Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Back with a vengeance, 9 April 2003
Michael Moorcock's uncanny ability to capture the mood of the times can be found in all his Jerry Cornelius work which remains as relevant to the present as it did to the sixties and seventies. He has continued to write Cornelius stories in response to his times and this one, with its references to Cromwell in Ireland and the British in the Middle East, is one of the best. A response to 9/11, it brings on all the old cast plus some lovely caricatures of George Bush and Colin Powell as
they make the world into a quagmire of globally warmed weather and weapons of mass destruction. Witty, black comedy. Nobody
does it better. The apocalypse with a joke and a song. And
while you're at it pick up the Cornelius Quartet. It's amazing
how much of our present dilemma Moorcock predicted.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Still flying the flag, 16 Dec 2002
By A Customer
At a time when most sf has become bland, safe and too neat for its own good, Moorcock still flies the old flags of innovation and radicalism. This, as Alan Moore says in his introduction, shows that Jerry Cornelius was at least forty years ahead of his time and writing about the world we are just beginning to know.
Angry, careless of the world's approval, full of eloquence and wild wit, FIRING THE CATHEDRAL shows that Moorcock is still the boss. The majority of those who once sought to follow him have fallen into doing safe riffs on old themes. Only Moorcock and Ballard, of the 60s New Wavers, continue to forge into unknown territory and offer us stimulus where even the most ambitious of
their contemporaries have set themselves up as oil refiners.
FIRING THE CATHEDRAL is about blood, betrayal and butchery, about hypocrisy and horror. About whistling a happy (or at least sardonic) tune as the world turns to crap. This is what the young folk should be doing and which, sadly, so few of them are
turning out, these days. Read it with Stuart Home's 99 Things To Do With A Dead Princess and feel the blood start to move in your veins again!
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The first fiction about 9/11. Brilliant., 10 Dec 2002
This is probably the first piece of fiction to deal with the events of Sept. 11th in the USA. It also deals with George W. Bush's policies in general and combines everything brilliantly.
As Alan Moore says in his intelligent introduction, Jerry Cornelius was born in the 60s but he is really a man of the 21st century. His stories become increasingly relevant to us as time moves on. This book is a phantasmagoria of quotations (many from the 1930s and 1940s, showing how our present situation has its roots in British and American policies since that time) and grotesque images, very funny comedy, pointed criticism and, dare I say it, real wisdom. It starts in a protected shopping mall where the 'Gandi' (a combination of Gandalf, Father Christmas and Uncle Sam) is giving an audience and it ends with a vision of a ruined, war-ravaged, globally warmed England whose inhabitants have to purchase domed environments in order to go on living their familiar middle class lives. Satire, of course. But also visionary fiction of the highest order. This is a limited edition, so my advice is to snap it up while you can. I doubt if you will find anything more substantial for quite a while.
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