The Whispering Swarm

The Whispering Swarm is Michael Moorcock’s first major book in almost a decade – but is it a novel or autobiography? The narrator is a young Londoner called Michael Moorcock, who is writing stories and articles and editing magazines in the 1960s, eventually taking over the highly influential New Worlds. Many of the science fiction and fantasy writers of the time are mentioned, some under their real names (Harry Harrison, Barry Bailey), others lightly disguised: JG Ballard is Jack Allard and Moorcock’s first wife, writer Hilary Bailey, is Helena Denham.

But alongside the early career of the young Michael, told by the older Moorcock with a loving nostalgia for a London now largely lost, is an astonishing fantasy world just as real, just as believable: the Alsacia. Accessible through a gate in a square just off Fleet Street where Michael works, the Alsacia has the abbey of the Old Flete Carmelite Friars and an inn where the clientele include 18th- and 19th-century highwaymen and adventurers and early 17th-century Cavaliers; Michael is introduced to Captain Turpin, Colonel Cody and Prince Rupert. And he meets the feisty Moll Midnight, with violet eyes and red-gold curls. Over the coming years he helps hold up the Hackney Mail tram, is involved in several fights with Protectorate thugs – and takes part in a plot to rescue Charles I from the scaffold. And he falls in love with Molly.

The pain throughout this book is the tension between Michael’s life with Helena and their young children, and his relationship with Molly in the Alsacia – or perhaps between Law and Chaos in this ultimate multiverse. All autobiographies are fictionalised; all fictions contain truth. Whether Molly and the Alsacia represent real people and events in Moorcock’s early life or his inner, creative being, this beautifully written work is one of the most honest stories imaginable.