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A review by cookabook
Elric of Melniboné by Michael Moorcock
3.0
It's your standard DnD-inflected fantasy novel, but more psychedelic.
The book follows Elric, ruler of the most ancient and problematic empire of Melniboné, as he fends off his cousin Yrkoon's attempted coups and travels the land in search of his kidnapped love Cymoril. Along the way Elric and his companions encounter strange peoples and creatures, enlist the help of demon lords, and duel with magic swords.
I don't have the vocabulary to explain this ideally, but here goes: Elric of Melniboné depicts a world devised by a British man that seems bent on placing itself outside the European imaginary, but nonetheless preserves its author's Eurocentric worldview. The trappings of the Dragon Isle have little in common with classic Euro-fantasy, but is still pretty Orientalist. Maybe fans will feel I'm missing something, or maybe Moorcock started to cool it on the "savage barbarian" stuff in later books, but it's hard to overlook in this volume.
Would I recommend the first Elric book to fantasy fans today? It depends...if the fantasy tradition you prefer is the weird and antiheroic—more Lovecraft and Conan the Barbarian than Lord of the Rings and Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn—and you're okay with some more, eh, colorful reading (torture, slavery, drugs, etc.), then go for it. If not, bag it. The real value of Moorcock's influence can be found in books that themselves are major influences on new works today such as A Song of Ice and Fire and Dragonlance.
The book follows Elric, ruler of the most ancient and problematic empire of Melniboné, as he fends off his cousin Yrkoon's attempted coups and travels the land in search of his kidnapped love Cymoril. Along the way Elric and his companions encounter strange peoples and creatures, enlist the help of demon lords, and duel with magic swords.
I don't have the vocabulary to explain this ideally, but here goes: Elric of Melniboné depicts a world devised by a British man that seems bent on placing itself outside the European imaginary, but nonetheless preserves its author's Eurocentric worldview. The trappings of the Dragon Isle have little in common with classic Euro-fantasy, but is still pretty Orientalist. Maybe fans will feel I'm missing something, or maybe Moorcock started to cool it on the "savage barbarian" stuff in later books, but it's hard to overlook in this volume.
Would I recommend the first Elric book to fantasy fans today? It depends...if the fantasy tradition you prefer is the weird and antiheroic—more Lovecraft and Conan the Barbarian than Lord of the Rings and Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn—and you're okay with some more, eh, colorful reading (torture, slavery, drugs, etc.), then go for it. If not, bag it. The real value of Moorcock's influence can be found in books that themselves are major influences on new works today such as A Song of Ice and Fire and Dragonlance.