Breakfast in the Ruins: A Novel of Inhumanity is a 1972 novel by Michael Moorcock, which mixes historical and speculative fiction. It was first published in the United Kingdom by the New English Library.[1] The novel centres on Karl Glogauer, who is also the protagonist of Moorcock's Nebula Award winning novella, Behold the Man, his homosexual exploits with an unnamed man from Nigeria, and his fantasies of the past and lives that he could have led.
The novel is divided into nineteen chapters, the first of which is set in the 'present' (1971), the next seventeen spaced out at roughly ten-year intervals from 1871 through to 1990, with the last chapter set once again in the present. The chapters begin and end in the present, with a short scene involving Glogauer and the man, which vary from philosophical discussion to sex involving dominance and submission. The chapters are each also followed, except for chapter nineteen, by a short section entitled What would you do?, which presents sadistic choices, a Morton's Fork, such as:
"You have three children.
One is eight years old. A girl.
One is six years old. A girl.
One is a few months old. A boy.
You are told that you can save any two of them from death, but not all three. You are given five-minutes to choose. Which one would you sacrifice?"[2]
Other dilemmas presented are not that cruel, such as:
Would you interrupt a pleasant evening out in order to help a stumbling, very messy, completely drunk beggar?
Would you let your vet put down an old dog which you don't really like but who can live another year or two?
If your girlfriend becomes pregnant, would you help her get an abortion, suggest that she have the child and offer to help care for it, or abandon her?
How would you react to a seduction attempt by the mother of your girlfriend, who is quite attractive herself?
Would you put your old mother into a nursing home or change your life to be able to take care of her?
If the doctor tells you that your father has only one year to live, would you reveal it to your father?
If the doctor tells that you yourself have only one year to live, what would you do with that year?
Plot summary
The novel's first chapter begins in London, with Karl Glogauer travelling through Kensington on his way to the Derry and Tom's Roof Gardens. There, on a bench in the Spanish Gardens, he fantasises about the past, trying to put "his mother, his childhood as it actually was, [and] the failure of his ambitions" out of his head with an imagined life in Regency-era London, filled with politics, gambling, women and duelling.
His imaginations are interrupted by a "deep, slightly hesitant, husky" voice and a greeting of "Good afternoon" from a dark-skinned man who spends the entirety of the novel unnamed. He first asks if he may join Glogauer on the bench, and then goes on to explain that he's merely visiting London, and that he hadn't expected to find such a place in the middle of the city. Glogauer wrongly assumes him to be a rich American tourist, annoyed to have been disturbed from his reverie.
The man then asks Glogauer if he may photograph him; Glogauer, now flattered, assents. While he's being photographed, the man explains that he's from Nigeria, attempting to convince the government of England to buy copper at a higher price. Glogauer says that he's an illustrator. The man then invites Glogauer to have tea with him, and Glogauer, feeling guilty, and, despite recalling his mother's words to not have anything to do with people who make you feel guilty, agrees.
After journeying through the Tudor and Woodland gardens, they dine at the restaurant. During the meal, Glogauer attempts to introduce himself. The man, however, does not respond, merely offering Glogauer the sugar bowl. Glogauer realizes that the man is using on him some of the same seduction techniques which Glogauer himself used when seducing girls in the past. When the Nigerian asks Glogauer to "come back with me", Glogauer says "Yes".
The second chapter, introducing a format that is followed by most subsequent chapters, excluding the last, begins, in italics, with a short scene in the man's hotel suite. Glogauer has taken his clothes off, and lies naked on the bed. The man touches first his head, and then his shoulders. Glogauer closes his eyes, blocking reality out, and begins a fantasy, similar to that which was interrupted by the man in the first chapter. The ending of the chapter is also another scene, in italics, that is set in the present.
The bulk of the book takes place during a single night at the hotel suite, during which the two have little sleep. The Nigerian introduces Glogauer to various aspects of homosexual sex. Though completely new to it, Glogauer quickly sheds all inhibitions and starts acting in an (unspecified) provocative manner, startling the Nigerian: "You know how to be offensive, don't you? A short time ago you were just an ordinary London lad. Now you are behaving like the bitchiest little pansy I ever saw" (Ch.15). During the night the two of them quarrel, reconcile, and have some more sex and a little nap. The Nigerian also makes Glogauer paint his skin black.
Gradually, it starts looking like the Nigerian is not what he seems. His English is suddenly changing; suddenly it looks like his eyes are blue; and at a certain moment Glogauer suddenly feels that he might be a woman, or an animal with teeth — and then he looks again like he was. The Nigerian says that "We are many people, there are a lot of different sides to one's personality". Later on, he expresses his objection to abortion because "I'm against the destruction of possibilities. Everything should be allowed to proliferate. The interest lies in seeing which becomes dominant. Which wins". This implies that the Nigerian is aware of Glogauer's experiencing the different lives he might have had — though he never refers to it.
The Nigerian offers to make Glogauer a successful artist and get his paintings bought. Later on, he offers to take Glogauer with him. Glogauer, suddenly realizing that this is a famous man whose photos often appear in the papers, refuses. The Nigerian reacts: "I offered you an empire, and you've chosen a cabbage patch". Finally, they part on roof garden where they first met — and the Nigerian (if he is that) has turned into a white man.
The unnamed Nigerian could be an incarnation of Jerry Cornelius — an urban adventurer and hipster of ambiguous and occasionally polymorphous gender, who appears in several Moorcock books. In Behold the Man, and at the start of Breakfast in the Ruins, Glogauer is white, but by the end of Breakfast he has become black. (Similarly, Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius is white in The Final Programme but black in A Cure for Cancer.)
Karl Glogauer's variant lives
Karl Glogauer goes through no less than 17 incarnations in the course of the book. In each one he is a year older and, in general, more cruel and ruthless. In many of these incarnations, though not all of them, he has a Jewish background.
1871: The seven-year-old Karl Glogauer and his Alsatian mother try to flee the government troops' suppression of the Paris Commune, but the mother gets killed though she in fact opposed the Commune.
1883: The eight-year-old Karl Glogauer, son of a respectable German family in Brunswick, speaks very indiscreetly to an important guest from Berlin.
1892: The nine-year-old Karl Glogauer, a Cape colored working as a punkah wallah at a mansion in Cape Town, has his beloved collection of butterflies accidentally destroyed by a clumsy white man.
1898: The ten-year-old Karl Glogauer, son of a rich cigar manufacturer in Havana, sees his brother horribly tortured for joining the anti-Spanish insurgents and decides to join them himself.
1905: The eleven-year-old Karl Glogauer, a Jewish refugee from Poland, working with his parents at a sweatshop in Whitechapel, is caught up in the deadly confrontation between Russian revolutionaries and agents of the Czar's Secret Police. Glogauer's parents are terribly maimed but the boy robs a dead revolutionary and gets enough money to take care of them. This is by far the longest and most detailed episode of Glogauer's variant lives.
1911: The self-assured twelve-year-old Karl Glogauer, a half-German, half-Indian orphan in Calcutta, builds up a career as a dockside "agent", hustler and drug trafficker, and deals ruthlessly with a sailor who tries to cheat him.
1918: The thirteen-year-old Karl Glogauer survives in a Thamn, a French village just behind the WWI front line, by using a dead soldier's gun to hunt dogs, cats, rats and any other creature he encounters and sell the "mixed meat" to a butcher — and then he also kills a human being.
1920: The fourteen-year-old Karl Glogauer, a revolutionary fighter traveling on the armed train of the anarchist Nestor Machno during the Russian Revolution, has fun raking the Ukrainian provincial railway station at Pomoshnaya with machine gun fire.[3]
1929: The fifteen-year-old Karl Glogauer, son of a rich New York businessman, takes his girlfriend to a speakeasy which is the haunt of gangsters — and meets his father there, in the company of a young woman who is not his mother.
1935: The seventeen-year-old Karl Glogauer, a German Jew from Berlin, escapes the Nazis and gets to Italy — only to be conscripted, sent to take part in the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and die of an Ethiopian spear piercing his belly at the Battle of Adwa. At the last moment of dying, his possible incarnations — an opera singer, a great writer and even a great general — "march before him through the dust".
1944: The eighteen-year-old amateur violinist Karl Glogauer is sent to Auschwitz and succeeds in getting a "plum job" in the camp orchestra. As long as the Nazi guards like his playing The Blue Danube while they dance with their wives and girlfriends, he can hope to have warm clothes and not get sent to the gas chambers.
1947: The nineteen-year-old Karl Glogauer, a member of the Irgun Tsva'i Leumi (National Military Organization), a Jewish underground fighting against the British Mandate of Palestine, takes part in ambushing British soldiers on the road to Tel Aviv, capturing them and hanging them on palm trees at the roadside.[4]
1959: The twenty-one-year-old British Sergeant Karl Gower ("Glogauer" sounded too German and too Jewish) is stationed to the Kenya Emergency and is already an expert in torturing Mau Mau prisoners, his favorite method being to apply burning cigarettes to their genitals.
1968: The twenty-two-year-old American soldier Karl Glogauer gets involved in massacring the inhabitants of a Vietnamese village, goes into a mindless killing frenzy and narrowly avoids killing his own officers as well.
Finally:
1990 (a future date at the time of writing): The fifty-one-year-old Karl Glogauer will have become a survivor of devastating global wars and one of the handful of humans still living among the ruins of London. He will have become a cannibal, having acquired a taste for human flesh as a mercenary in Paris, and he will have been burning books to keep warm, since reading them will have made him feel too depressed.
Of the life of the Karl Glogauer who met the Nigerian in 1971, some scattered references tell that he was born about the outbreak of WWII in 1939; that his mother had openly carried out relationships with other men (there was a man in pajamas in his mother's room, at another time he found the air raid warden in his mother's bed); that his father was very patient about it, but finally left and disappeared about the time Glogauer was eight; that he grew up in a rather stormy relationship with his dominant mother, left home at the age of fifteen in order to become a great artist, but was rejected by the Art School;[5] came back home after three months; that he went at some time to Paris and stayed there "for some time"; that at various times he got three girls pregnant and spent 200 pounds to get an abortion for one of them; that he is an unsuccessful painter, frustrated with the way his life has turned; and that he lives at Ladbroke Grove, London.
To these variant lives of Karl Glogauer should be added the one in Morcock's Behold The Man where Glogauer lives a troubled life in modern London, always obsessed with the character of Jesus Christ. He finally travels back in time, has sex with a nymphomanic Virgin Mary and finds that her son Jesus is a total moron incapable of any of the acts attributed to Jesus. Thereupon, Glogauer decides to play the part himself, re-enact all the acts attributed to Jesus in the New Testament and finally provokes the Romans to crucify him — which they duly do.
Trivia
Some editions of the novel were printed with an introduction that contained a hoax about the death of Michael Moorcock, stating that he had "died of lung cancer, aged 31, last year". It also went on to state that the "whereabouts of Karl Glogauer" were unknown.[6] The introduction was signed to James Colvin, a pseudonym that Moorcock, along with several others, had used on short stories appearing in New Worlds.
The fictional Moorcock Multiverse, consisting of several universes, many layered dimensions, spheres, and alternative worlds, is the place where the eternal struggle between Law and Chaos, the two main forces of Moorcock's worlds, takes place. In all these dimensions and worlds, these forces constantly war for supremacy. Since the victory of Law or Chaos would cause the Multiverse either to become permanently static or totally formless, the Cosmic Balance enforces certain limits which the powers of Law and Chaos violate at their peril. Law, Chaos, and the Balance are active, but seemingly non-sentient, forces which empower various champions and representatives.
The Champion Eternal, a Hero who exists in all dimensions, times and worlds, is the one who is chosen by fate to fight for the Cosmic Balance; however, he often does not know of his role, or, even worse, he struggles against it, never to succeed. Since his role is to intervene when either Law or Chaos have gained an excess of power, he is always doomed to be surrounded by strife and destruction, although he may go through long periods of relative quiet. In most depictions by Moorcock all these stories happen in fantasy worlds, but the same would clearly apply to Karl Glogauer's various lives in actual 20th Century situations, as described here.
Related Research Articles
Corum Jhaelen Irsei is a fictional fantasy hero in a series of novels written by Michael Moorcock. The character was introduced in the novel The Knight of Swords, published in 1971. This was followed by two other books published during the same year, The Queen of Swords and The King of Swords. The three novels are collectively known as the "Corum Chronicles trilogy" or "the Chronicles of Corum". Both The Knight of the Swords and The King of the Swords won the August Derleth Award in 1972 and 1973 respectively. The character then starred in three books making up the "Silver Hand trilogy", and has appeared in other stories taking place in Moorcock's multiverse.
Michael John Moorcock is an English–American writer, particularly of science fiction and fantasy, who has published a number of well-received literary novels as well as comic thrillers, graphic novels and non-fiction. He has worked as an editor and is also a successful musician. He is best known for his novels about the character Elric of Melniboné, which were a seminal influence on the field of fantasy in the 1960s and 1970s.
Elric of Melniboné is a fictional character created by English writer Michael Moorcock and the protagonist of a series of sword and sorcery stories taking place on an alternative Earth. The proper name and title of the character is Elric VIII, 428th Emperor of Melniboné. Later stories by Moorcock marked Elric as a facet of the Eternal Champion.
Jerry Cornelius is a fictional character created by English author Michael Moorcock. The character is an urban adventurer and an incarnation of the author's Eternal Champion concept. Cornelius is a hipster of ambiguous and occasionally polymorphous gender. Many of the same characters feature in each of several Cornelius books, though the individual books have little connection with one another, having a more metafictional than causal relationship. The first Jerry Cornelius book, The Final Programme, was made into a 1973 film starring Jon Finch and Jenny Runacre. Notting Hill in London features prominently in the stories.
The Eternal Champion is a fictional character created by British author Michael Moorcock and is a recurrent feature in many of his speculative fiction works.
Trainspotting is the first novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, first published in 1993. It takes the form of a collection of short stories, written in either Scots, Scottish English or British English, revolving around various residents of Leith, Edinburgh, who either use heroin, are friends of the core group of heroin users, or engage in destructive activities that are effectively addictions. The novel is set in the late 1980s and has been described by The Sunday Times as "the voice of punk, grown up, grown wiser and grown eloquent".. The title is an ironic reference to the characters’ frequenting of the disused Leith Central railway station.
Randall Flagg is a fictional character created by American author Stephen King, who has appeared in at least nine of his novels. Described as "an accomplished sorcerer and a devoted servant of the Outer Dark", he has supernatural abilities involving necromancy, prophecy, and influence over animal and human behavior. His goals typically center on bringing down civilizations through destruction and conflict. He has a variety of names, usually with the initial letters "R. F." but with occasional exceptions, such as Walter o'Dim and Marten Broadcloak in The Dark Tower series.
Gideon Stargrave is a comics character created by Grant Morrison in 1978 for the anthology comic Near Myths, and later incorporated into their series The Invisibles. The character is based on J. G. Ballard's "The Day of Forever" and Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius, which led to accusations of plagiarism from Moorcock.
The Dancers at the End of Time is a series of science fiction novels and short stories written by Michael Moorcock, the setting of which is the End of Time, an era "where entropy is king and the universe has begun collapsing upon itself". The inhabitants of this era are immortal decadents, who create flights of fancy via the use of power rings that draw on energy devised and stored by their ancestors millions of years prior. Time travel is possible, and throughout the series various points in time are visited and revisited. Space travellers are also common, but most residents of the End of Time find leaving the planet distasteful and clichéd. The title of the series is itself taken from a poem by a fictitious 19th-century poet, Ernest Wheldrake, which Mrs. Amelia Underwood quotes in The End of All Songs. "Ernest Wheldrake" had been a pseudonym used by Algernon Charles Swinburne.
Warrior on the Edge of Time is the fifth studio album by the English rock band Hawkwind. Many of the lyrics are by Michael Moorcock, and the album is loosely based on the concept of Moorcock's novel The Eternal Champion. It was the band's highest-charting studio album on the UK Albums Chart, where it peaked at number 13, and was their third and last album to make the U.S. Billboard chart, where it peaked at number 150. Reviews have been mixed, with Melody Maker panning the album and particularly criticizing the vocal work while the All Music Guide has praised the album for features such as the songwriting. This would also be the last album to feature the band's bassist Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister, who was fired from the band one day before the album's release.
Behold the Man is a existentialist science fiction novel by British writer Michael Moorcock. It originally appeared as a novella in a 1966 issue of New Worlds magazine; later, Moorcock produced an expanded version that was first published in 1969 by Allison & Busby. The title derives from John 19, Verse 5, in the New Testament: "Then Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. And Pilate said to them Behold the Man".
The Warlord of the Air is a 1971 British alternate history novel written by Michael Moorcock. It concerns the adventures of Oswald Bastable, an Edwardian era soldier stationed in India, and his adventures in an alternate universe, in his own future, wherein the First World War never happened. It is the first part of Moorcock's A Nomad of the Time Streams trilogy and, in its use of speculative technology juxtaposed against an Edwardian setting, it is widely considered to be one of the first steampunk novels. The novel was first published by Ace Books as part of their Ace Science Fiction Specials series.
The Eternal Champion is a fantasy novel by Michael Moorcock that introduces the hero known as both John Daker and Erekosë. Originally written in the late 1950s, it constitutes the first novel of Moorcock's sprawling Eternal Champion series. The tale was first published in 1962 as a magazine novella Moorcock expanded the novella to novel length for publication in 1970. He revised the text for its 1978 publication. Along with expanding the original story, the novel makes some minor changes to narration and scenes, and also includes references to other short stories by Moorcock. The Eternal Champion is the first in a trilogy of novels known as the Erekosë series. The sequel novels are Phoenix in Obsidian, and The Dragon in the Sword (1987).
Three Hearts and Three Lions is a 1961 fantasy novel by American writer Poul Anderson, expanded from a 1953 novella by Anderson which appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine.
Tomorrow is a novel by Graham Swift first published in 2007 about the impending disclosure of a family secret. Set in Putney, London on the night of Friday, 16 June 1995, the novel takes the form of an interior monologue by a 49-year-old mother addressed to her sleeping teenage children. It takes her a few hours—from late at night until dawn—to collect her thoughts and rehearse what she and her husband, who is asleep next to her, are going to tell their son and daughter on the following morning, which for the latter will amount to a rewriting of the family history reaching back as far as 1944. The family narrative completed, the novel ends in the early hours of Saturday, 17 June 1995, before anybody has stirred.
The Beginning Place is a short novel by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, written in 1980. It was subsequently published under the title Threshold in 1986. The story's genre is a mixture of realism and fantasy literature. The novel's epigraph "What river is this through which the Ganges flows?" is quoted from Jorge Luis Borges. The novel has been subject to critical studies comparing it to C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass and William Shakespeare's As You Like It.
Half of a Yellow Sun is a novel by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Published in 2006 by 4th Estate in London, the novel tells the story of the Biafran War through the perspective of the characters Olanna, Ugwu, and Richard.
This is a bibliography of the works of Michael Moorcock.
↑ "What would you do? (5)". Breakfast in the Ruins. p.53.
↑ The same incident is narrated by the Soviet writer Konstantin Paustovsky where it is described from the point of view of terrified civilians cowering behind the railway station building and waiting for Machno's train to pass.
↑ "The Sergeants affair", in which two British Army sergeants were captured by the Irgun and hanged, is an actual, well known (and highly controversial) historical event. However, the actual details are substantially different from those described in Moorcock's book.
↑ This is reminiscent of a similar incident in the early life of Hitler
↑ Moorcock, Michael (1972). "Introduction". Breakfast in the Ruins. New English Library.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
