The third novel of the Pyat quartet finds Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski scheming his way from New York to Hollywood, Cairo to Marrakesh, from cult success to the utter limits of sexual degradation, leaving a trail of mechanical and human wreckage as he crashes towards an appointment with the worst...
Originally published on my blog here in July 2001.The second of the Pyat novels - centred around a minor character who originally appeared in the Cornelius Quartet - takes his story from his escape from the collapsing Russia of the civil war which followed the 1917 revolution to a new life in the...
Byzantium Endures, the first of the Pyat Quartet, introduces one of Michael Moorcock's most magnificent creations - Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski. Born in Kiev on the cusp of the twentieth century, he discovers the pleasures of sex and cocaine and glimpses a sophisticated world beyond his horizons...
After three books of tall tales that often completely conflict with history, genius "inventions", rampant drug use, rape and more unnecessary and arbitrary insults directed at Jews than there are Jews in the world, what's left for a potentially insane and completely unlikeable protagonist to go? ...