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First, some explanations. The Pyat Quartet by Michael Moorcock consists of four novels, Byzantium Endures, The Laughter of Carthage, Jerusalem Commands, and The Vengeance of Rome. The first two books came out at the beginning of the 1980s, which was when I read them. The other two weren’t available in the US, though, and every so often through the years I’d wonder what had happened to Pyat and company. Luckily for me, and for everyone else caught in the middle of the story, PM Press recently published all four of them.
This review should probably come with a trigger warning, but I’d have to list so many troubling areas the warning itself would take up several pages. I can only say that if any of this paragraph is problematic for you, please consider yourself warned. To begin with, Maxim Pyatnitski, the main character, is racist, misogynist, and antisemitic — there are epithets here that would make Jeff Sessions blush. He’s also a liar, a braggart, a fantasist, and a cocaine addict. He betrays his friends, then somehow works the stories around so that they were the ones to betray him. In short, he’s one of the most unpleasant main characters in all of literature.
But there’s more to him than just that. For one thing, Pyat, as he’s called, lies to himself as much as to other people, and since we follow him from his birth in 1900 to sometime in the seventies we see how these fantasies begin and grow, how he throws up stories to defend himself against unpleasant truths. From the first he’s claimed to be a Cossack (he was born in Ukraine), and by the end he’s not only a Cossack but related to the Romanovs. But the greatest truth of all, the one he’s hiding even from himself, is that he’s really Jewish. It’s the crack that splits him in two right from the beginning, that widens more and more as he grows older, that turns him against himself as he frantically projects his demons onto someone, anyone, else.
As you might expect, this makes him the most unreliable narrator ever. But even though we see things from his point of view, most of the time there are enough hints and clues that we can piece together what’s really happening. It’s a story told in stereo, one side the history that Pyat thinks he knows or wants to believe, and the other side the events that actually happened. It’s a hard trick to pull off, and sometimes the only response to a particularly clever bit is to sit back and admire how Moorcock did it. It makes the narrative sometimes funny and sometimes tragic, and sometimes both at once. I actually felt sorry for Pyat when people “mistook” him for a Jew, though I got over it quickly enough.
This strange, broken individual turns out to be the perfect vehicle to comment on the twentieth century. Pyat is the twentieth century, in a way — brash, boastful, paranoid, and filled with pernicious theories; in love with new technology but with no thought of the consequences; careening through the decades high on cocaine and out of control. He blunders through the Russian Revolution, the silent movie era in Hollywood, the KKK, the fascists in Italy and Nazis in Germany. The problem with Hitler, he thinks, is that he went too far; his man is Mussolini. This continues even as Mussolini sends him to Germany, ostensibly as a spy but really to get him out of the way so he can sleep with Pyat’s mistress. (Pyat, as always, is completely oblivious.) Unfortunately this leads to a disgusting scene with Hitler that — fair warning — might put you off sex altogether.
After that image it might sound strange to say that there is a lot of beautiful writing in these books. Moorcock seems to have done an incredible amount of research, and he describes Constantinople in the 1910s, Hollywood in the twenties, Egypt and Germany and Italy in the thirties in lush, vivid prose. Here’s Italy: “The country was a thousand shades of gold, amber, old ivory, sprawling like a lazy lion beneath the sun; our nostrils were filled with the scent of petrol and wild poppies, of lemons, mustard and honey, our hearts with an innocent relish for simple freedom.”
Pyat has several styles, though. Most of the time his narrative is straightforward, though told with striking and remarkable imagery. There are also moments when he loses himself in time and space, straying from the past to the present and back again. Sometimes he simply rambles in several languages, mostly German and Yiddish, rehearsing all the wrongs done to him and fulminating against the present decay. This can become almost poetical: “The white light purifies my brain and mercury flows from my eyes. There are angels in the snow and their swords are silver. Little girls in cotton dresses run to me with scraps of paper and I cannot read them. They dazzle me. Carthage is on the horizon. Byzantium blazes like a mirror. It is to be the Final War…”
The Quartet is by no means perfect. It’s too long and wanders too much, and some parts seem unnecessary. I was especially disappointed by one episode: we know from Pyat’s confused reveries that he was in a concentration camp, but when we finally get there it isn’t what those words led me to believe — and, I have to admit, hope; I truly wanted that anti-Semite to see the end result of antisemitism. Instead he’s sent very early on to Dachau, where he spends his time mostly in interviews with an SS officer. And since this was near the end of the Quartet it was a letdown, at least for me. I don’t think you can talk about antisemitism without coming at last to the dark heart of it.
Still, the whole thing is worth reading, an amazing achievement. Unless you’re put off by unpleasant main characters, or racial or religious stereotypes, or positive portrayals of some of the worst criminals in history… The Quartet isn’t for everyone, is what I’m saying.
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To find out if you’d like these books, you can get the first volume, Byzantium Endures, in the Anarchist Story Bundle, along with four other intriguing novels, for $5.00. The second, The Laughter of Carthage, is among the novels in the second bundle, for $15.00. And you’ll get my novel The Dream Years in the second bundle as well.
