The Final Programme Read online

  Also available from Michael Moorcock, Titan Books and Titan Comics

  A NOMAD OF THE TIME STREAMS

  The Warlord of the Air

  The Land Leviathan

  The Steel Tsar

  THE ETERNAL CHAMPION SERIES

  The Eternal Champion

  Phoenix in Obsidian

  The Dragon in the Sword

  THE CORUM SERIES

  The Knight of the Swords

  The Queen of the Swords

  The King of the Swords

  The Bull and the Spear

  The Oak and the Ram

  The Sword and the Stallion

  THE CORNELIUS QUARTET

  A Cure for Cancer (March 2016)

  The English Assassin (April 2016)

  The Condition of Muzak (May 2016)

  THE MICHAEL MOORCOCK LIBRARY

  Elric of Melniboné

  Elric: Sailor on the Seas of Fate

  MICHAEL MOORCOCK’S ELRIC

  Volume 1: The Ruby Throne

  Volume 2: Stormbringer

  The Final Programme

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783291779

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781783291762

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First Titan edition: February 2016

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © Michael and Linda Moorcock, 1968, and Multiverse Inc. Revised version copyright © Michael and Linda Moorcock, 2016, and Multiverse Inc. All characters, the distinctive likenesses thereof, and all related indicia are TM and © 2016 Michael and Linda Moorcock and Multiverse Inc.

  Edited by John Davey.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  THE FINAL PROGRAMME

  Illustrated by Malcolm Dean

  Additional illustrations by Harry Douthwaite

  For Alfred Bester

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  ALSO BY MICHAEL MOORCOCK

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION

  by John Clute

  PRELIMINARY DATA

  PHASE 1

  PHASE 2

  PHASE 3

  PHASE 4

  TERMINAL DATA

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  THE REPOSSESSION OF JERRY CORNELIUS

  by John Clute

  Once upon a time a rather unremarkable composer and music publisher named Anton Diabelli composed a rather unremarkable waltz—simple to hum and easy to remember—and then he had an idea. As he was always looking for material to publish, especially music that could be played by amateurs on the piano, why not (he thought) take this waltz around to as many composers as possible (eventually he found fifty of them) and have them each write a variation on the thing? Then he could put the fifty-one pieces into what was commonly called (at this time, 1823) a pasticcio, a collection of works by various hands, all in the style of some original composer, and then hawk his pasticcio far and wide. Which is more or less what happened. But what if Diabelli had been a trickier, more formidable composer? What if he had given his fifty composers not the simple-hearted waltz history records, but only a variation of the real tune?

  Rather more recently, in January 1965, a young writer and author named Michael Moorcock, who seemed rather unremarkable at the time, composed a regular waltz of a novel called The Final Programme, excerpts from which caused some comment when published soon after in NEW WORLDS, the SF magazine he had then been editing for about half a year. Easy to read, linearly plotted, full of SF twists and turns, this novel introduced to the SF world (and in fact seemed to donate to some of its writers) a new kind of infinitely malleable template for myth-making called Jerry Cornelius, simple to hum and easy to remember, a sexually ambivalent, amoral (but exceedingly oral) portmanteau anti-hero who was part saint and part devil, an instant myth of the pop sixties whose tastes in music, clothes, cars, drugs, wombs, technology and apotheosis all seemed to make him an authentic emblem of Swinging London and (more narrowly) of the New Wave in SF which Moorcock had instigated by giving space to its writers in his magazine, which soon became notorious. As did its mascot. Moorcock encouraged his fellow writers to use Cornelius as a template in stories of their own. There may not have been fifty of them, and NEW WORLDS hardly became a pasticcio, but all the same it was pretty clear—indeed advertised—that The Final Programme was being used, sometimes very competently, as the initial theme for a whole series of mythopoeic variations, whole multiverses of riffs, on Jerry himself; on Miss Brunner, his collaborator in instant Messiah-hood; on Frank, his shifty, scrounging brother; and on Catherine, the sister he’s deeply in love with.

  But what if The Final Programme turned out not to be the basic template tune at all? What if it was only a variation on the real tune?

  * * *

  The fate of Diabelli’s theme is well known, for the poor devil had the singular luck to approach Ludwig van Beethoven with his little template waltz. Sick, deaf, and ageing, the great composer slammed the door in his face at first, but later, somehow intrigued by the tune, he told Diabelli that he would undertake the task after all. He then exceeded his brief; instead of one variation he wrote thirty-three—they comprise his final and perhaps greatest work for solo piano. They last an hour. You could call them the real tune.

  What happened with Michael Moorcock is rather different. After seeming to give Jerry Cornelius to the world as a pop saviour, he turned and took him back, just as though he were Diabelli and Beethoven both, in one skin. The final result, all thirty-three variations, became the four central Cornelius volumes now known as The Cornelius Quartet: The Final Programme (1968); A Cure for Cancer (1971); The English Assassin (1972) and The Condition of Muzak (1977). Being published over such a long span, these volumes may have initially given off a sense of improvisation; but in fact they read best when understood as a single sustained novel. Moreover, like most books whose structure is most easily described in musical terms, the meaning of The Cornelius Quartet only comes clear as the end is neared. What may have seemed, in the first instalment, to be the main theme turns out, in the end, to have been a variation; only as The Condition of Muzak reaches apotheosis do we hear the real tune in its entirety.

  That basic theme—it is Jerry Cornelius’s fundamental obsessive concern through all his various incarnations—is easy to put but hard to play: because authenticity in the city is a costume drama, how can any late-twentieth-century city dweller acquire and maintain an identity strategically capable of constituting urban life?

  The presentation of self in everyday life in the inner city is a form of theatre, where identity is rôle and where entropy is high, for time is passing. Jerry Cornelius is the paradigmatic native of the inner city; his rôles constitute a genuine paradigm set of strategies for living there. His inner city is London (but could be New York), his patch is Ladbroke Grove. His real story (I believe) r
uns from about 1965 to about a decade later, a period during which London had been destroying itself as a place to live, hence the rapacity of his need for safety and solace. It is for this reason that the various masquerades and venues which make up his story read as a series of precariously achieved enclaves, or wombs. To shift the metaphor, Jerry’s life is a constant series of auditions. His constant failures are the failures of the city (circa 1975) where ultimately there are no enclaves, no permanent wombs, for time rots them. No music stays fresh. Jonathan Raban speaks to something of the same general point in his socio-literary study of the meaning of urban life, Soft City (1974):

  Sociology and anthropology are not disciplines which take easily to situations where people are able to live out their fantasies, not just in the symbolic action of ritual, but in the concrete theatre of society at large. The city is one such situation. Its conditions effectively break down many of the conventional distinctions between dream life and real life; the city inside the head can be transformed, with the aid of the technology of style, into the city on the streets. To a very large degree, people can create their cosmologies at will, liberating themselves from the deterministic schemes which ought to have led them into a wholly different style of life. To have a platonic conception of oneself, and to make it spring forth, fully clothed, out of one’s head, is one of the most dangerous and essential city freedoms, and it is a freedom which has been ignored and underestimated by almost everyone except novelists.

  Michael Moorcock is one of those novelists. His main gloss on Raban may be that the city in our time being deeply entropic, life within it therefore tends to the condition of Muzak.

  But he’s also an SF writer, and the whole of The Final Programme is sparkling good SF. Being the most extended single riff on the basic theme of identity maintenance in the entire tetralogy, it is consequently the most easily assimilated story, very remote from the darker, more complex, virtually Edwardian verisimilitude of later pages, grimmer times. The Final Programme is a constitutive image of the sunshine of surviving at a time (1965) when (perhaps for Moorcock, too) London bore an air of slightly pixillated ebullience. London swung. The story reflects this. Jerry and Miss Brunner (here, a computer technician with enormous powers—it’s only in the final book that she’s revealed for what she always was in the city, a tight-assed schoolmarm from Ladbroke Grove) clash and conspire from here to Lapland and Angkor Wat (to be similarly grounded as a dream of Derry & Toms department store half-choked in its own overgrown roof garden), and eventually get their computers and their super-science formulae together in a womblike cave where they merge themselves into a new hermaphrodite Messiah for whom the world is “tasty”, so it eats the world.

  Altogether there’s a lot of vampirism in both The Final Programme and succeeding parts of the tetralogy; part of the time it’s an SF energy-transfer, a countervailing response to the loss of usable energy in this venue or that; ultimately it reads as an analogue of the use people make of each others’ images (or life-forces) in coping with the interplay of dramaturgies that constitutes social life in the deep city. In any case, Jerry Cornelius as polymorphous Messiah could be said to constitute the false theme of the tetralogy, the spunky little Diabelli waltz; for though it makes a nice story (and helped fuel the New Wave’s own wry messianism), generally speaking Jerry is anything but…

  In A Cure for Cancer, which is a kind of negative scherzo on the pattern of the first book, he has polarised into a black with white hair, and continues to vampirise those about him to maintain his own image-stability. A couple of years have passed in the real world; the scene has darkened, witness the headlines and news reports and arms advertisements that appear more and more frequently in the text and whose function is not to make editorial points about the world (they’d date very quickly), but to demonstrate some of the ways in which the world acts as a shaping, controlling input on its victims (us, Jerry); headlines are like executive memos in the Castle. War has come, American “advisors” have turned Europe into something very like the news reports of life in Vietnam. We are inundated with media. Jerry Cornelius makes to dance in step, to keep alive, to recover his beloved sister. He runs a transmogrification service which forcibly does to others what the media do to all of us, thus maintaining a kind of intricate balance. He goes to a strange America (perhaps Kafka’s) continuing a conflict with the newly introduced, loathsome Bishop Beesley, who with Miss Brunner seems to represent the only kind of officialdom Moorcock is willing to deal with directly; their life-denying “orderliness” constantly threatens Jerry’s identity and the enclaves of aesthetic harmony he and his compatriots try to inhabit.

  We meet most of these compatriots in the next volume, The English Assassin, where the action broadens and deepens significantly. We are into the 1970s in the city, and Jerry has retreated very far indeed within the action. Having gone into a fugue of horror at the collapse of the century, he spends most of the novel in a coffin, beneath the surface of the newly ornate narrative, whose Edwardian cadences depict a turn-of-the-century dream of the romance of Empire at its hectic Jubilee peak. The English Assassin is also full of nostalgia for Edwardian visions of what the future might hold, dreams of a time when art nouveau flying boats and zeppelins would criss-cross a balkanised Europe with fin-de-siècle lords and ladies, a time when all the weapons and appurtenances of technological progress would make up a glorious raree-show. Every single invention would be fixed still in time long enough to be memorised, the great Duesenberg would not turn to junk before we had a chance to make a symbol of it, every surface of the steam yacht would be polished and legible and reflect our faces. Into these scenes of nostalgia for an endurable future are introduced various lords and ladies, the tetralogy’s remaining important characters, who dance out their rôles on Jerry’s coffin: Sebastian Auckinek, the two Nyes (Captain and Major), Colonel Pyat, Prinz Lobkowitz, and most importantly Una Persson (stage singer and dancer, revolutionary, Catherine’s lover and Jerry’s) and Mrs Cornelius (his appallingly greedy, vulgar, foul-mouthed libidinous mother, who seems to represent an earlier form of city life—a sly, savage, indomitable, wise Cockney survivor of everything the century can throw at her). These lords and ladies are alive in their own right, but also represent Jerry’s desperate attempts to apply fixative to the Empire and to time, so as to maintain himself in a lousy era.

  Of course it doesn’t work. The Edwardian vision of Empire is deeply tubercular; the Edwardian dreams of the future are hopelessly innocent, hopelessly pre-war. The bright clothing and the jamborees rot, like Jerry in his coffin. The entropic decay of the British Empire mirrors the entropic decay of Jerry’s attempts at constituting images of survival in dehumanised London as the sixties turn sourly downwards into the seventies. A dozen futures have died for us SF readers before we could breathe them to life. Golems stalk the council flats. The English Assassin ends in fire and death. There is a lot of ageing going on: it’s the nature of the catastrophe.

  And so we reach The Condition of Muzak, which repossesses Jerry Cornelius from messiah-hood and other intoxications by retelling his earlier lives in its own complex terms, as phases in a harlequinade. In The Final Programme and A Cure for Cancer Jerry has seemed to be Harlequin himself, the dominant figure of all the show, manipulating costumes and plot at will so as to reach a point of stable bliss with Columbine, who is his sister Catherine. He snaps his fingers at incest, and the world shrivels at his dancing feet. But of course it doesn’t work. In The English Assassin he has gone to earth, and as we reach the dense heart of The Condition of Muzak (the chapters leading up to his final Ladbroke Grove party, which this time is a genuine masquerade) we find him undergoing a strange metamorphosis. He is deeply withdrawn (therefore London is deserted), but manages to struggle back to the roof garden at Derry & Toms as to a tropical womb, where he settles into a foetal position and, umbilically tied by earphones to music emblematic of his past lives, sinks into near coma, which is no way for Harlequin to act. The whole departme
nt store is covered with roots and vines and undergrowth, but finally Major Nye and Hythloday (the Professor Hira of The Final Programme, whose first meeting with Jerry thus anticipates his last) discover Jerry and drag him to safety in a nearby house, where he lapses into catatonia, only to be ultimately aroused, and reborn, as Pierrot. It must be a great relief. Deep within he has always been incapable of the coercive manipulations his rôles as Harlequin have laid on him. Deep within he has always really been Pierrot the Weeper, helplessly in love with Columbine, and always at risk of losing her to the genuine Harlequin, who is Una Persson.

  Indeed, everyone is relieved. There is a fugue of joy. Though Jerry is only a figurehead now, the Empire in all its parti-coloured glory returns to honour him as the King of London in a coronation parade lasting hours in the bright sun. The dream of Empire has come true. Time passes in this dream. Christmas is nigh. Over the course of an extraordinary sequence that marries Dickens and Wells in a description of a London heartbreakingly clement and legible as the snow falls and everyone sings carols, Harlequin leads us through gaily bedizened streets to the Ladbroke Grove party, whose zone of peace has spread this time throughout the town. Jerry is there as Pierrot, Catherine as Columbine is in a magic sleep, Harlequin awakens her lovingly (Una Persson loves Catherine too), but gives her up to Pierrot. In a London prepared to rejoice with him at such a moment, Jerry Cornelius has won his heart’s desire.

  But of course it doesn’t work.

  Framing the rest of The Condition of Muzak are several chapters of another complexion entirely, also set in the Ladbroke Grove area of London, Jerry’s mythical home, but no longer is Ladbroke Grove mythical. Jerry Cornelius is a teenager who lives with his gluttonous mother and his seedy brother Frank in a slum flat. He is rather seedy himself. He spends much of his time in a “tiny balcony formed by the house’s front porch”, which he plans to turn someday into “an ornamental conservatory with semi-tropical plants”, and suddenly we realise with a sort of horror that this imaginary conservatory grounds the roof garden at Derry & Toms in the same way that that roof garden grounds most of the exotic locations (like Angkor Wat) of the entire tetralogy. It is a shocking discovery. Jerry Cornelius is a grubby little daydreamer. Worse follows. He is a rock musician, or hopes to be one, but his taste isn’t really very secure, he’s not much on the guitar, and when he finally gets the chance to perform in public (at an amateur gig under an elevated highway) he’s too spaced out to make any sense at all. It’s the real world, in which time passes, taking us down. For Jerry, as the years pass, life seems to be a series of bad auditions. Most of his fellow denizens of Ladbroke Grove are in no better shape than he is; the Edwardian tapestry of lords and ladies (with two exceptions) turn out to be a klatch of petty entrepreneurs; Auchinek is a music agent, for instance, while Frank sells fake antiques to tourists at the Portobello Road market. Gradually Jerry achieves some success, on the stage, acting Harlequin; he has teamed up with his sister and Una Persson (she remains vital) and they all have sex together; playing games with themselves. His mother is also unchanged, or so it seems. She remains all appetite, she remains indomitable; because she survives the Cornelius clan survives. Then, in the last pages of the novel, she dies. Her death is not like the play-deaths earlier in the tetralogy. She is dead. She is dead. As the novel closes—for she is dead—Jerry is on his way to tell his pregnant sister the terrible news of the real fact of death.