Byzantium Endures

Byzantium Endures is a

Frederic Morton in his review of the novel for The New York Times commented that "the book has two important virtues, and they conflict. Russia's great cities, before and during the Revolution, come alive in judicious renderings of sights and sounds, gestures and moods. The image works, and there are many others of like effectiveness. But these images are the product of a balanced literary sensibility attuned to moral ironies and to ethical counterpoint. As such they work against rather than with the book's major element: Pyat's other, more dominant voice, which mesmerizes just because it is so authentically unbalanced in its egotism, so dynamic in its lopsidedness, so amoral in its elan, so gorgeously maniacal. If Mr. Moorcock had been able to resolve the dissonance, he would have come close to a masterpiece". His conclusion is that "Byzantium Endures is often masterly - and never more so, strangely enough, than when Pyat fantasticates away on the nature of divinity. The machines he invents may be altogether chimerical, but his private theology intriguingly underpins his ravings".^[1]

Paul West writing for The Washington Post noted: "A game of mirrors is going on here, a game whose rules extend beyond the immediate concerns of Byzantium Endures...The reader has to work out whether or not, granted the constraint of editing, the entire novel should have been cast in the mode of the preface, with Pyat given not raw and unmediated, but planted in the living tissue of authorial speculation. I wonder, because Moorcock as himself, or impersonating himself, is a subtler teller than Moorcock impersonating Pyat, who limps and drones and fumbles, enlarging what an expert novelist would have trimmed, and vice versa. If the gain is a greater realism, the loss is in technique; a loss which perhaps the other three volumes will justify".^[2]

Kirkus Reviews called Moorcock's attempts "a bravura impersonation: modern Russian history laid out with the care and lavishness of a good smorgasbord. And the resulting novel is indeed glassy, stylish, marvelously well-researched--at its best in the evocation of Russian train-travel circa 1920. But Max himself never comes to life, never functions as anything more than an emblem. So this grand-scale panorama, though historically vivid (it's a fascinating era), lacks a center--and, as one watches the events and scenery move by, the effect is most often that of an empty, cold construction".^[3]