dirty primitives.

Think of Walter Pater's words in light of what art critic Robert Hughes had to say as part of his 1980 series, The Shock of the New: "An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his work accumulates 'value' and becomes, ipso-facto, harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power." I suspect Robert Hughes was familiar with Michael Moorcock's book.

Although one can read The Condition of Muzak without having familiarity with any of the other volumes in Cornelius Quartet, I'd strongly advise reading the series in sequence. All of the prime characters in Muzak - brother Frank, sister Catherine, Mom, Major Nye, Una Persson, Miss Brunner, Sebastin Auchineck, Bishop Beesley, Mitzi - have a history and we'd do well to know their stories.

As noted above, the quartet of novels culminates in The Condition of Muzak. The cast of characters in Quartet are recast as Commedia dell'arte players dancing the Entropy Tango as they spiral toward oblivion. Of course, Jerry Cornelius, Eternal Champion, hopped up hipster, luminous Londoner, takes center stage in his star roles as, in turn, Harlequin (thus the book's cover), Pierrot and . . . that's for Michael Moorcock to tell.

Fictional flash camera in hand, let me share a few snappy snaps of Magic Michael's copious modern classic:

Transformed Planet - Among the ruins of Angkor in a defoliated jungle, monkeys and parrots are no longer their rowdy, rambunctious selves; following nuclear holocaust, occasionally but only occasionally we will hear a parrot squawk or see a monkey move slowly, very slowly, with extreme caution. Not a happy face day for Mother Earth.

Elegance Personified - An otherwise blighted urban landscape fades in the presence of stunning Una Persson. Slender, cultured, refined, even when Una might turn violent - "Smith and Wesson .45 in her hand, half-cocked" - her radiant beauty shines forth. If The Condition of Muzak found its way into theaters, Sasha Luss would make the perfect Una.



Music Man - Jerry Cornelius wants to hit the top ten chart with his latest rock group, The Deep Fix. Promoter Sebastian Auchinek tells Jerry directly, "I can see you're serious. But are you commercial?" Some things never change: even in post-nuclear war times, music is seen by the money people as nothing more than a cash cow to milk for all it's worth. Fortunately, classical music survives - at different points in London, Jerry hears Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony and Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire.

And Now For Something Completely Different - Recall I mentioned Condition is part Monty Python skit. Here's a for instance: out beyond London, in the remains of Canterbury, Jerry drives his snazzy brown and cream Duesenberg by a group of monks high up on scaffolding, in the process of erecting a timber reproduction of a Cathedral. He can see they painted the exterior in an effort to make it look like stone. Jerry hoots his horn and waves to the monks and then turns up his stereo to give them a friendly bast of 'Got to Get You into My Life.' But then, whoop: distracted, one of the monks loses his footing on the scaffold and falls fifty feet to his death. Bummer! Jerry-John Cornelius-Cleese speeds onward.

The Condition of Muzak is tops. Grab a copy, open the book, and rev up to ZA-ZA-ZOOM.


British author Michael Moorcock, born 1939

[Graham P · Rating 4 out of 5]

And the quartet comes to a close. This one is more about titular badboy Jerry Cornelius and his casually doom-ridden ways. While the prior entry, 'The English Assassin' was a love letter to England, this one is more of a farewell letter to the characters that people the narrative...and there's plenty of them. From the divine shitkicker, Una Persson, to the patriotic chronicler, Major Nye, we get to say goodbye in typical Moorcockian cut-up, time-bent fashion to all of them. Perhaps it's the least exciting of the quartet, but showing London revitalize itself as a future-forward city is powerful (the Christmas scene is SF Dickensian to say the least). Absurd, if you like it. Non-linear, if you can handle having dead characters come to life with the turn of a page. Lewd, if you don't mind the bullshitting wayfarer, Jerry Cornelius, here more existential and glum than he ever was.

A classic of the absurd theater of the New Wave. How I'll miss this bonkers universe.

[Wreade1872 · Rating 3 out of 5]

“It’s a perfectly easy shape, i think,” said Una Persson. “But it – well, it shifts. It’s a prism. A classically cut diamond, perhaps. It isn’t strictly linear. By selecting a linear pattern from the larger design you certainly distort things. I think that's what you mean, don’t you, Jerry?”
Mo belched. Then he farted. “Pardon,” he said.
Jerry gave up. “All i know is that there’s too much going on at once and I've had enough.

Thank god that lot is over. I mean this has some really nice scenes but they're spread out amongst a lot of just ok stuff. Except this is now book 4 so the length and cumulative weight of nonsense tends to make it drag.

Its both a sort of a reboot of the previous 3 books and also a sort of victory lap, with many call backs for those who are big fans of the previous wors, unfortunately the last 2 of books where quite dull.

At times it feels like there's going to be a point to it, it adds all this stuff about the myth of the phantom hunt and all the Harlequin stuff, but none of really worked for me, even if taken on its own. While i also couldn't help but remember none of that came up in any of the previous volumes anyway.

In the end it was hovering close to 2-stars at many points. One day i'll reread the first book which i loved at the time, but having slogged my way through 3 more volumes i have utterly forgotten why i liked that first book.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The last book of the Cornelius Quartet is also the best, in my opinion. Jerry Cornelius seems to be an agent of chaos, and to exist and perhaps travel through many related realities in the Multiverse. But the universe, and perhaps the Multiverse, is subject to entropy, a fact that Cornelius himself may unwittingly serve as an agent of chaos. I feel like in this final volume, Cornelius and those around him are more aware of their roles in their universes and the Multiverse, and Cornelius tends to melancholy with the realization that his personal goals - or what he thinks he wants - will always fall second to his role and destiny, and things wind down towards mediocrity - the Entropy Tango - the title references a quote that all art tends to the condition of music, but in Jerry Cornelius' Multiverse, it is rather to the condition of Muzak. The merging of the Jerry Cornelius identity with other aspects of the Eternal Champion, and more allusions to Elric, make this more fully integrated with the world of Moorcocks other writings . . . I don't know what else to say, except that I liked it, no matter how bizarre it was . . .

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The protagonist is constructed from different intertextual sources, including spy and horror fiction, the Harlequin tradition (not the romance novels, but the Italian commedia dell’arte), cultural figures such as musicians, and numerous news reports describing events in which an individual named Jerry Cornelius, or some variant thereof, took part.

Acquired Mar 27, 2007
The Book Addict, London, Ontario

[Simon Mcleish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally published on my blog here in December 1999.

Michael Moorcock waited several years before completing the Jerry Cornelius series. In it he underlines the themes of the series as a whole, without really bringing things to a conclusion. He also brings out a new emphasis, the identification of Jerry with Harlequin, and the other characters with traditional Harlequin roles, and the relationship between Jerry and Moorcock's concept of the Eternal Champion.

There is very little plot in The Condition of Muzak. Even more than the preceding stories, it is made up of unrelated and inconsistent tales - fantasies, in more than one sense - of Jerry's adventures. In the earlier novels, these are different dystopian ideas of the sixties and seventies, but now he also turns up in the past, in the Boer War or the Indian Raj. The episodes containing his brother Frank and his mother are now more mundane, as though these are fantasies more closely related to reality (a North Kensington estate). (At the same time, both characters are more exaggeratedly unpleasant.) His sister Catherine is almost totally a symbol rather than a person; she spends almost the entire novel unconscious, a Galatea to be admired by her brother.

This series had a strong emotional effect on me when I first read it a decade ago. It is still one which could do this, though re-reading it I have tended to admire the way that Moorcock produces his effects rather than letting them act on me. This is partly because I have read it before, and partly because I am rather older. Despite never writing about the real sixties and seventies, the novels have a strong sense of that period. That doesn't mean they have dated, but that one of the most importa nt themes they explore is the replacement of the optimism of the sixties with disillusionment.

[Mark Harding · Rating 3 out of 5]

Flavours:

* Series of set pieces - Masques - Tableaux
* Meandering (the bad aspects, plus, in the book, time does actually meander)
* Imagine putting in all those references before the internet was available!
* Reminiscent of the Ulysses dream and Nighttown sequences
* Puzzling. For example, the long Chronology of Appendix 1 lists all the horrible things Jerry Cornelius has done. Only, in the novel, he hasn’t done them. (He spends much of his time been distracted, all ill, or full of ennui.) And he’s muc nicer for it. Is it that, in the novel, he never did those things, although he could have? Or is it that he did do them. but in a different set of universes to the one that the novel lives in?
* Interesting to compare the Cornelius family tree as revealed in the Coda section called ‘A Bundle’ with Farmer’s Wold Newton family (began with Tarzan Alive 1971).

[Marcus Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

In ‘The Condition of Muzak’ Michael Moorcock considers the process of living in a harlequinade, and is a moving summation as we move through the author’s obsessions, the serials of Fantomas, Bob Dylan, Hendrix, and the Beatles, Arthurian legends and British folklore.

It’s quite a slog to read at times, and doesn’t always make sense (I always compare Moorcock’s work to a psychedelic rock album of the sixties), but what we have here is a writer who not only manages to supersede conventional science fiction, but also makes something completely new of traditional fiction. The realisation of this book (I think) is that Jerry Cornelius is seeking sanctuary in different universes (or multiverses) of Time in separate private mythologies. The implication being that as are we all.

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is the last of "The Cornelius Quartet" and marks the first time I've actually completed a series like this. This installment, like all the others, was a slog at times - all over the place and hard to follow, but also uniquely creative and innovative. I'm not sure if I'm saying this because of interviews I've seen with Moorcock or a genuine perception but my take is that these books are a satire on imperialism. Recommend this series if you're curious about Moorcock or don't mind working a bit as you read.

[Joe Stamber · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read a lot of MM books in the eighties and this was one of them. It's part of a quadrilogy, I believe it's called "The Cornelius Chronicles". Anyway, I can't remember any one of the four from the other, only that they were all barmy. At the time I must have enjoyed them, otherwise I wouldn't have read the whole series.

[Ben Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s a dreamlike quality to this book which switches from one apparent reality to another at ease. Sometimes it seems linear and reasonable, other times it’s confused and ludicrous.

We apparently discover the true nature of the real Jerry Cornelius, but what we make of this is entirely up to us.

Fun, quirky, weird, and baffling. Excellent book.

[Shannon Appelcline · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good writing, but often incomprehensible. Just when it feels meaningful, everything collapses again.

[Andrew Lawston · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've not read as much as Michael Moorcock as perhaps I ought to have done. That said, I'm not entirely convinced that The Condition of Muzak was the best place to start correcting this lapse. Nominally the final book in Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius quartet, Jerry and his family and friends are adrift in time. The shifting timeframes, geography, and status of the characters confounds any real narrative flow, and the reader has little choice but to relax and enjoy the ride.

Much of the book is set around Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove in the late 1960s through to the mid-1970s, and there's a lot that is prescient about London's destiny as the area begins to become gentrified. Many opinions are voiced about contemporary music, and Stanley Kubrick gets a strange little sideswipe.

The blurb insists that the books in the Cornelius Quartet can be read in any order, but with references to characters from other Moorcock novels, and broad familiarity with the Cornelius family being somewhat assumed, I had a continual feeling of not quite being in on the joke. Moorcock's prose is literary and dense, full of intertextual references and wordplay. It happens that several of the themes (the Harlequinade, the Wild Hunt, Voltaire's Candide) are things I know about in some detail. You could probably get by without this contextual knowledge, but you'd certainly miss some of the jokes and possibly get a bit bored.

This book is a wild, mad journey through time with Jerry Cornelius and is well worth a look, but the style is extreme, and your own mileage with it may well vary.

[Hugo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tumbledown end to the sequence, as the Twentieth Century collapses into itself, and Cornelius—once sustained by sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, and the Spirit of the Age—is now reduced to catatonia, the occasional brandy, and tea, strong as it comes. While the various personages of the various personalities are represented by the Commedia Dell'Arte, Britain dissolves into factions, Imperialism comes home to roost, and London becomes a fabulous Utopia. Meanwhile, or all along, the Cornelius family struggles to make a living, flailing through elements of—and preambles to—previous novels, and the mighty Mrs Cornelius succumbs to the inevitable forces of Time and Entropy.

"Yer got ter larf, incha?"

[Dane Wooster · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Metatemporal Jester Who Lives at the Heart of The City

Truly a fantastic ode to literature as performance art, as interpretive aesthetic; as heartfelt playfulness and melancholy proclamation. The entire Jerry Cornelius Quartet is highly recommended.

[Arthur B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thought-provoking conclusion to the main Jerry Cornelius novel series, challenging the reader to judge whether the "real" Jerry or the archetypal one has more substance. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/201...

[Devowasright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly tempted to immediately start the first book again.

[Aonghus Fallon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Londoner Jerry Cornelius is an immortal, time-travelling assassin (although his travels seem to be mostly confined to the twentieth century, or variations of it) while also epitomising the rather shallow nihilism of the day - in his case, the late Sixties and early Seventies.

This book fascinated me when I first read it - but then, I was barely into my teens. Now it reads like a period piece, albeit a good one. It's the most coherent book of the series: the characters are given a mythic sub-text and it's suggested that the fragmented, erratic narrative is the literary equivalent of fiddling with a radio ('tuning up') - a burst of pop music one minute, a classical piece the next, then a news bulletin. This is modern culture, Moorcock seems to be saying - and so it is, even more so now than thirty-five years ago.

[bluetyson]

isbn,original

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the best, certainly the most entertaining of the first four books dealing with Jerry Cornelius.

[Meredith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book isn't like the others. Much more linear. The form of the 4 part series does make sense as a piece of music. This is where all of the disparate threads resolve. Pretty neat.