Below are my thoughts on the latest installment of Michael Moorcock's Elric saga. Fair warning: I found it very disappointing.
The Citadel of Forgotten Myths finds Elric and his companion Moonglum traveling to what is essentially another world in pursuit of the origins of the Melniboneans. As a bare premise, it's not bad. Unfortunately, it doesn't really pay off: we learn very little that is either concrete or interesting. There are wild implications about the Melniboneans being descended from dragons, but those ideas never really gel into anything. It's as if Moorcock is still undecided on that point himself.
Like some of the previous novels in the saga, The Citadel of Forgotten Myths is a fix-up constructed from short stories joined together by edits and additional matter to make them work as a novel; it revises two previous published stories, linking them together, before capping things off with a longer, unpublished section at the close. The first two segments are generally in-line with Moorcock's usual brand of sword & sorcery, at least as I remember it. However, in this case the construction feels hasty and somewhat clumsy. I didn't learn that the earlier Elric novels were fix-ups until long after I read them, but I suspect I would have guessed that The Citadel of Forgotten Myths was stitched together into a lopsided whole even if I hadn't been previously aware.
The first two sections of the book are where it is at its best; they mostly fit into Elric's swashbuckling adventures of old, save that they are marred by constant references to his saga's continuity. There are two things that struck me annoyingly repetitious in the novel: allusions to Cymoril's death and references to "dream quests" and "dream couches."
The second half of the book has a very different flavor than the shorter stories that comprise its more promising beginning. There's a narrative arc in the back half, and the occasional action scene, but that section of the novel is especially ponderous and filled with philosophizing about proper governance, feudalism, and the like.
It also suffers from a lack of congruence. It doesn't feel like the previous two chapters at all. It's weirder, but not in a good way; it has the feel of an early draft where strange ideas are being tried out on the page, whether they're keepers or not. For example, when we plunge into the perspective of the crazed chaos goddess who has chosen Elric for her foe, we get a kaleidoscopic view that may do a fine job exemplifying chaos as a concept--but it does a poor job in portraying a character with an actual motivation. It wanders too much and for too long without justifying the indulgence.
As a character, Elric has always been prone to fantastical philosophizing, indeed he is the poster boy for a certain style of brooding sword & sorcery antihero, but I don't remember the previous books featuring so much pointless musing that goes nowhere. It feels like Moorcock was trying to use the story to say something about government and just rule, but it's too all over the place and doesn't come to a point. I'm not sure if it was an intentional allusion to the state of modern politics, but the "Make Melnibone great again" stuff in The Citadel of Forgotten Myths especially drew me out of the story.
The last section of the novel also has continuity errors that someone should have noticed. The most egregious example: Elric calls to his magic sword, which flies to his hand! And then, despite now having said sword in his hand, on the next page Elric calls to his magic sword, which flies to his hand! The editor was either asleep at the wheel, the author never re-read his work, or some combination of the two has conspired to wrap things up in a laughable snafu right at the climax.
I'm afraid this just isn't a good book on any of the levels that matter.
