Count Brass

After Hawkmoon and company's defeat of the Dark Empire, Hawkmoon comes to realise at the start of this book that everything is changed. The multiverse is twisted, Count Brass is alive and his wife, Yisselda is not. His friends are a little worried about his state, but are willing to give him some time. He knows something is not right, and sets out to find out what is going on.

In the interests of full disclosure, I'm reviewing not the White Wolf American edition of this omnibus, but the British edition, which as far as I know contains the same material. The White Wolf editions used to trumpet that they were "newly revised for their US publication" but I doubt there were any drastic changes in them other than fixing typos and smoothing over inconsistencies, since Moorcock basically stated in his introduction to every single book how he had to restrain himself from doing even minor story revisions because once you start it's hard to stop and he wanted to maintain the quickly written fire of youth sensibility that was in those earlier stories. That said, this is the last volume of the series and in theory closes out the sequence, by returning the focus to Hawkmoon, who we really haven't seen since book 3. In the first novel "Count Brass", we move to the aftermath of Hawkmoon's saving the world, as he wishes for all his of friends that had died during the conflict with the Black Empire were still alive . . . and finds that sometimes you can get what you want and still not be happy. The first novel's probably the best of the bunch, having the most coherent plot and the most interesting mystery, the everpresent multiverse stuff is kept in the background to some extent and doesn't seek to overwhelm everything. Dangling threads are carried over into the second novel "Champion of Garathorn" but it mostly consists of Hawkmoon becoming another Champion and saving other people on a different plane. The last novel "Quest for Tanelorn" essentially functions as a conclusion of sorts to the entire saga that spread out over the last fifteen books but Moorcock just falls back into the pseudogibberish that sometimes characterizes his more fantastic sequences and settles with bringing four champions together to save everything, which we've seen before, at least twice. The first time, it was neat, the second, entertaining, now it's just "ho-hum" because he doesn't bring anything new to the concept, they join together and smash stuff. For the record, it was nice seeing Corum and Elric one last time, and even Erekose, although he's from the first book and I don't remember him too clearly. But the novel has the hallmarks of being written quickly, or at least the story being made it as the author goes along because it all wraps up far too neatly and quickly and starts to lose sense after a bit (so who was the sword again?) and it's more of a "grand finally" than a grand finale. In his defense, however, wrapping up a saga of this scope and breadth would require a War and Peace sized novel, and Moorcock only really focuses on the fantasy-related champions, not even bringing the SF-esque ones (Jerry Cornelius, Jherek, etc), so while it feels like AN ending and wraps up the stories of Hawkmoon and Elric and Corum and Erekose, I can't really accept it as THE ending. But at least it's happy, in a way, which is rare commodity with the Cha

Michael Moorcock, Count Brass (Berkley, 1973)Moorcock returns to the world of Hawkmoon and co. in the Chronicles of Castle Brass, a trilogy that might as well be called the fifth, sixth, and seventh Runestaff novels. Here, we have Hawkmoon and Yisselda, the only survivors of the battle of Londra, married for five years, and with two children. During a moment of reflection, Hawkmoon opines that he'd give anything to have his old friend Count Brass, Yisselda's father, back. The story then turns into a "be careful what you wish for" fable, as the townsfolk of Aigues-Mortes start reporting the ghostly figure of Count Brass haunting the town cemetery, swearing to kill Hawkmoon. Hawkmoon goes to meet the challenge, and when he finds Count Brass, the two of them have to figure out why the Count-twenty years younger and unable to remember any of his long association with Hawkmoon-has been sent from the grave to kill his dearest friend.As with the rest of the series, there is much here to delight the Moorcock fan and more than enough to bring in the lover of sword and sorcery novels who hasn't yet encountered Moorcock somehow. The everpresent typos that marred the DAW editions of the first two Runestaff novels are gone, and so the reader can just let the story flow. And it does. Loads of plane-hopping fun. *** ½

As a standalone book this does not have the impact that it should. Seen as the culmination of the Eternal Champion saga (spanning 15 volumes in its current incarnation) it is the only happy ending one could hope for. If you read any of the other books about the Eternal Champion, get this one and see how it all ends.