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How should he use the power? Did he really have a mission? Could he alter history and be responsible for aiding the Jews to throw out the Romans?
In his own time Glogauer is a failed lover, a questing but forever unsatisfied mystic, a repeated faker of suicide attempts. In first-century Judaea these shortcomings are echoed in terrible ironies, and his destiny emerges as inevitable from the moment he visits a certain carpenter's workshop to find the misshapen idiot boy called Jesus.
Karl Glogauer had discovered the reality he had been seeking. That was not to say he did not still have doubts.
Perhaps it might have been possible to alter history, but the grim old drama plays out as it was foreordained--or at least, close enough for historians to hammer into the prophesied shape. "The chroniclers would rearrange it". Whether history has been remade as tragedy or farce is for readers to decide. This is Moorcock's sharpest, most successful novel of pure SF; it's the 22nd selection in Millennium's very strong SF Masterworks library. --David Langford
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Short, sharp and shocking,
By A Customer
This review is from: Behold The Man (S.F. Masterworks) (Paperback)
In his interviw about this book Moorcock says he kept the sci-fi to a minimum because he didn't want readers to get bogged down in extraneous detail. He was not interested in 'rationales' of how the time machine worked but what the time machine might represent symbolically (a womb, arebirth) and this is obvious from his description of the machine. If this didn't have its sci-fi element my guess it would be a famous literary classic because it's a whole lot more subtle and interesting than Last Temptation of Christ or that Dennis Potter play about Christ, which I think had the same title. It is the book's continuing power, which hit me as a young man. It isn't intended to shake your faith in religion. It's intended to make you question your faith in everything! Nice and short, too.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Where's the sequel ?,
By A Customer
This review is from: Behold The Man (S.F. Masterworks) (Paperback)
Breakfast in the Ruins, a kind of litany of 20th century infamy and failure, with its wonderfully graphic and oddly sympathetic Mei Lei sequences and various other graphic moments from various terrible 20th century military adventures, is the sequel to Behold the Man. When are the publishers going to put this, far harder to obtain, wonderful novel into the Masterworks series. Anyone who wants to know where the 20th century went wrong could do worse than take a look at this short, powerful read in which Moorcock originally published his own death notice -- and then had to pull it when everyone believed him! Behold the Man is a fine, thoughtful text for our times, but Breakfast in the Ruins take the same quasi-Christ Karl Glogauer on a modern 'stations of the cross' journey which also touches on black/white racism and anti-Jewish racism and looks at man's eternal inhumanity to man; and yet, as in so much of Moorcock's apparently grimmest work,there is a substantial and credible note of hope at the very peculiar end! Moorcock has Dickens's touch -- he shows you the injustice, the terror and the pain -- but he also shows you how human dignity and respect can, like love, conquer all! If you can find the earlier edition, which included Breakfast in the Ruins, read the two books togehter.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
God this is good,
By
This review is from: Behold The Man (S.F. Masterworks) (Paperback)
This has, no doubt, been widely read by SF lovers. First published in 1969, it won the Nebula award for best novella. It is quite a quick read - even the number of pages exaggerate its length.I made the mistake of reading the blurb on the back cover before I bought the book. Unfortunately, this told me the plot up to page 145, so there were no surprises for me! So what's it about without giving away everything? Karl Glogauer has the opportunity to travel in time using a time machine invented by a crank scientist. He decides to go to Palestine in 29 AD so that he can watch the crucifixion. The story builds up the events leading to this decision at the same time as following Glogauer's progress in the past. I enjoyed this story... as a non-religous person I am all in favour of this type of alternative look at religous history.
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