There is no denying that Michael Moorcock is an inventive writer. I've only started to read his work recently, starting with that irreverent novel about Jesus "Behold the Man", the peripatetic adventures concerning Elric, and now "Dancers At the End of Time".
This series of books is set in a future well beyond our own time. For Jherek Carnelian and the rest of his kind, our world is so far in the past (hundreds of thousands of millenia in the past) that history and Hollywood, fiction and fact have blurred together. Moorcock takes us so far into the future that "sand" on a beach is actually crushed bone, and characters behave in ways which would shock even the most open-minded people of our own society.
In Jherek Carnelian's society it is impossible for anyone to feel shock. No one is encumbered with the conventions and standards which we in our own time feel obliged to live by. In the future life is one long game without rules, a fairground in which to indulge. Death is practically an obsolete notion. Sounds like heaven on Earth, doesn't it? As space and time are no longer barriers, it wouldn't surprise me if another time traveller like Karl Glogauer had gone into the past and "implanted" the concept of heaven - the misinterpreted promise that all the misery and suffering, the turmoil and deprivation, would eventually be rewarded with everlasting life and blissful harmony. All in exchange for clean living and a lot of faith. This would have been a cruel trick for a time traveller to play, even if it wasn't intentional.
In the early 20th century Marcel Duchamp once declared that anyone can be an artist. In Jherek's time everyone is an artist, able to create their own environments to whatever specifications they desire, alter their bodily appearance whenever the whim takes them, and build menageries filled with specimans culled from anywhere and anywhen.
Jherek has a fondness for anything associated with his favourite period the 19th century. When it comes to nostalgia past eras are best loved by those who never experienced them. It's like someone obsessed with Robin Hood holding a romantic view of the Middle Ages. One object of beauty coveted by Jherek is the elegant Mrs Amelia Underwood. Much of Moorcock's story concerns Jherek's attempts to win the heart of Amelia Underwood in a series of well-intentioned gestures and temporal wanderings. I don't want to say too much more than that, but rest assured, it's an eventful ride. Sometimes it's hard to keep track of what the characters look like as they keep changing their appearance, but just hang in there. When Jherek pursues Amelia in 1896 he's like the proverbial fish out of water. You won't be disappointed.
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