The return of the colonel
This is a great Homeric return. With The Vengeance of Rome, Michael Moorcock releases his hobbled Odysseus, Colonel Pyat, from the maelstrom of history, the impossible burden of cultural memory. The original migrant — born in Kiev, assaulted and prostituted in Egypt, lionised in Hollywood — folds back into a case of greasy papers, technical drawings, sepia postcards, abandoned in Notting Hill and later deposited with Moorcock in Texas. Right from the start of the ‘Between the Wars’ quartet, a narrative trajectory was established. The conclusion of the sequence was as much predetermined as the fate of a family breakfasting in Stepney under the flight path of a V2 rocket.