THE WHISPERING SWARM

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

The Whispering Swarm may be the most autobiographical novel Michael Moorcock has written, focusing on a character also named Michael Moorcock, whose life was similar to the life led by the author, although many of his colleagues and acquaintances are pseudonymously represented.

The crux of the novel is Alsacia, the Sanctuary of the White Friars, where time seems to have no meaning and characters of legend drink, carouse, and plot side by side. The reader is asked to accept their strange region on faith and without question, just as Moorcock, the character, is meant to accept it.

Moorcock, the character, suffers from a strange form of tinnitus, which he describes as a whispering swarm. Aside from drug use, the only things that seems to be able to quell the disturbance is time he spends in Alsacia, which he accidentally stumbled across as a teenaged editor. Further drawing him into this enclave is that fact that the inhabitants of Alsacia appear to be taken from the pulps he enjoyed reading and editing, especially the highwaywoman Moll Midnight. Alsacia proves to be more than that, and its attraction for Moorcock is palpable.

Outside of Alsacia, Moorcock leads a relatively normal life, making friends with authors and musicians, building his career as editor, publisher, author, and musician, meeting and marrying Helena Denham, and raising two daughters with her. Helena, however, can’t complete Moorcock, and when he is with her he yearns from Moll and Alsacia, just as he yearns for Helena and London when he is in the strange world in which time is permeable and fiction intermingles with reality.

While the characters who surround Moorcock in London are based on, and often use the names, of real authors and musicians, the characters who inhabit Alsacia are just as clearly drawn from fictional sources, such as The Three Musketeers, folklore, or merely are archetypes who serve the author’s purpose. When Moorcock gets involved with the historical Prince Rupert, there is an undercurrent to him reminiscent of Moorcock’s own Warrior in Jet and Gold, who appeared in so many variations of the Eternal Champion cycle. When Rupert gets Moorcock involved in a rescue attempt of King Charles I, not only is there a strong sensation of Alexander Dumas’s Twenty Years After, but also of Moorcock’s own The Warhound and the World’s Pain.

Although The Whispering Swarm is reminiscent of much of Moorcock’s potboilers, the novels the character denigrates and views as mere pulp, there is a much more philosophical cast to the novel as a whole, putting it in the same category as Moorcock’s more serious works, such as the Pyat quartet or Mother London. The practical upshot of this is that the adventurous portions of the novel, whether the early raid on a trolley or the later attempt to rescue Charles I, lack the swashbuckler action that Moorcock has demonstrated time and again that he is capable of writing.

The Whispering Swarm is the first volume of a trilogy, but the adventure Moorcock participates in comes to a satisfactory conclusion, even if Moorcock’s relationships with his wife, children, and Alsacia are left unresolved to continue into the next installment. The novel may not flow with the ease of one of Moorcock’s early Elric novels, but it gives the reader much more meat to chew on.

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