This is the second book in the Dancers at the End of Time trilogy by Michael Moorcock. I wrote down my thoughts on the first book here:
Spoilers ahead!
The epigraph is the 1899 poem A Last Word, by English poet Ernest Dawson. The epigraph to the first book is also a poem, which includes the words “alien heat”, and I thought the alien heat the title refers to was the strangeness of Jherek’s newfound love. Since feelings are strictly performative at the End of Time, this strong emotion is in fact alien to Jherek’s experience. For The Hollow Lands, however, I couldn’t think of such a link between title and content, since there are no literal or figurative hollow lands, so I thought I’d include a snippet from the epigraph here:
Let us go hence, somewhither strange and cold,
To Hollow Lands where just men and unjust
Find end of labour, where’s rest for the old,
Freedom to all from love and fear and lust.
I liked how long Moorcock stretched out Jherek’s ignorance of the fact that he was condemned to death in 19th century London in the previous book. Since the moment of his hanging coincided with the fabric of Time spitting him back into his own era, he believes the gallows to have been an archaic time machine. It’s a pretty funny way to illustrate how foreign the concept of violence is for the people at the End of Time. Jherek remembers his time in prison fondly; since he has no concept of imprisonment, crime, or punishment, he just thought he was being treated with great hospitality. When confronting Amelia on her declaration of love in a note handed to Jherek’s lawyer after his trial, Amelia says he was about to die, to which Jherek replies in astonishment that he did not know death threatened.
As a general rule, it is difficult for an individual to remain in the past once he has existed in the future. In the first book, this is framed as a purely physical restriction, although it is hinted that Lord Jagged of Canaria might somehow be able to remain in the past for long periods, as we see his doppelgänger Lord Jagger, oversee Jherek’s trial and sentencing in the 19th century. At the End of Time, this phenomenon is known as the Morphail Effect, named after the scientist Brannart Morphail, who lends Jherek the time machine he uses in his first journey to the past.
In this book, the Morphail Effect is explained to be a self-correction of the stream of time whenever a paradox is about to occur, which explains why Jherek was returned to the End of Time when he was being hanged (the paradox being the death of a man who hadn’t been born), and why time travelers are also returned to the End of Time once they have visited (they can’t help but act upon their new knowledge of the future). The time traveler is simply deposited at some point in Time where his knowledge and actions cannot alter the timeline, which is usually the farthest point in the Future to which he has already traveled.
This implies that the disciplined time traveler may acually remain in the past, so long as he says and does nothing out of the ordinary for an inhabitant of the period. There can be no Back to the Future sports almanac shenanigans, in other words. This explains how Lord Jagged and Amelia have been able to remain in the 19th century, as Jagged has meticulously constructed at least two identities (the judge Lord Jagger, and the journalist Mr. Jackson), and Amelia has simply not told anyone about her time travel.
Towards the end of the book, Lord Jagged’s identities are revealed and he explains he has been conducting experiments around the Morphail Effect, through the use of a time machine sophisticated enough to escape Brannart’s detection (hence why no one knows where Jagged goes off two when he gets into one of his solitary moods). He has been kidnapping people in the past and dropping them off at different eras in the future, which explains Amelia’s sudden appearance in the first book. Jagged informs Jherek that he has been to the absolute end of Time, at a point where they (Jagged, Jherek and the rest) had “learned to live again”. He says the irony of this achievement coinciding with the destruction of the Universe was too great for him to bear, so he resolved to find a way in which they could all seek refuge in the past.
I’m really liking this trilogy so far. It reminds me very much of Vance’s Dying Earth, although it doesn’t read as much like a fantasy book (there are no wizards, for one). Here are some things I really liked.
One fascinating element in this book is the underground time loop bunker that Jherek falls into. In it, he meets a group of children who are cared for by Nurse, an old robot designed to manipulate time. Nurse was tasked with protecting this group of children by keeping them in a week-long time loop. Thus, the children have been living the same week for thousands of years. What I find really creative and funny is the threat Nurse is keeping her children from: Pecking Pa VIII’s The Great Massacre of the First-Born.
‘It’s a remake about the birth of Christ,’ said Flora Friendly. ‘Pecking Pa is going to play Herod himself.’
This name alone meant something to Jherek. He knew that he had met a time traveller once who had fled from this same Pecking Pa, the Last of the Tyrant Producers, when he had been in the process of making another drama akout the eruption of Krakatoa.
The amount of information and the sheer absurdity that these lines convey is truly masterful. The reader is presented with the idea of a world controlled by film producers who force everyone to act in planetary-scale productions. It’s hilarious in its absurdity, although the implication is that the events (mass murder, natural disasters, etc.) in these productions are real, which explains why the children are being sheltered, and why that time traveller fled from the Krakatoa eruption.
I also liked the insertion of H. G. Wells into the plot. It was pretty funny how he muses that Jherek might actually have taken his book, The Time Machine, as fact, and how that is certainly the mark of great writing.
I expect to be done with the third book, The End of All Songs, shortly.