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A review by ianbanks
Letters From Hollywood by Michael Moorcock
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
informative
slow-paced
4.0
This book is a series of letters to J. G. Ballard, chronicling Moorcock’s time putting together a script for a director. This is a harrowing sequence of events not dissimilar to experiences I’ve read by other authors but Moorcock turns his often savage wit on the whole affair and tries to make some kind of sense of it. He’s also undergoing a lot of turmoil in his own life and this is creating a sense of bewilderment about the whole creative process that you can’t help but feel sorry for him.
As I’ve grown older, my relationship with Mr Moorcock has grown more complex. I respect the fact that he wrote an absolute shedload of books, many of which I love, but the more I’ve read about him and the more I come across his non-fiction, the less I like him as a person (I’ve heard he speaks highly of me, too). In this memoir of his time in California, he displays some arrogant, self-destructive traits that I’ve encountered in other very talented individuals (and disliked in them) but he also shows in his writing a core of decency towards the people he likes that I can’t help thinking I may be misjudging him.
This is, really, a terrific little book, only dropped down to four stars because I just didn’t buy some of the traveloguing: I’ve never been out of Australia but I’ve read some writing about places here that tried to come off as knowledgeable but were just wrong and I got a similar vibe from this. However, I loved the characters that Moorcock meets and describes, the movie and writing talk and the whole conversational feel of it. Good fun.
As I’ve grown older, my relationship with Mr Moorcock has grown more complex. I respect the fact that he wrote an absolute shedload of books, many of which I love, but the more I’ve read about him and the more I come across his non-fiction, the less I like him as a person (I’ve heard he speaks highly of me, too). In this memoir of his time in California, he displays some arrogant, self-destructive traits that I’ve encountered in other very talented individuals (and disliked in them) but he also shows in his writing a core of decency towards the people he likes that I can’t help thinking I may be misjudging him.
This is, really, a terrific little book, only dropped down to four stars because I just didn’t buy some of the traveloguing: I’ve never been out of Australia but I’ve read some writing about places here that tried to come off as knowledgeable but were just wrong and I got a similar vibe from this. However, I loved the characters that Moorcock meets and describes, the movie and writing talk and the whole conversational feel of it. Good fun.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Racism, Drug use, Classism, Death, and Terminal illness