Jerusalem Commands: The Third Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet

By Michael Moorcock

Book Overview

"I will admit I was lured into temptation during the twenties and thirties, and I blame no one for what happened then, least of all myself."

Unmistakably, this is the voice of Colonel Pyat, addict, inventor, and bizarre Everyman for the twentieth century. In Jerusalem Commands, the third of the Pyat quartet, our hero schemes and fantasises his way from New York to Hollywood, from Cairo to Marrakech, from cult success to the utter limits of sexual degradation, leaving a trail of mechanical and human wreckage in his wake as he crashes towards an inevitable appointment with the worst nightmare this century has to offer.

It is Michael Moorcock's extraordinary achievement to convert the life of Maxim Pyatnitski into epic and often hilariously comic adventure. Sustained by his dreams and profligate inventions, his determination to turn his back on the realities of his own origins, Pyat runs from crisis to crisis, every ruse a further link in a vast chain of deceit, suppression, betrayal. Yet, in his deranged self-deception, his monumentally distorted vision, this thoroughly unreliable narrator becomes a lens for focusing, through the dimensions of wild farce and chilling terror, on an uneasy brand of truth.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1604864931
• ISBN13: 9781604864939
• Release Date: July 2013
• Publisher: PM Press
• Length: 496 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Pyat -- the Big Lie continues

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 nightmare of the twentieth century. This is the third volume in a sequence the Times Literary Supplement suggested was a modern 'Human Comedy', comparing the author with Balzac. Not a fantasy, scarcely an historical novel, in that, as with the other volumes, it moves back and forth between various periods of the real 20th century, including the present day.