Gloriana; or, The Unfulfill'd Queen
by Michael Moorcock
(Warner Aspect, $14.00; 480 pages, trade paperback; published in August
2004.)
One of British fantasist Michael Moorcock's  greatest
achievements is 1978's Gloriana; or, The Unfulfill'd Queen, a
lush alternate history set in the immense and decadent royal castle
of Albion -- a fantasized and eroticized Elizabethan England untouched
by Christianity. This novel won several awards, including the World
Fantasy.
Gloriana explicitly engages two very different classics of
British fantasy. Its portrait of the excesses of imperialism and its
critique of chivalrous virtue contrast with Edmund Spenser's Elizabethan
ode to knighthood and empire, The Faerie Queene. The architecture
of Gloriana's castle, its detailed and allegorical descriptions, and
its complex intrigues all render homage to Mervyn Peake's similarly
constructed Gormenghast cycle.
A disturbing and claustrophobic work, Gloriana is filled with
monstrous deeds, vindictive characters, and terrible secrets. Its titular
queen -- wandering through an intricate edifice that mirrors her soul
-- must hold her empire together and come to terms with sexual longings
that no amount of intercourse can satisfy.
In 1993, responding to criticism from Andrea Dworkin, Moorcock revised
and sanitized his classic. The problem was with a particularly disquieting
-- yet thematically essential -- rape scene in the penultimate chapter.
The replacement scene was ludicrously pedantic and overwritten. The
characters suddenly behaved completely out of character; their speech
and thoughts -- previously mysterious and subtle -- suddenly degenerated
into heavy-handed histrionics. Moorcock had eviscerated and betrayed
the dangerous and ambiguous heart of his powerful creation. Every new
or changed sentence -- so stilted and awkward compared to the creepy
elegance of the original -- felt, ironically, like a rape of the text.
In yet another new edition, Moorcock wisely restores the original
chapter -- and, in an appendix, also includes the regrettable revision.
Also for this edition, the author provides a new and informative introduction
describing and contextualizing the history of his controversial masterpiece.
Originally published in
The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 22 January 2005.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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