Shelfbound

What: The Cornelius Chronicles by Michael Moorcock, a tetralogy starring British spy (amongst other things) Jerry Cornelius. Published in the US as The Cornelius Quartet.

Why: The adventures of Jerry Cornelius have been influential on a generation of sci-fi writers and graphic novelists; in particular, Shelfbound favorite Grant Morrison, who relied heavily on the character and his mythos for King Mob’s origin in The Invisibles.

“As he looked up at it, Jerry thought how strongly the house resembled his father’s tricky skull.

“Virtually every room, every passage, every alcove had booby traps, which was why Jerry was so valuable to the expedition.”

This Week: The Final Programme, “Preliminary Data” and “Phase 1″ (Chapters 1-5)

First Impressions: The cover of the old British paperback of The Cornelius Chronicles features all warm hues of orange, red, and yellow, with blue blobs surrounding the stylized lettering of the author’s name like a pair of parted lips. Beneath the text-heavy top half of the cover, a tiny Jerry Cornelius stands astride a futuristic hovering car, one arm across his body and the other lazily pointing a gun at nothing in particular. The marketing people promise that he’s “the most original science fiction hero of our times,” and the fact that “times” is plural may hit closer to the themes of the tetralogy than the marketers even realized.

For now, we are meant to see Cornelius as a rock god sci-fi super-spy Jesus, able to bed anyone, rock any suit and drive any car. He is the ultimate sex symbol of the Swinging 60s, for better or worse.

Text: The Final Programme is the first of the four Jerry Cornelius books and, thus far, upholds the promise of the cover. Cornelius is appropriately murky as a character, sliding in and out of a variety of scenarios with the kind of malleable identity necessary for a gun-toting, sister-loving, Eastern philosophy-espousing lover/assassin. So far it’s difficult to determine exactly what he wants (other than to be “the hero” for his sister Catherine), or what’s on the microfilm in his father’s house that instigates the plot. But the snappy dialogue and action keep the reading pace up, and the supporting characters–Frank the mad junkie, Miss Brunner the warrior-dominatrix, John (Cornelius’ Alfred), a gentleman named Mr. Smiles–provide a bizarre prism through which Cornelius himself appears practically normal.

Also, the idea of the Final Programme is in place:

“The ultimate point in the past would therefore be the ultimate point in the future. But what if something interrupted the cycle? An historical event, perhaps, of such importance that the whole pattern was changed. The nature of time, assuming that it was cyclical, would be disrupted. The circle broken, what might happen? … If she could get her computer built and start her other project as well, she might be the person who could save something from the wreckage. She could consolidate everything left into one big programme–the final programme, she thought. Idea and reality, brought together, unified.”

But what all this really means is yet to be revealed. The notion of time being cyclical, introduced in the Preliminary Data (this would be the “Prologue”), has some kind of presence in the book but it’s hard to say if it’s just there for Sci-Fi New Wave-y bullshitting or if it’s going to have a genuine impact on this first book. It greatly recalls Grant Morrison’s comic book opus The Invisibles–I say “recalls” even though it was written thirty years earlier because I read The Invisibles first–in which all time is the same time, simultaneously unchanging yet ready to fracture at the barest touch. I’ll talk more about Moorcock’s influence on The Invisibles, and particularly on the character of King Mob, as I get further into The Cornelius Chronicles, but certainly the thematic resonance is pervasive.

“‘I’m not sure why I bothered with the shooting–probably just because I enjoyed it.’”

At the conclusion of Phase 1, Jerry has infiltrated his father’s fortress and attempted to rescue both an important microfilm and his sister from his drug-crazed brother–and failed at both efforts. He leaves behind him a heap of bodies and spends weeks in the hospital recovering. The violence is oddly lackadaisical, as though the Cornelius brothers are just going through the motions, as indicated by Frank’s line above. Its ultimate futility is an interesting choice for the genre, usually divided between military rah-rah-ing and ponderous morality plays. In fact, it resembles nothing so much as a video game, Doom in text form. As a genre sci-fi has always been at its best when critiquing the ways in which society really operates; here, the “first person shooter” aspect of Phase 1, with death dealt meaninglessly, serves as an interesting commentary on the disconnect so many of us have with real violence. (Back to Morrison, who in an interview stated: “We should be grateful that we live in a culture so insulated from true horror it can afford to play with fear as entertainment.”)

Despite the grand failure of his efforts, Jerry seems relatively unfazed by the experience, and the episode seems complete. I wonder if we’re moving more into the idea of time and The Final Programme now, or if the home invasion and microfilm plot will continue to develop.

Questions: Phase 1 of The Final Programme is a mostly complete novella, quite able to stand on its own. How will it contribute to the larger plan of the novel as a whole? And will we learn anything more about Cornelius … are we even meant to? How will the novel turn now to the ideas presented in the Preliminary Data and Miss Brunner’s Final Programme? And speaking of Miss Brunner … did she physically absorb her submissive male companion? Can that be right? Oh so much more to come.