What We’re Reading: Modem Times 2.0
Modem Times 2.0 by Michael Moorcock (PM Press, 2011)
Michael Moorcock’s Modem Times 2.0 was a difficult book. It’s a collection of…snapshots? short stories? eventualities? featuring Moorcock’s recurring spy/dandy, Jerry Cornelius. There have been four Cornelius novels and a number of short stories, but I must admit that I haven’t read a single one.
Could that be why I found Modem Times to be a dense, confusing tangle of vignettes? The characters travel all over the world, travel through time (and not just in one direction), and maybe also across parallel worlds. Given all this, I need you to believe me when I say that I liked it quite well.
The quick cuts from vignette to vignette are disorienting at first. They whirl by like clips on a 24-hour news channel: genocide, economic troubles, domestic dispute, and the passing of the old ways. It’s a cracked kaleidoscope that turns with the world, viewing it from every angle all at once. Even on a sentence level, things can be difficult to parse:
“The holidays over, Jerry Cornelius stepped off the Darfur jet and set his watch for 1962. Time to go home. At least this wouldn’t be as hairy as last time. He’d had a close shave on the plane. His head was altogether smoother now.”
It’s up to the reader to create context for the events. In fact, Moorcock calls Cornelius and his cohorts “context based characters.” That is, depending on where they are and who they’re with, what time period they’re in and what world they’re on, they act differently. This is true for all humans, I guess, but it’s rarely a truth that fiction takes on with any responsibility. Moorcock makes it a particular point of Modem Times, though, taking it to an extreme by portraying the cast as a sort of rotating, remixed Harlequinade.
If this sort of thing doesn’t sell you on the book, I’m not sure what else I can offer. Synopsizing is hard when jumping from post-Blitz “Araby”-esque shopping to post-genocide Darfur to a parallel version of modern warfare with armored queens and dukes of Gloucester. The chapters of the first part of the novella read like the best mix tape I’ll never hear:
1. A Misery in Motley
2. When Did Sunnis Start Fighting Shiites?
3. Captain Marvel Battles His Own Conscience!!!!!
4. Ecce Rumpo
5. The Wanton of Argos
6. William’s Crowded Hour
7. How to Get Your Free State $2 Bills
8. A Game of Patience
9. Pakistan — The Taliban Takeover
10. The Epic Search for a Tech Hero
11. Les Faux Monnayeurs
12. Home Alone Five
13. Offshore Operations
14. Chasing a Cure
15. A Night to Remember
16. Biggles: The Limited Editions
I think the mix tape is a suitable metaphor for the whole book and what it does (or what it does for me, at least). It’s something of a mess, but it’s a mess that’s contained in just 72 pages of life, death, failure, a little hope here and there. If 72 pages can contain all that (and if 16 tracks can describe the rise and fall of a relationship), maybe they can make our sprawling lives a bit more manageable.
Modem Times, for all that sprawl and confusion of life it contains, is bookmarked by Christmases. They’re Christmases in crumbling cities and broken homes, but they’re Christmases nonetheless. “Merry Christmas, mum,” Jerry says. “God help us, one and all.”
Maybe that’s not so comforting after all. But does a book have to be comforting to help you understand the world? Does it have to be organized? Have you, valued readers, ever conquered a difficult book and felt bettered by it?
