Moorcock's "Elric of Melniboné," the origin story for Moorcock's famed albino anti-hero, is a fast-paced, highly entertaining novel that succeeds in subverting many conventions of the genre.
Most notably, the novel offers an antidote to the simplistic, good-versus-evil paradigm embraced by Tolkien and his imitators, for whom the actions of antagonists need no further explanation than a desire to inflict evil for evil's sake.
Elric is a bookish misfit who has been reluctantly thrust, by the line of succession, into the emperorship of the powerful island nation of Melniboné. Through his extensive reading and scholarship, Elric has developed a strong sense of morality and justice that would have served him well if he were, say, a hobbit at the center of a World War I allegory.
But in Moorcock's universe, Elric's morality proves to be an extraordinary liability, for the people he leads have little interest in academic forms of justice. As Elric's love interest, the princess Cymoril, tells him, "Melniboné has never stood for good and evil, but for herself and the satisfaction of her desires."
Every time Elric takes an action he believes is morally right, such as showing mercy to his traitorous cousin Yyrkoon, it later haunts him. The people Elric leads don't want an emperor obsessed with right vs. wrong; they want an emperor who demonstrates strength, who protects the kingdom's riches and shows no mercy to would-be foreign invaders. They want a conqueror.
To me, Moorcock's morally ambiguous universe more closely mirrors our own world than the universe popularized by Tolkien.
I'm excited to read the next book in the Elric series.
The best paragraph (p. 184):
If the young emperor has found any advantage in his lifelong weakness it must be in that, perforce, he has read much. Before he was fifteen he had read every book in his father's library, some more than once. His sorcerous powers, learned initially from Sadric, are now greater than any possessed by his ancestors for many a generation. His knowledge of the world beyond the shores of Melniboné is profound, though he has as yet had little direct experience of it. If he wished he could resurrect the Dragon Isle's former might and rule both his own land and the Young Kingdoms as an invulnerable tyrant. But his reading has also taught him to question the uses to which power is put, to question his motives, to question whether his own power should be used at all, in any cause. His reading has led him to this 'morality,' which, still, he barely understands. Thus, to his subjects, he is an enigma and, to some, he is a threat, for he neither thinks nor acts in accordance with their conception of how a true Melnibonéan (and a Melnibonéan emperor, at that) should think and act. His cousin Yyrkoon, for instance, has been heard more than once to voice strong doubts concerning the emperor's right to rule the people of Melniboné. 'This feeble scholar will bring doom to us all,' he said one night to Dyvim Tvar, Lord of the Dragon Caves.
