The return of the colonel

This is a great Homeric return. With The Vengeance of Rome, Michael Moorcock releases his hobbled Odysseus, Colonel Pyat, from the maelstrom of history, the impossible burden of cultural memory. The original migrant — born in Kiev, assaulted and prostituted in Egypt, lionised in Hollywood — folds back into a case of greasy papers, technical drawings, sepia postcards, abandoned in Notting Hill and later deposited with Moorcock in Texas. Right from the start of the ‘Between the Wars’ quartet, a narrative trajectory was established. The conclusion of the sequence was as much predetermined as the fate of a family breakfasting in Stepney under the flight path of a V2 rocket. ‘Everything just keeps moving, rolling on remorselessly towards Auschwitz,’ Moorcock told Colin Greenland in 1992.

Pyat breathed his last, suffering a heart attack when hassled by black youths during the Notting Hill carnival in 1977. Or so we are told — we don’t have to believe it — in the introduction to Byzantium Endures, the first novel of the quartet.