Jerusalem Commands: The Third Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet

(Paperback, Revised ed.)

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Colonel Pyat: addict, inventor and bizarre Everyman of the twentieth century. In Jerusalem Commands, the third of the Pyat Quartet, he schemes and fantasises his way from New York to Hollywood, from Cairo to Marrakesh, from cult success to the limits of sexual degradation, leaving a trail of mechanical and human wreckage in his wake as he crashes towards an inevitable appointment with the worst nightmare this century has to offer. It is Moorcock's extraordinary achievement to convert the life of Pyatnitski into an epic and often hilariously comic adventure.

Reviews

"Ostensibly, Pyat's voyages from California to Casablanca and Cairo are those of any picaresque hero, plunging into adventure, danger and miraculous escape, without any purpose except the next step of the journey. But it is also a journey through the prejudices of the 1920s, from the subliminal racism of the British empire and the suppressed antisemitism of Hollywood to the dawning supermanship of fascism."
--Andro Linklater, Sunday Times (UK)

"There is a feast in store for those who have never been dazzled and disturbed by Michael Moorcock's eye for the absurd and gift for fantasy, and confirmation for those familiar with his work, that he is one of the most original authors of our time."
--Sunday Telegraph (UK)

"Moorcock's powers of description--especially when focused on the sights and smells of megalopoli--and his range of references are immense."
--Mark Sanderson, Times Literary Supplement

"Few novelists have risen above the orthodox categories of fiction to produce something as expansive and elaborate as this."
--Peter Ackroyd, Sunday Times (UK)

"New adventures both picaresque and grotesque take [Pyat] across bootlegging America, like a hobo, to Hollywood as actor, writer and set-designer; to Egypt with various film-making eccentrics, only to end up enacting scenes of lurid degradation for a powerful pervert... Such escapades are Hollywood and schoolboy fantasy seen through the eyes of a talented inventor who is also a bigoted racist, egoist and abuser of women. Moorcock shows us through this remarkable but odious bore that fascistic attitudes are not as far removed from some forms of popular fiction and fantasy as we might prefer to think."
--Robert O'Brien, Time Out London

Author Bio

Michael Moorcock is the author of numerous novels, including the Elric series, Cornelius Quartet, Gloriana, and The White Wolf's Son. He has received the Nebula, World Fantasy, and British Science Fiction awards and is a Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. As editor of the science fiction magazine New Worlds, he was one of the progenitors of the controversial New Wave movement. His nonfiction works have appeared in the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, and the New Statesman. He lives in Bastrop, Texas. Alan Wall is a novelist, a short story writer, a poet, an essayist, and a professor of writing and literature at the University of Chester. His novels include Bless the Thief, China, The Lightning Cage, The School of Night, and Sylvie's Riddle.