The Mad God's Amulet (Hawk Moon, No 2) [Mass Market Paperback]

Michael Moorcock, The Sword of the Dawn (DAW, 1968)

First, to get it out of the way: the worst, absolutely unforgivably worst, thing about the 1968 DAW edition of The Sword of the Dawn is its unforgivably bad cover. It's so bad I actually knocked half a point off the book's final rating. DAW, who usually came up with top-notch artists to do Moorcock covers, really dropped the ball in the Runestaff series, and this is the nadir. Cover it, school-textbook style, before reading.

That said, the book itself is top-notch, one of the better novels in the whole Eternal Champion cycle. Dorian Hawkmoon, reluctant servant of the Runestaff and another incarnation of the Eternal Champion, is off on the quest to find the last piece of the puzzle he needs to strike back at the Granbretanian army, an artifact called the Sword of the Dawn. Needless to say, getting his hands on it will not be easy...

The same cast of characters from the first two novels returns, along with some throwaway characters, a new villain or two, and all the adventure one could possibly want. As well, The Sword of the Dawn is set on a new continent in the purview of the Eternal Champion, Amarehk (yes, it is what you think it is), and Moorcock's descriptions of the city of Nawlin (yes, it's at the delta of the big river) are perhaps the most detailed urban descriptions in the whole series.

The novel could probably stand on its own without too much of the ongoing plot being lost, but aspiring Moorcock readers are encouraged to read the whole series (preferably after those of Elric, Corum, and Erekose, at least). ****

Not a lot here to really make this book shine, and a few things that let it down.

Very lazy plotting - we just get thrown about here and there. That could be part of the fun, and there is something of the D & D silly campaign where a hundred unlikely events are meant to happen to our intrepid adventurers. Still it gets a bit too silly for me, and I'm getting to not really care that much about the Warrior in Jet and Gold who can just turn up magically along with any era shaping magical item. Same with the deadly foe - far too lazy in just saying, "Oh, sure, they all got routed and defeated, um, and a million of them got killed ... but, ah, NOW there's, um TWO MILLION, and the bad guy didn't really die, and they're back!". I mean, who cares? Either something magical suddenly shows up that will defeat them all, or, even if you do, suddenly they'll just somehow regroup to be back to threaten again in the next sequel. The heroes are embarrassingly standard in the way they can fight all day hugely outnumbered with dwindling remains of their army being cut down around them, but, of course, not suffer a scratch and have nothing more than a bit of fatigue. Yisselda as heroine becomes utterly clichéd: here, let me just stand to one side being feminine and either helpless or emotionally/sexually supportive. Oh, and Hawkmoon starts getting all broody - save me from broody heroes! Ugh.

I was just about never `in' the story, I was always outside looking in, and frequently shaking my head at the level of guff.

The casual background of atrocities gets a bit sickening after a while, and also feels lazy and contrived, "Oh, yeah, THIS guy was so bad, he, um, got people's babies and killed them. (Hang on, I've done that one). And then he ate them! (Oh, done that one too). In front of the mother!!! (Yeah, that'll do)." This gets offensive pretty quick, especially when I think it's meant to be, you know, hard core - Moorcock saying his bad guys are, well, really bad - it's spotty nerds who've never punched someone in their life trying to impress each other with fight scenes. The author feels nothing for these throwaway victims, we're not really meant to either, they're just a bit of local colour (cf. the similarly blithe use of comic atrocity in Goodkind's second rate Wizard's First Rule). Thus D'Averc can simply flip from villain to hero because all those people he blithely killed were, remember, only MINOR characters.

It's all pretty bleak: I could maybe cope with the lazy plotting if we were having some fun on the way (as Fafard and the Grey Mouser at times do without this oppressive background), but the only hope of the book is the action. It's hard to care about the action when we know the author can and will just randomly pull out something from nowhere with no reference to a wider world (oh, hey, here's an ancient civilisation with vastly superior technological weapons we've stumbled onto. Phew, that was lucky).

So, after giving The Jewel in the Skull a bit of a rap I'm not so keen to move onto volume 3 (except to work out whether I should just clear this stuff from my bookshelves altogether).

2½*

Michael Moorcock, The Mad God's Amulet (DAW, 1968)

The adventures of Dorian Hawmoon, last duke of Koln, continue in The Mad God's Amulet, the second novel in the Chronicle of the Runestaff. Hawkmoon, with the immediate dangers of the first novel neutralized, wants nothing more than to return to the Kamarg and his friends. Of course, this is fantasy literature, where nothing is simple. He gets sidetracked a couple of times, we spend some more time in the company of the mysterious Warrior in Jet and Gold, things blow up, old enemies return, new enemies crop up, and then there's the Mad God of the title. All of which, of course, happens at the same time that the full might of Granbretan's army marches on the Kamarg, the last European outpost of independence against the depraved King-Emperor Huon.

Fun stuff. Very easy reading. All the womderful things I said about the first book still apply. Unfortunately, so do the pervasive typographical errors in the DAW editions. Whoever was asleep at the wheel the first time must have lapsed into a coma, because they are even more frequent here. I despair, at this point, of any legibility at all by the time I make it to the seventh book in the series.

Look for corrected editions, but definitely read this series. *** 1/2