Michael Moorcock's THE LAUGHTER OF CARTHAGE

 Do I hate myself? Sometimes I'm pretty sure I hate myself. Or at least the imp of the perverse sitting on my shoulder really hates me, because I had the terrific idea that now, while Ukraine is dealing with a Russian invasion/occupation effort and state legislatures all over the U.S. are trying their hardest to roll back every bit of social progress our country has made in my lifetime and before, I somehow decided it would be an interesting time to read the rest of Michael Moorcock's sprawling, challenging and really hard-to-handle Pyat Quartet, also known as Between the Wars, being the continuing first person account of pretty much the whole of the 20th Century by a narrator so unlreliable as to make Severian seem like Walter Cronkite.

I first encountered the character of Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski , aka Colonel Pyat, back in 2015, back when The Former Guy was just an annoying game show host and we still believed in things like the political norms we'd come to take for granted like peaceful transfer of power and presidents getting to nominate and confirm supreme court justices no matter at what point in their terms vacancies occurred. The first novel in the quartet, Byzantium Endures, took Pyat from his birth in Kyiv on January 1, 1900 (Julian calendar), through the Russian Revolution and a little beyond. It introduced us to the thoroughly unsavory (as in self-aggrandizing, lying, womanizing, alcoholic, cocaine-addicted, anti-semitic, racist, paranoid, etc.) figure, first as someone the author (Michael Moorcock's self-insert-stand-in) met late in Pyat's life in London and to whom the author promised to see Pyat's memoirs into print, sight unseen, sure they'd be fascinating. But as the fictionalized Moorcock takes great pains to explain to us in a vast prologue to the text of the novel, Pyat's memoirs were really just a mess of ramblings in multiple languages, newspaper clippings, blueprints for inventions he claimed to have come up with first and other messy and barely legible ephemera, i.e. we're already pretty annoyed by the very idea of Pyat before we see a page of the novel's actual text. Furthermore, Moorcock took even greater pains to create a text as a sort of afterword to give us a glimpse of what the fictionalized Moorcock had to work with to produce the work in our hands, and it's a masterpiece of the kind we'd expect more from Philip K. Dick than Michael Moorcock. I compared it in my original review to Confessions of a Crap Artist and to that I still hold. Jack Isidore, eat your heart out.

Volume 2, The Laughter of Carthage, picks up more or less right where Byzantium Endures left off, in about 1920. After a long ship voyage as an exile/refugee from Odessa to Constantinople in which Pyat has shared a cabin with the future mother of Eternal Champion Jerry Cornelius but established a torrid shipboard romance with a widowed Russian Baroness, Pyat lands in Constantinople and starts debauching himself, continuing to see his Baroness, who hopes he'll run away with her and her exquisite daughter to Berlin, but also finding a young Romanian sex worker who is a dead ringer for his childhood sweetheart, Esmé, Pyat takes a while to get back to his career as an inventor.

Before we know it, though, he is rescued/taken prisoner after almost getting to try out his flying machine, in which all the parts, including a fuel tank and propeller, are strapped onto a human being, somewhere in Anatolia. Pyat bullshits his way into getting a free ride back to Constantinople, where all he has are lady troubles and a healthy dose of paranoia that Carthage (his synechdoche for, confusingly, both the Jews and the Muslims and, for good measure, the Catholics -- basically everybody who isn't "Byzantium", which, as he established in the first novel, he considers to be, basically, Tsarist/White Russia and whomever else he can convince himself is Protestant and White enough to be worthy of continuing to bear the Torch of Civilization) has never stopped pursuing him in the form of Bolshevik spies. Before escaping Constantinople, Pyat has to do some unsavory tap-dancing to avoid getting reported to the local authorities as a pedophile, ending by complicating his situation still further by convincing the Baroness that "Esmé" is actually a spy in whose trap he is haplessly caught. As he plots to "rescue" Esmé, the Baroness plots to rescue him, and it's all vintage Pyat. Whatta jerk. But there's so much worse to come.

Within a year I would become so famous the matter of one small factory and an insignificant municipal airport would seem a petty concern indeed. I had been given the opportunity to conquer the entire new world with my genius. A strong, scientifically advanced America would be the most powerful country on Earth. Once celebrated here, I would automatically come to influence the world. Then at last Russia, my old spiritual Russia, could be rescued from the Bolshevik scavengers. The steppe would grow green and beautiful again; the wheat-lands would bloom, the forests retain their tranquil profundity and the new golden cities would arrive, the cities of reborn Byzantium.

Such are our man's thoughts as he escapes from his latest collapsed effort to make his fortune from his "genius" invention of a slightly better airship and the development of Memphis, TN as the airship capital of the U.S., if not the world, rescuing the American South from its economic woes endured since the Civil War. Alarm bells should be ringing at this. And they should ring even louder when I tell you this scene takes place in 1922. And that our man Pyat's favorite movie is Birth of a Nation.

That's right, Pyat's new path to fame, fortune and influence is gonna be as a traveling rabble rouser for the second version of the Ku Klux Klan (hilariously exposed and lampooned by Robert Evans and friends as a proto-Multi-Level-Marketing grift in this episode of Behind the Bastards. Indeed, this second volume of Moorcock's most despicable anti-hero contains a murderers row of main characters from that podcast, with even Old Shatterhands and his creator, Karl May, getting name checked here. We could almost call The Laughter of Carthage "Behind the Bastards: The Novel" except it was published way back in 1984, likely before anyone involved with that show was even born. But I mean, Pyat even found the White House "disappointing" compared to the Klankrest in Atlanta, GA). But first we have a charming interlude in Europe, in which Pyat spoils Esmé rotten in luxury hotels, going to movies and clubs in 1920s Rome where he rubs shoulders with lots of actual historical figures who eventually become close friends/supporters of one Benito Mussolini, of whom Pyat already approves, of course, and then makes a stop off in Paris, intending next to join Mrs. Cornelius in England but only after he's extracted some profit for his genius airship ideas which, of course, come to nothing when "Carthage" strikes again and bankrupts the nascent airship company he and several French speculators have formed, and his French partners have all naturally made poor, innocent Pyat the scapegoat and never mind that he was living entirely off money he borrowed from an old friend from his Odessa days who, of course, has a disgusting homosexual crush on Pyat (never mind that Pyat is himself quite comfortably bisexual, and his joyful reunion with a Russian Prince from the first novel quickly turns into an affair as passionate as what he continues to have with the underaged Esmé, whom he has convinced everybody is his sister) and is thus pretty much yet another avatar of "Carthage", and it was only the extravagance with which he spent and "invested" his borrowed money (mostly on cocaine) that convinced the French partners that he was sound enough to trust with their capital and credit in the first place... 

Anyway, soon he has to get out of France quick, but can't swing a trip to England yet OR afford passage for both Esmé and himself to his next destination, the USA, where he pretty much repeats his French adventure except this time it's down in Memphis, and instead of escaping to another country to try again with his airship schemes (which again have blown up through no fault of his own), he falls in amongst the upper echelons of the Ku Klux Klan, who  bring him aboard a fancy paddle steamer on the Mississippi to give a special briefing to the colorfully hooded and gowned elite of the KKK about the dangers of Bolsheviks, Muslims, Catholics and International Jewry from his first-hand knowledge. His remarks are so entirely to the Klan's liking that he gets booked for repeat performances all over the country in the company of a formidable and sexy-yet-mature woman who chaperones him about the nation and fucks his brains out in train cars and hotels from coast to coast while he spreads his message of Peace and Love but only if you're "Byzantium." Along the way, Pyat manages to continue to learn nothing until this, too falls apart and he now has the Invisible Empire on his tail, another set of enemies that should be pretty hard to square as "Carthage" but he kind of starts framing them that way in his head anyway because Pyat and then, wonder of wonders, he is once again rescued by Mrs. Cornelius, who made her own way from Constantinople but also got sidetracked into the USA as part of a dance troupe of British Beauties entertaining in vaudeville-type theaters up and down California with the vague hope of being Discovered and made into a Movie Star, which is where we leave her and Pyat, who is absolutely convinced that he can make her dreams come true and never mind his track record on bringing his own fantasies to reality. Hey, he's only 22.

Many reviewers have complained that this second volume of the Pyat Quartet is not as interesting as the first, and they have a point in that Byzantium Endures is set against one of the most dramatic backdrops 20th century literature had to offer: World War I and the Russian Revolution. It also gave us genuine pathos in the stories of Pyat's mother and their neighbors, including the sad fate of Esmé the First, who only ever wanted to become a nurse and save the lives of Ukraine's brave fighting men, but, in Pyat's absence while he was off fighting and getting lost and getting conscripted as an agent by both sides at various times, got herself raped multiple times when the triumphant Red Army invaded and did what conquering armies do best in the early days of conquest. The Laughter of Carthage continues with the painstaking research and recreation of bygone days that made the first volume even more special, but replaces the drama with mere movement -- a picaresque -- in which we watch Pyat comically misunderstand his place in the world, the nature of his companions, and, as I said, fails ever to learn from his experiences, choosing at every failure to simply blame it on "Carthage" and shake his fist at enemies who barely know he exists.

Where the book, like its predecessor, succeeds enough to be worth the comparative tedium, though, is how brilliantly it achieves Moorcock's primary goal in telling us his ultimate anti-hero story here in our mundane real world: helping its readers to feel at last like they understand how capital H Hate happens, how people who seem perfectly ordinary and might even be ok to have a beer with once in a while are actually monsters who think the only people who count as people and deserve to share the Earth are able-bodied, well-educated, fair skinned, Protestant, cocaine-snorting fascists like Maxim Pyatnitski. It's an understanding that isn't pleasant to have, but is necessary for us in this dumb century -- a care package full of survival tips from the dumb century that came before it. Anyway, I really just want to see what kind of ridiculous adventures Pyat has had -- or believes himself to have had, or expects us to believe he had -- before he winds up a cranky old fart running a junk shop in Portobello Road. According to the blurb for the third volume, Jerusalem Commands, he's going to Egypt next. I'm down.