The Peking Junction by Michael Moorcock

 

The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius: Stories of the Comic Apocalypse - Michael Moorcock on Jerry Cornelius from his Introduction:

"For me, he's a character combining the endearing and enduring traits of a number of my contemporaries as well as being a latter day Pierrot, Colombine, and Harlequin, responding to the world around him with, if not always appropriate sentimentality, at least an admirable resourcefulness and malleability. An almost limitless good humor, Jerry's a pretty lighthearted existentialist. He once claimed to be too shallow to hold on to his miseries for very long. I think he also said somewhere (or I might have said it for him) that it isn't especially important if all we're doing is dancing forever on the edge of the abyss. It's scarcely worth worrying about. The really important thing, of course, is the dance itself and how we dance it.
So here are what I consider to be the best of the dances Jerry has danced since the 1960s. I hope some of them at least will get your feet tapping. After a while, you might even feel like joining in."

In the spirit of tapping feet, I'll be posting a separate review on each of the eleven tales in this collection, the first tale being:

THE PEKING JUNCTION
"Out of the rich and rolling lands of the West came Jerry Cornelius, with a vibragun holstered at his hip and a generous message in his heart, to China."

Whoa, baby! Jerry C might be a lighthearted existentialist but he's neither a stranger like Camus' Meursault nor nauseated like Sartre's Roquentin; nope, Jerry Cornelius travels to China sporting the beard and uniform of a Cuban guerrilla and pours Wakayama Sherry for three generals who have agreed to meet him in a remote Chinese province.

Conversation revolves around all that mass devastation cited in previous Jerry Cornelius adventures, most notably A Cure for Cancer - skies thick with Yankee pirate jets, nonstop napalm, millions dead in London, Paris, Berlin - and one general carefully voicing, "The tension, the tension," undoubtedly thinking of Kurtz and his dreadful "the horror! the horror!"

This, the first of twenty-one mini-chapters that make up The Peking Junction, concludes with the following exchange:

A Wakayama Sherry sipping general says, "It must have seemed like the end of the world..."
Jerry frowned. "I suppose so." Then he grinned. "There's no point in making a fuss about it, is there? Isn't it all the for the best in the long run?"
The general looked exasperated. "You people..."

The tale's tone is set thusly and fans will be pleased to encounter quotes from and references to The Chronicle of the Black Sword, The Dreaming City, The Sundered Worlds, dad's fake Le Corbusier château, Karl Glogauer and Jerry's reflecting: "Having been Elric, Asquiiol, Minos Aquilinus, Clovis Marca, now and forever he was Jerry Cornelius of the noble price, proud prince of ruins, boss of the circuits. Faustaff, Muldoon, the eternal champion..."

Three Peking Junction highlights that caught my attention:

A Common Bond Between JC and MM
Jerry Cornelius joins the generals on a visit to the site of a crashed US F111A tactical attack jet. After assessing the damage to wing and tail along with also taking a gander at the ragged, now dead pilot, Jerry forces himself to climb up on the jet's fuselage and "strike a pose he knew would impress the generals." After a general describes how the jet will eventually go in a museum, Jerry pretends to study the cliff above the aircraft since he doesn't want the generals to see him weeping.

Jerry's weeping brings to mind a moving statement in Michael Moorcock's Introduction: "I remember weeping at images of burning children in Vietnam and a few hours later I had turned that grief into comedy in my Jerry Cornelius novel A Cure for Cancer. Maybe, after all, that was my way of staying sane."

Moderan Madness
Returning to the pagoda where they sipped Wakayama Sherry, one of the generals muses while staring across the flat Chinese landscape, "Soon we shall have all this in shape." Really, general? Such a noxious statement is cringeworthy, reminding me of David R. Bunch's Moderan men, half steel, half flesh, whose ultimate goal is to cover the earth with a white-grey sheet of uniform plastic.

Jack the Dripper
At one point while in conversation with the generals, Jerry "suddenly remembered the great upsurge of enthusiasm among American painters immediately after the war and a Pollock came to mind." Love how something someone says can spark a memory for a specific painting. Not surprising this happens to Jer, an eternal champion who is never so overwhelmed he looses his aesthetic sense.

Onward to the next Jerry Cornelius Lives and Times tale: The Delhi Division.



"Nothing much was happening in the Time Center that day; phantom horsemen rode on skeletal steeds across worlds as fantastic as those of Bosch or Breughel, and at dawn when clouds of giant scarlet flamingos rose from their nests of reeds and wheeled through the sky in bizarre ritual dances, a tired, noble figure would go down to the edge of the marsh and stare over the water at the strange configurations of dark lagoons and tawny islands that seemed to him like hieroglyphs in some primeval language (the marsh had once been his home, but now he feared it his tears filled it.). - Michael Moorcock, The Peking Junction