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Pyat Quartet / Between the Wars #2
The Laughter of Carthage
The second volume of the Pyat Quartet.
Having escaped the horrors of the Russian civil war, Maxim Arturovitch Pyat discovers that the hazards of Europe are as nothing to the perils that await him in America.He is almost immediately involved in further scandals, touring the country as a speaker for the Ku Klux Klan.In this second of Michael Moorcock's acclaimed Pyat series of novels, only the reappearance of Pyat's enduring love, his femme fatale, Mrs Corenelius, offers him a chance of escape.
Having escaped the horrors of the Russian civil war, Maxim Arturovitch Pyat discovers that the hazards of Europe are as nothing to the perils that await him in America.He is almost immediately involved in further scandals, touring the country as a speaker for the Ku Klux Klan.In this second of Michael Moorcock's acclaimed Pyat series of novels, only the reappearance of Pyat's enduring love, his femme fatale, Mrs Corenelius, offers him a chance of escape.
608 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1984
13 people are currently reading
252 people want to read
About the author
Michael Moorcock
1,207 books3,746 followersMichael 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.
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.
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March 8, 2020
History's Victim or Savior?
This novel is the second of a quartet of Colonel Pyat's picaresque adventures. When strung together, the titles of the first two volumes read “Byzantium Endures the Laughter of Carthage", which encapsulates one of the two major themes of the quartet: the cultural and religious war between Greek and Russian Orthodoxy/ Protestantism (on the one hand), and Atheism, Bolshevism, Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, and Zionism (on the other hand).
The Ukrainian engineer and inventor Pyat claims that he isn't a particularly political person, but he is a committed partisan in this war. He consistently attacks Coons, Niggers, Japs and Jews, especially/even when his travels take him to the USA. The novel is set between 1920 and 1924, when the Ku Klux Klan (for whom he participates in a speaking tour) is active, and these prejudices are prevalent, if not necessarily condoned. Like the Klan, he believes in “native, white, Protestant supremacy”.
Extended Revelations of the Psychic Weaklings of Western Civilisation
Pyat's worldview seems to embrace Oswald Spengler's diagnosis of the Decline of the West (the Occident) at the hands of the Orient. Pyat is an admirer of Mussolini, if not necessarily Hitler. He is an egotist who believes his technological creativity and inventiveness can save Western Civilisation:
Yet, so he says, his genius is denied and frustrated by Oriental/anti-Occidental forces. They destroy his attempts to commercialize his patents and innovations in both Paris and the USA. He is pursued around the world by his nemesis, the Russian Jewish Chekist secret agent, Brodmann, who Pyat detects in the street, on doorsteps, in restaurants and cafes, and in trains and trams. Even Pyat questions whether these sightings are imaginary or invented. Have his failures pushed him over the threshold of paranoia?
Vile Distortions, Bigotry and Hubris
It's easy to infer that Pyat is an unreliable narrator. However, it's not clear whether this is a product of the reader's disdain for Pyat's ideas and behaviour. Moorcock rarely judges his protagonist, except in the brief introduction. He refers to “my own distaste for the majority of Pyat's opinions", then gives us Pyat, warts and all, including “his vile distortions of fact, his racial and religious bigotry". Pyat is unapologetic and full of hubris:
He succeeds and fails at the level of the historical forces that govern the world. Yet, he feels that he has been brought down by the pettiness and envy of lesser men:
Carthage and Byzantium
Carthage is symbolic of the forces that have undermined Western Civilisation, while Byzantium represents the greatness of this civilisation, even if it is under threat.
Pyat views himself as a savior of Byzantium, even if it can't be returned to Constantinople. He dreams of America as a New Byzantium, a “Slavic bastion of our Orthodoxy". Paradoxically, he believes that the Jews have overtaken New York, which has become the capital of Carthage:
America has been taken over by foreigners and aliens, who are “all anarchists and crooks trying to take over the country”:
Colonel Pyat's travels take him from East to West, including across the USA. The cities he visits include Odessa, Sebastopol, Batoum, Constantinople, Rome, Milan, Paris, New York, Washington, Memphis, Atlanta, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
My Sister, My Daughter, My Bride
When Pyat arrives in America, he embarks on a similar journey to Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's “Lolita". Although still only 23 or 24, he is a relatively distinguished European in the New World, which he hopes to save. Once again, he has no trouble finding female company, even while he is waiting for his fiancee, Esme, to join him by ship and train from Paris.
Esme is an analogue for Lolita. When they first meet in Constantinople, she is 13 and he is 20. She is a whore, with whom he becomes obsessed, because of her resemblance to the Slavic blonde beauty, Esme Loukianoff, the Ukrainian girl he was due to marry before the Russian Civil War. He lost contact with her in the turmoil after the war.
The surrogate Esme is actually Elizaveta Bolascu, whose racial origin is uncertain, but lives with her poor migrant parents in Constantinople when they meet. Pyat buys her from her parents for two sovereigns, quickly naming her Esme, and, like Lolita, she replaces an earlier object of love. By the end of the novel, Esme is supposedly arriving by boat in New York, destined to be married, but the novel ends suspiciously before her arrival, leaving a doubt in the reader's mind as to whether she has found someone else with whom to remain in Paris. At the time, the two of them are 17 and 24 respectively. You have to wonder whether the proximity of their ages (and their intention to marry) differentiates the relationship from that of Humbert and Lolita.
Pyat describes Esme in much the same way as Humbert describes Lolita. He uses diminutive terms, such as “my little girl" and “my pretty little dove", as well as “my sister, my daughter, my bride", “my soul, my muse" and “my child-whore". However, his “carnal affection for Esme” is never far from his mind (or, supposedly, hers):
Fictional Memoirs of a Sleazy Old Fascist
Despite the gravity and excitement of his adventures, you have to ask whether Pyat is just a sleazy old fascist after all?
Still, Moorcock manages to create a superlative novel out of his outrageous exploits. The pretence is so convincing that you start to believe these fictional memoirs are true. Even if they're not, who cares?
SOUNDTRACK:
The Soundtrack of Our Lives - "Mantra Slider"
https://youtu.be/gHPQHxDo1qE
This novel is the second of a quartet of Colonel Pyat's picaresque adventures. When strung together, the titles of the first two volumes read “Byzantium Endures the Laughter of Carthage", which encapsulates one of the two major themes of the quartet: the cultural and religious war between Greek and Russian Orthodoxy/ Protestantism (on the one hand), and Atheism, Bolshevism, Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, and Zionism (on the other hand).
The Ukrainian engineer and inventor Pyat claims that he isn't a particularly political person, but he is a committed partisan in this war. He consistently attacks Coons, Niggers, Japs and Jews, especially/even when his travels take him to the USA. The novel is set between 1920 and 1924, when the Ku Klux Klan (for whom he participates in a speaking tour) is active, and these prejudices are prevalent, if not necessarily condoned. Like the Klan, he believes in “native, white, Protestant supremacy”.
Extended Revelations of the Psychic Weaklings of Western Civilisation
Pyat's worldview seems to embrace Oswald Spengler's diagnosis of the Decline of the West (the Occident) at the hands of the Orient. Pyat is an admirer of Mussolini, if not necessarily Hitler. He is an egotist who believes his technological creativity and inventiveness can save Western Civilisation:
“[Much later, in London,] Mrs Cornelius’ sons call me a sleazy old fascist, but they say this to everyone. I am a visionary, no more, no less...
“I am one of the great inventors of my age.”
Yet, so he says, his genius is denied and frustrated by Oriental/anti-Occidental forces. They destroy his attempts to commercialize his patents and innovations in both Paris and the USA. He is pursued around the world by his nemesis, the Russian Jewish Chekist secret agent, Brodmann, who Pyat detects in the street, on doorsteps, in restaurants and cafes, and in trains and trams. Even Pyat questions whether these sightings are imaginary or invented. Have his failures pushed him over the threshold of paranoia?
Vile Distortions, Bigotry and Hubris
It's easy to infer that Pyat is an unreliable narrator. However, it's not clear whether this is a product of the reader's disdain for Pyat's ideas and behaviour. Moorcock rarely judges his protagonist, except in the brief introduction. He refers to “my own distaste for the majority of Pyat's opinions", then gives us Pyat, warts and all, including “his vile distortions of fact, his racial and religious bigotry". Pyat is unapologetic and full of hubris:
“I am history's victim, but I have had many exquisite moments, seen the world in all her beauty, made love to delightful women, enjoyed lasting relationships and the warmth of public acclaim.”
He succeeds and fails at the level of the historical forces that govern the world. Yet, he feels that he has been brought down by the pettiness and envy of lesser men:
“In Russia I had been swept along by profound historical forces, but in France mere financial trickery had dictated my fate...
“This is how Carthage conquers. Through money and human folly...
“This laughter of Carthage gives me strength to resist...The armies of Turkey and Israel combine against me, but I shall continue to fight.”
Carthage and Byzantium
Carthage is symbolic of the forces that have undermined Western Civilisation, while Byzantium represents the greatness of this civilisation, even if it is under threat.
Pyat views himself as a savior of Byzantium, even if it can't be returned to Constantinople. He dreams of America as a New Byzantium, a “Slavic bastion of our Orthodoxy". Paradoxically, he believes that the Jews have overtaken New York, which has become the capital of Carthage:
“Mastering her, they mastered America. Eventually, inevitably, this would lead to mastery of the world.”
America has been taken over by foreigners and aliens, who are “all anarchists and crooks trying to take over the country”:
“I have reason to know they are threatened by an increasingly unified army of Bolshevik Hebrews and Papists, plotting tirelessly to rouse the black and yellow races against them.”
Colonel Pyat's travels take him from East to West, including across the USA. The cities he visits include Odessa, Sebastopol, Batoum, Constantinople, Rome, Milan, Paris, New York, Washington, Memphis, Atlanta, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
My Sister, My Daughter, My Bride
When Pyat arrives in America, he embarks on a similar journey to Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's “Lolita". Although still only 23 or 24, he is a relatively distinguished European in the New World, which he hopes to save. Once again, he has no trouble finding female company, even while he is waiting for his fiancee, Esme, to join him by ship and train from Paris.
Esme is an analogue for Lolita. When they first meet in Constantinople, she is 13 and he is 20. She is a whore, with whom he becomes obsessed, because of her resemblance to the Slavic blonde beauty, Esme Loukianoff, the Ukrainian girl he was due to marry before the Russian Civil War. He lost contact with her in the turmoil after the war.
The surrogate Esme is actually Elizaveta Bolascu, whose racial origin is uncertain, but lives with her poor migrant parents in Constantinople when they meet. Pyat buys her from her parents for two sovereigns, quickly naming her Esme, and, like Lolita, she replaces an earlier object of love. By the end of the novel, Esme is supposedly arriving by boat in New York, destined to be married, but the novel ends suspiciously before her arrival, leaving a doubt in the reader's mind as to whether she has found someone else with whom to remain in Paris. At the time, the two of them are 17 and 24 respectively. You have to wonder whether the proximity of their ages (and their intention to marry) differentiates the relationship from that of Humbert and Lolita.
Pyat describes Esme in much the same way as Humbert describes Lolita. He uses diminutive terms, such as “my little girl" and “my pretty little dove", as well as “my sister, my daughter, my bride", “my soul, my muse" and “my child-whore". However, his “carnal affection for Esme” is never far from his mind (or, supposedly, hers):
“Often she would call me ‘brother’ in private. When we made love, she said it gave the occasion a delicious tinge of wickedness, of incest.”
Fictional Memoirs of a Sleazy Old Fascist
Despite the gravity and excitement of his adventures, you have to ask whether Pyat is just a sleazy old fascist after all?
Still, Moorcock manages to create a superlative novel out of his outrageous exploits. The pretence is so convincing that you start to believe these fictional memoirs are true. Even if they're not, who cares?
SOUNDTRACK:
The Soundtrack of Our Lives - "Mantra Slider"
https://youtu.be/gHPQHxDo1qE
December 7, 2012
Originally published on my blog here in July 2001.
The second of the Pyat novels - centred around a minor character who originally appeared in the Cornelius Quartet - takes his story from his escape from the collapsing Russia of the civil war which followed the 1917 revolution to a new life in the States. He is as unpleasant a character as ever, definite proof (if any were needed) that the narrators of novels do not have to reflect the views of the author. In this novel, Pyat becomes involved with the Klu Klux Klan, and this is just an extension of his racist views from his earlier condemnation of Jews and Turks. The racism of our past is easily forgotten; it can be seen in the writers who have survived - Kipling, Buchan and Haggard, and to a greater extent two of the most popular twentieth century authors of all, Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie - but is even clearer in those who have now basically been forgotten or whose politics have been overshadowed by what they did (such as film director D.W. Griffith).
It is relatively easy to see why Moorcock wanted to write about Pyat despite his lack of sympathy with the kind of views he would give the character. It can be very difficult for those who would be called liberals to understand the way that people like Pyat think, and Moorcock has certainly managed to give an insight into the paranoid world of conspiracy theories these people often espouse. (The title refers to this; Carthage is Pyat's term for the "decadent" Eastern and African influences which in his view were at this time constantly trying to bring down the virtuous white civilization.) Ironically, while constantly bemoaning the way in which most people have been hoodwinked into thinking these conspiracies non-existent, Pyat is constantly being the innocent dupe - assuming his memoirs to be honest - of others who use him to front fraudulent schemes.
The von Bek novels, particularly The City In The Autumn Stars, demonstrated that Moorcock had the ability to write great historical novels as well as atmospheric fantasy. In the Pyat series, this talent is fully realised. In The Laughter of Carthage, we have a meticulously researched insight into the past. There may be similarities to Flashman, but these are mainly because of the antiheroic central character; this series is stronger, more hard hitting.
The second of the Pyat novels - centred around a minor character who originally appeared in the Cornelius Quartet - takes his story from his escape from the collapsing Russia of the civil war which followed the 1917 revolution to a new life in the States. He is as unpleasant a character as ever, definite proof (if any were needed) that the narrators of novels do not have to reflect the views of the author. In this novel, Pyat becomes involved with the Klu Klux Klan, and this is just an extension of his racist views from his earlier condemnation of Jews and Turks. The racism of our past is easily forgotten; it can be seen in the writers who have survived - Kipling, Buchan and Haggard, and to a greater extent two of the most popular twentieth century authors of all, Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie - but is even clearer in those who have now basically been forgotten or whose politics have been overshadowed by what they did (such as film director D.W. Griffith).
It is relatively easy to see why Moorcock wanted to write about Pyat despite his lack of sympathy with the kind of views he would give the character. It can be very difficult for those who would be called liberals to understand the way that people like Pyat think, and Moorcock has certainly managed to give an insight into the paranoid world of conspiracy theories these people often espouse. (The title refers to this; Carthage is Pyat's term for the "decadent" Eastern and African influences which in his view were at this time constantly trying to bring down the virtuous white civilization.) Ironically, while constantly bemoaning the way in which most people have been hoodwinked into thinking these conspiracies non-existent, Pyat is constantly being the innocent dupe - assuming his memoirs to be honest - of others who use him to front fraudulent schemes.
The von Bek novels, particularly The City In The Autumn Stars, demonstrated that Moorcock had the ability to write great historical novels as well as atmospheric fantasy. In the Pyat series, this talent is fully realised. In The Laughter of Carthage, we have a meticulously researched insight into the past. There may be similarities to Flashman, but these are mainly because of the antiheroic central character; this series is stronger, more hard hitting.
June 12, 2015
An interesting fact of perhaps dubious relevance to both the book and the reader is that apparently this novel was written simultaneously with one of the other Von Bek novels "The City in the Autumn Stars", which if nothing else proves that Moorcock knows how to make better use of his time than I do.
Of course, I read that fact on the Internet, which makes it debatable whether it's even true and putting me roughly in the same category as Colonel Pyat, our narrator in the same sense that the drunk guy at the bar who won't stop telling you about all the amazing things he did and the even more amazing things he could have done won't shut up about it. Now sprinkle all those great stories with racist rants out of nowhere like some kind of nervous twitch that requires him to say something about Jews every five minutes regardless of what else he's talking about and passages that have the same relationship to coherence as I do with the Mr Universe award and bang! suddenly you've concocted yourself a Pyat novel! No wonder he was able to do this in his off hours.
Frankly, I make this sound far worse than it really is. Moorcock's such a professional that even his hack work has several levels of thought going on inside it and this is far from hack work, instead it seems like he's playing more of a long game here, stringing out and piling on Pyat's delusions and sins so that when the other shoe drops and all those illusions are forcibly stripped away it's not going to be a pretty sight for him but may be satisfying for us, especially for having put up with four books of him lying and insisting that he's not lying.
This one features Moorcock pushing our buttons quite a bit more, as Pyat has more adventures in Europe before heading over to the good ol' US of A, which in the mid 1920s was quite the happening place. Pyat is pretty much the same as he was in the first novel, still convinced he's the greatest scientific genius of this age while slamming anyone else who he feels is less intelligent than him (i.e. everyone) and holding a special contempt for the Jewish population despite the fact that all the objective evidence that suggests he's probably Jewish (he's circumcised and must look ethnically Jewish as everyone keeps assuming he is the first time they meet him). Given more space to stretch out in the novel means that Moorcock gives him quite a bit more rope to hang himself with and you too will be amazed as speaks highly of Nazis, praises "Birth of a Nation" as the greatest film ever made, morally justifies a sexual relationship with a minor that he's convinced himself is a dead ringer for his boyhood best friend and in the best part of all, gets to be a guest speaker for those fun boys in the pointy sheets, the Klu Klux Klan, finding himself agreeing with their message of inclusion of all races, as long as those races that aren't white know their place.
Oftentimes, as the first time around, the disconnect between what he's telling you and what's really happening is darkly hilarious, especially when you can't tell if he's just spinning events to make himself sound good or he really believes the crap he's telling you. His rampant cocaine use probably contributes to this, even as he insists, much like David Bowie once did, that it's not the side effects and can only be love. Moorcock shifts the geography much more drastically this time, even once he's inside the US and that helps make the narrator somewhat more tolerable as whenever you want to tune out his whining about how nothing is his fault and how nothing goes his way despite the fact that he's more geniusy than the average genius you can pay attention to the attention that Moorcock pays to the period detail (and it must have been fun to research all those details only to have the narrator systematically get them wrong for the purposes of the story) until he starts doing something interesting again.
Unfortunately, the formula of Pyat's tales within a tale, starts to wear thin as the book goes on, as he continually becomes the greatest at whatever he's doing (on tour with Mrs Cornelius, he also writes the best plays, too . . . its like if Mary Sue wrote a fan-fiction about the life of Mary Sue), meets someone who can brings his scientific and advanced technological marvels to life (his description of a future run by his machines are the closest the novel feels to a more typical Moorcock tale) and then just as he's about to realize his dream and dazzle the world something happens that scuttles those particular plans and he has to start all over again somewhere else. It can make for a bit of a monotonous experience over six hundred pages, especially when he keeps spiking those "woe is me" tales with various paranoid rants about Carthage and some Jewish fellow he feels is tailing him and is thus responsible for all his ills (ironically enough, the Klu Klux Klan experience winds up giving the story a bit of variety right when it needs it) and as good as the story is you may find that Pyat is best in smaller doses. But as an addled view of the earlier part of the century it's a wild ride and even if your host isn't the most ideal, Moorcock fills the proceedings with enough local color and shenanigans that you're interested in seeing where he's possible going with all this. Probably nowhere good, but even so.
Of course, I read that fact on the Internet, which makes it debatable whether it's even true and putting me roughly in the same category as Colonel Pyat, our narrator in the same sense that the drunk guy at the bar who won't stop telling you about all the amazing things he did and the even more amazing things he could have done won't shut up about it. Now sprinkle all those great stories with racist rants out of nowhere like some kind of nervous twitch that requires him to say something about Jews every five minutes regardless of what else he's talking about and passages that have the same relationship to coherence as I do with the Mr Universe award and bang! suddenly you've concocted yourself a Pyat novel! No wonder he was able to do this in his off hours.
Frankly, I make this sound far worse than it really is. Moorcock's such a professional that even his hack work has several levels of thought going on inside it and this is far from hack work, instead it seems like he's playing more of a long game here, stringing out and piling on Pyat's delusions and sins so that when the other shoe drops and all those illusions are forcibly stripped away it's not going to be a pretty sight for him but may be satisfying for us, especially for having put up with four books of him lying and insisting that he's not lying.
This one features Moorcock pushing our buttons quite a bit more, as Pyat has more adventures in Europe before heading over to the good ol' US of A, which in the mid 1920s was quite the happening place. Pyat is pretty much the same as he was in the first novel, still convinced he's the greatest scientific genius of this age while slamming anyone else who he feels is less intelligent than him (i.e. everyone) and holding a special contempt for the Jewish population despite the fact that all the objective evidence that suggests he's probably Jewish (he's circumcised and must look ethnically Jewish as everyone keeps assuming he is the first time they meet him). Given more space to stretch out in the novel means that Moorcock gives him quite a bit more rope to hang himself with and you too will be amazed as speaks highly of Nazis, praises "Birth of a Nation" as the greatest film ever made, morally justifies a sexual relationship with a minor that he's convinced himself is a dead ringer for his boyhood best friend and in the best part of all, gets to be a guest speaker for those fun boys in the pointy sheets, the Klu Klux Klan, finding himself agreeing with their message of inclusion of all races, as long as those races that aren't white know their place.
Oftentimes, as the first time around, the disconnect between what he's telling you and what's really happening is darkly hilarious, especially when you can't tell if he's just spinning events to make himself sound good or he really believes the crap he's telling you. His rampant cocaine use probably contributes to this, even as he insists, much like David Bowie once did, that it's not the side effects and can only be love. Moorcock shifts the geography much more drastically this time, even once he's inside the US and that helps make the narrator somewhat more tolerable as whenever you want to tune out his whining about how nothing is his fault and how nothing goes his way despite the fact that he's more geniusy than the average genius you can pay attention to the attention that Moorcock pays to the period detail (and it must have been fun to research all those details only to have the narrator systematically get them wrong for the purposes of the story) until he starts doing something interesting again.
Unfortunately, the formula of Pyat's tales within a tale, starts to wear thin as the book goes on, as he continually becomes the greatest at whatever he's doing (on tour with Mrs Cornelius, he also writes the best plays, too . . . its like if Mary Sue wrote a fan-fiction about the life of Mary Sue), meets someone who can brings his scientific and advanced technological marvels to life (his description of a future run by his machines are the closest the novel feels to a more typical Moorcock tale) and then just as he's about to realize his dream and dazzle the world something happens that scuttles those particular plans and he has to start all over again somewhere else. It can make for a bit of a monotonous experience over six hundred pages, especially when he keeps spiking those "woe is me" tales with various paranoid rants about Carthage and some Jewish fellow he feels is tailing him and is thus responsible for all his ills (ironically enough, the Klu Klux Klan experience winds up giving the story a bit of variety right when it needs it) and as good as the story is you may find that Pyat is best in smaller doses. But as an addled view of the earlier part of the century it's a wild ride and even if your host isn't the most ideal, Moorcock fills the proceedings with enough local color and shenanigans that you're interested in seeing where he's possible going with all this. Probably nowhere good, but even so.
June 25, 2013
More uncomfortable reading.
The second of the Pyat books is more of the same: unreliable narrator; unpleasant shit; the seedy underbelly of the early 20th cent; near schizophrenic stylee ramblings from Pyat and dollops of racist paranoia thrown in for good measure.
Pyat's naivety is more to the fore in this book than the 1st as is his more predatory and manipulative/delusional sexual depravity.
Bits are like a very unpleasant version of the movie The Sting.
I'll continue on to the 3rd book...but need to purge my head with some lighter pulp first.
The second of the Pyat books is more of the same: unreliable narrator; unpleasant shit; the seedy underbelly of the early 20th cent; near schizophrenic stylee ramblings from Pyat and dollops of racist paranoia thrown in for good measure.
Pyat's naivety is more to the fore in this book than the 1st as is his more predatory and manipulative/delusional sexual depravity.
Bits are like a very unpleasant version of the movie The Sting.
I'll continue on to the 3rd book...but need to purge my head with some lighter pulp first.
June 30, 2020
The second volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet, a series alleging to be the manuscript left behind at the protagonist Pyat's death in 1977. Moorcock is known for his antihero protagonists, but Colonel Pyat may be the most disturbing of them all. He stands a terrible analogue for the 20th century, having been born (allegedly) January 1st, 1900. The first volume tells of his survival of the dawn of the 20th century in Eastern Europe, mostly Ukraine, and his efforts to escape at any cost (to others) from that region around the time of the Bolshevik Revolution and chaos that accompanied the rise of the Soviet State. Colonel Pyat is a racist and anti-Semite (in deep denial of his own Jewish heritage), a liar and con-man who embodies and worships many of the worst aspects of humanity, a cocaine addict, and a pedophile, all the while believing himself a victim. In this second volume, he makes his way from Constantinople (as he insists on calling it) to Western Europe (Italy and France), and escaping financial scandal makes his way to America. In America, he falls in with his idols among the Ku Klux Klan. But ever he is pursued by the "laughter of Carthage" - "Carthage" in history being the Semitic, Oriental-founded city of Africa which was the bitter enemy of Rome, and which for Pyat is code for the Jewish, Asian, and African forces of savagery opposed to what he thinks of as true civilization - white, European, Greek-Russian, Orthodox Christian (what he referred to in the first book as "Byzantium"). Throughout this second volume, he is becoming disillusioned with the possibility that America could be his Byzantium, and fears that Carthage, through Hollywood, has come to rule America. A deeply disturbing and powerful book.
January 28, 2020
That was quite good fun, I enjoyed it much more than Byzantium Endures. I find my interest in Pyat increases with how much he becomes more unlikable. Also there are more occasions in this volume where his reading of the situation he's in is just plain wrong which gives rise to some comic misunderstandings.
January 29, 2015
I liked this book a lot. The whole series is a borne of a legitimately fascinating thematic bent, and really explores these themes in a variety of very clever ways. These clever ways also mean the book is rarely a compelling read. The prose is very well-written, but the deliberate repetition starts to mask this pretty well. I end up with mixed feelings, because the choices make so much sense, but they also make the book a bit of a slog at times. Ultimately it feels worthwhile, I just hope that the whole series will pay-off.
May 20, 2014
The second of Michael Moorcock's Pyat Quartet sees our unreliable narrator misadventure through Constantinople, Rome, Paris and across the USA in the early 1920s. Despite Pyat's often repellent beliefs, the richness of Moorcock's writing and his sense of time and place keep you reading to find out just what Pyat will get away with next.
September 11, 2017
The second stage of Pyat's journey takes us from 1919 Odessa to 1924 Los Angeles, but his adventures aren't as interesting as the events of the Bolshevik Revolution recounted in the first volume. The litany of ultra-nationalist, monarchist narration intended to convince us that Socialism is the answer to all the problems of the world gets so dull it backfires. After a few hundred pages of this glaringly negative propaganda, you start rooting for the Fascist villains. Mrs. Cornelious reappears but she and the rest of the supporting cast are tediously unpleasant. Moorcock is a skillful writer but he's unable to evoke the Dr. Zhivago-like epic grandeur he achieved in the first volume, so this one gets a lower rating. I'm still impressed enough with Moorcock's grandiose attempt to paint such a huge canvas that I'll eventually read Volume Three.
October 26, 2021
For those of you that read these reviews (and I can understand why you couldn't be bothered if you don't), this is the second in a quartet of books about an anti-hero.
A drug addicted, anti-semitic, double-crossing, self-aggrandizing rapist bastard who in this volume adds pederasty, fraud and KKK membership to his growing list of sins. Unlike Flashman, Pyat has no redeeming features to speak of and an obsessive predilection for ranting about the ancient city of Carthage.
Well, I say it is an ancient city. Whenever he wants to talk of moral and social decay conquering whichever city he happens to be in (with rich irony) he ravingly uses Carthage conquering it as a tediously dragged out metaphor. Frankly, this book could have been two hundred pages shorter.
At the halfway point in the series I am surprised he hasn't be jailed and castrated... maybe in the next book if we're lucky.
A drug addicted, anti-semitic, double-crossing, self-aggrandizing rapist bastard who in this volume adds pederasty, fraud and KKK membership to his growing list of sins. Unlike Flashman, Pyat has no redeeming features to speak of and an obsessive predilection for ranting about the ancient city of Carthage.
Well, I say it is an ancient city. Whenever he wants to talk of moral and social decay conquering whichever city he happens to be in (with rich irony) he ravingly uses Carthage conquering it as a tediously dragged out metaphor. Frankly, this book could have been two hundred pages shorter.
At the halfway point in the series I am surprised he hasn't be jailed and castrated... maybe in the next book if we're lucky.
January 17, 2023
i have nothing but admiration for moorcock’s vision and bursting interwar canvas but this was mostly a big slog. pyat’s travelogue through france and italy is fucking endless and i found myself longing for his demented ordeals in the failing russian empire. this gets a little better when he arrives in the US and the klan stuff is disturbing and arresting but i found myself less and less able to pay attention to his endless tirades. after 526 pages of his nonsensical rants, his self aggrandizing racial-futurist mumbo jumbo - in which everybody he doesn’t like is a jewish carthaginian agent and everybody he does like is somehow exempt from these categories - well, the roguish charm that makes spending time in this fascist blowhard’s brain thorny and engaging was starting to wear thin. i definitely will finish this series but also definitely need some serious time away.
April 20, 2020
This is the second book in Moorcock's Pyat Quartet and follows the antihero protagonist and "unreliable narrator" Maxim Arturovitch Pyatniski (Col. Pyat) as he journeys from Europe to United States during the 1920's. The second half of the book, which finds Col. Pyat in the rural south and Hollywood, is particularly fascinating. The Laughter of Carthage was written in 1984 but is eerily prescient, especially viewed through the lens of today's political climate. Read for yourself and you'll soon realize that Col. Pyat would for sure be wearing a MAGA hat if he were around today!
July 5, 2025
Another fascinating look at the early 20th century.
We thought we'd learned just how bad Pyat was in the first volume, but here we learn there are no depths to his racism and his sociopathy, between his work for the KKK and his total annihilation of the essence of his child-bride.
Some of the early picaresque wandering across Europe seems a bit pointless, but once we get to America, things really come to a head.
We thought we'd learned just how bad Pyat was in the first volume, but here we learn there are no depths to his racism and his sociopathy, between his work for the KKK and his total annihilation of the essence of his child-bride.
Some of the early picaresque wandering across Europe seems a bit pointless, but once we get to America, things really come to a head.
November 15, 2019
This is the sort of book that makes you want to take a really long shower. Pyat has, at times, a sort of repulsive glamour that makes you almost hope he triumphs - yet his vices are laid on so heavily and his repetitive rants about race and pedophilia occur so frequently that I lost interest many moons before the end. Too long-winded.
August 14, 2022
Pyat continues his bid to blame his misfortunes on everyone other than himself (and primarily on the Jews); Moorcock, however, constructs his unreliable narrator's story in such a way that we can't help but see through him. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/201...
March 28, 2021
Moorcock writes an interesting character. This book is by no means an easy one to read, and some of the ramblings that go on in Pyat's head are hard to follow.
December 1, 2016
The second volume of Colonel Pyat's memoir takes us on a wild journey through constantinople, Europe and America, as Pyat continues to search for his fortune and the salvation of his beloved "Byzantium" (no longer associated with Orthodox Russia, which fell to the Communists). Along the way he continues to indulge his every vice, justifying his racism and misogyny with the popular beliefs of the time, and occasionally launching into a fresh diatribe about the moral decay England in the 60s and 70s.
Pyat has a new muse- a teenage prostitute from Constantinople, whom he feels is his childhood friend Esmé reborn. Dedicating himself to this new obsession he continues to call "love", Pyat boldly stumbles from one business venture and intrigue to another, as he attempts to raise capital to make his inventions a reality--untill each time he is forced to flee elsewhere.
The plot in this book is not as good as "Byzantium Endures", in my opinion. The roaring 20s make for a much more sedate backdrop than the Russian Civil War, and there's far less urgency in the plot. As such, the sense of danger is gone, and Pyat's philosophical posturing against the "Carthage" (which combines elements of anti-Zionist conspiracy mongering, along with his traditional disdain for the "uncivilized Orient", the "dark-skinned barbarian" and a general sense of "those envious lesser races wish only to destroy what we have out of greed, but are unable to create anything"), whom he sees hounding him at every step start to wear a little thin. It doesn't particularly help that there's much more presumably Yiddish text in this book (as opposed to Russian in Volume 1), which made it easy for me to sometimes lose the trail of Pyat's ramblings.
Things d pick up once he gets to America, and the book ends on a strong note- being a love letter to Hollywood of the 20s, of a sort. While there are many things here to make most Western readers turn away in disgust - the description of, and Pyat's involvement with the KKK for instance -- the series remains a fascinating look at just how the right-wing ideas flourished during the early 20th century. While it would be a huge over-generalization to say that Pyat's thinking can be easily found in portions of the world's population today, (and so they can be used to understand those people), I think it's fair to say that with Pyat Moorcock provides a useful framework to conceptualize how those types of beliefs can perperuate themselves.
Pyat has a new muse- a teenage prostitute from Constantinople, whom he feels is his childhood friend Esmé reborn. Dedicating himself to this new obsession he continues to call "love", Pyat boldly stumbles from one business venture and intrigue to another, as he attempts to raise capital to make his inventions a reality--untill each time he is forced to flee elsewhere.
The plot in this book is not as good as "Byzantium Endures", in my opinion. The roaring 20s make for a much more sedate backdrop than the Russian Civil War, and there's far less urgency in the plot. As such, the sense of danger is gone, and Pyat's philosophical posturing against the "Carthage" (which combines elements of anti-Zionist conspiracy mongering, along with his traditional disdain for the "uncivilized Orient", the "dark-skinned barbarian" and a general sense of "those envious lesser races wish only to destroy what we have out of greed, but are unable to create anything"), whom he sees hounding him at every step start to wear a little thin. It doesn't particularly help that there's much more presumably Yiddish text in this book (as opposed to Russian in Volume 1), which made it easy for me to sometimes lose the trail of Pyat's ramblings.
Things d pick up once he gets to America, and the book ends on a strong note- being a love letter to Hollywood of the 20s, of a sort. While there are many things here to make most Western readers turn away in disgust - the description of, and Pyat's involvement with the KKK for instance -- the series remains a fascinating look at just how the right-wing ideas flourished during the early 20th century. While it would be a huge over-generalization to say that Pyat's thinking can be easily found in portions of the world's population today, (and so they can be used to understand those people), I think it's fair to say that with Pyat Moorcock provides a useful framework to conceptualize how those types of beliefs can perperuate themselves.
July 15, 2021
Not quite as good as Byzantium Endures but still excellent. Colonel Pyat's travels continue from Byzantium to Rome to Paris to New York to Memphis to LA. He also continues his insane geopolitical rants about Byzantium versus Carthage, and continues to live in complete denial of his obvious Jewishness.
September 30, 2013
Nothing like reading the whole 20th century in one book...In fact, only about 2-4 years (1920-1924)? But it seems a lot longer as the past life and the future life of Maxim Pyativich (or however he spells it) crowd the telling of the story.
Pyat again is the Zelig of wherever he ends up. This time in revolutionary Constantinople (Byzantium), pre-fascist Rome, lost Generation Paris, booming New York, corrupt Washington, Ku Klux Klan country and finally the beginnings of tinseltown LA. Phew!
And again Pyat seems to blunder into the wildest imbroglios, with himself always as the innocent, the patsy. This book I'm not buying it. This is his history (and since the were papers the form the book were "found" by Moorcock, literally "his story"). Pyat is the most unreliable of narrators and part of the fun is figuring out Pyat's angle.
Moorcock's themes of "Byzantium" and "Carthage" were clarified a little more in this book. As far as I can make out "Byzantium" is the ideal where a quasi-fascist King-Prophet-Engineer has an iron fist over his subjects (who should only be white and non-Jewish, preferable Greek Orthodox) while "Carthage" opposes "Byzantium" by being multi-racial, democratic and demotic. But it isn't quite so clear-cut sometimes. The Bolsheviks are "Carthage" at the beginning - but Stalin soon turns out to be very "Byzantium", but Pyat has no kind words for him.
Once again the writing is captivating and rich. It is a shame that Moorcock is usually cast into the Carthaginian genre fiction ghetto - he can hold his own with the best literary fiction's Byzantium.
Pyat again is the Zelig of wherever he ends up. This time in revolutionary Constantinople (Byzantium), pre-fascist Rome, lost Generation Paris, booming New York, corrupt Washington, Ku Klux Klan country and finally the beginnings of tinseltown LA. Phew!
And again Pyat seems to blunder into the wildest imbroglios, with himself always as the innocent, the patsy. This book I'm not buying it. This is his history (and since the were papers the form the book were "found" by Moorcock, literally "his story"). Pyat is the most unreliable of narrators and part of the fun is figuring out Pyat's angle.
Moorcock's themes of "Byzantium" and "Carthage" were clarified a little more in this book. As far as I can make out "Byzantium" is the ideal where a quasi-fascist King-Prophet-Engineer has an iron fist over his subjects (who should only be white and non-Jewish, preferable Greek Orthodox) while "Carthage" opposes "Byzantium" by being multi-racial, democratic and demotic. But it isn't quite so clear-cut sometimes. The Bolsheviks are "Carthage" at the beginning - but Stalin soon turns out to be very "Byzantium", but Pyat has no kind words for him.
Once again the writing is captivating and rich. It is a shame that Moorcock is usually cast into the Carthaginian genre fiction ghetto - he can hold his own with the best literary fiction's Byzantium.
Want to read
May 11, 2013From the markets. Seduced by the title. Why don't I find out what Michael Moorcock got up to since his sci fi grew too wierd for the age I was, although I persisted beyond my grasp at the time, intrigued.
September 18, 2010
Mi colección favorita de Moorcock.
May 31, 2013
A bit of science, truly fiction but not what I'd call science fiction. a bit long winded.
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