Introduction to Firing the Cathedral
Now it is 2002, a flinching toe dipped tentatively in the tides of a new century. Cricket-ball Boeings and skyscraper wickets. Lonesome Cowboy George and Taliban Sam, the al-Qaeda Kid. Bloody tit for bloody tat in the Holy Land, and nervous nuclear Kashmir sweaters. Now we have Firing the Cathedral, and suddenly it’s obvious which century the Cornelius canon was describing all along. Unlike transsexual novelist Jillian Burnes and her ilk, unable to find language adequate to our contemporary human plight, unable to describe our times, our current situation, Moorcock seizes the 21st century bull by its horns and wrestles it into submission with a Texan rodeo confidence that seems equal to his youthful zest of more than thirty years ago. The reassembled original cast, Mo Collier, Una Persson and all the rest seem almost gleefully aware that this is their time, the apocalypse they were created to embellish, attacking their familiar roles with gusto. The random news-bite interjections have never seemed more relevant, suggesting as they do vectors of history colliding as an eight-lane pile-up in the present. Professor Hira’s quantum worldview hints at imminent disruptions in the linear human view of time, some looming singularity where our banal, nostalgically remembered past and our banal anticipated future are collapsed into a blazing, simultaneous Now; a single room that’s papered with five hundred years of headlines. Meanwhile, oceans rise. The map, both literally and politically, becomes a thing in flux where nothing’s fixed and where, for better or for worse, there are no longer limits to the possibilities.
This sudden agoraphobia-inducing disappearance of our normal human boundaries is almost certainly the key to Jerry’s timely reappearance and to the unusually light-hearted, sprightly mood that Firing the Cathedral finds him in. Moorcock has caught the tang of something in the 21st century air beside Daisycutters, fallout, Buddha-dust, cremated cow. A whiff of new potentials, new excitements, new discoveries. New Worlds. The nature of the catastrophe was not terminal. Despite the enervations and inertia of the century’s last decades, its energy survived and Heat Death was averted. Entropy theory itself, in a right old turn-up, had fallen to bits in the face of so-called Chaos mathematics, which suggested that just as chaos naturally generates islands of order (such as Jupiter’s Red Spot), so too will order tend inevitably to complexity, spontaneously generating fractal chaos. Planebombs. Tumbling markets and Plastique pedestrians. Strontium Shiva dancing in Islamabad. Thomas the Tank-Engine’s horrified eyes, all of those signals passed on Red. Verwirrung. Chaos. Arioch.
With the collapse of any structure, be it Trade Tower, currency, Uranium atom, ideology, comes a release of energy. That, no doubt, is what has put the bracing Skegness ozone in the century’s air, the spring in Jerry’s step. It’s given him the giggles, all this raining rubble, flares descending slowly over Manger Square, giant dust clouds rolling down Manhattan avenues as though from the stampeding ghosts of vanished buffalo. With every human signal buckling under the sheer weight of information, breaking down to noise and incoherence, he has never made more sense, never before seemed quite so confident and chipper.
