A century of screams: Breakfast in the Ruins (1972) by Michael Moorcock [Review]

A powerfully experimental look at inhumanity, viewed through many lives.

With his 1969 novel Behold the Man, Michael Moorcock used the science fictional device of time travel to explore the origins of Christianity and the nature of religious belief. His protagonist, the spiritually and sexually confused Karl Glogauer, travelled back in time and took on the role attributed by scripture to Jesus - with inevitable consequences.

Bold and brazen, Behold the Man reflected Moorcock's New Wave sensibilities and straddled his work in SF, literary, and experimental fiction. Three years later, he published a strange sort of sequel. Breakfast in the Ruins again focuses on Karl Glogauer - not one, but many versions of him. This eye-opening novel uses Glogauer as a refracting prism through which the cruelties of the 19th and 20th centuries are seen.

Billed as a "novel of inhumanity", Breakfast in the Ruins mixes fantasy, historical, and experimental approaches. Like the work of Moorcock's "inner space" ally J.G. Ballard, Glogauer's shattered lives force us to examine the worst that humankind can do and be. It is a harrowing odyssey into a century of screams, from the destruction of the Paris Commune to a nuked-out vision of the future, stopping to take in the atrocities of Shanghai, Kenya, and Vietnam.

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The seductive past

The novel opens innocuously enough. Glogauer visits the roof garden at the London department store Derry and Tom's - a recurring node in Moorcock's personal psychogeography. His reverie is interrupted by a stranger, a nameless black Nigerian man. Glogauer is compelled to dine with the newcomer, and then to visit his hotel. Over the course of a kind of lost weekend, the pair pursue an affair that is by turns sensual and troubling.

More bizarrely, Glogauer quickly finds his psyche fracturing into shards spread through time and space. He experiences fragments of alternate lives he lived, or could have lived, or may still live in the future. These are all attached to major flashpoints in history - times of conflict, suffering, and change.

As these lives advance through history, and as Glogauer's age increases gradually through them, his relationship to man's cruelties shifts. He deteriorates from victim, to bystander, to perpetrator of some of history's worst atrocities. Meanwhile, in the hotel room, Glogauer also undergoes a transformation in his relationship with the Nigerian - from a wary target of strange seduction to a dominant arrogance.

The structure of suffering

Breakfast in the Ruins is a tightly structured novel and almost every chapter proceeds in the same five steps:

1. One or more epigraphs, from documents or books contemporary to the time period of Glogauer's life in the relevant chapter. Moorcock typically uses these to quickly establish the historical context, and often the startling attitudes of the period.
   
2. A brief return, shown in italics, to the Nigerian's hotel room in 1971 and Glogauer's interactions with him there. Glogauer will recall fragments of his earlier life and the alternate life to follow in the current chapter.
   
3. The main event: a vignette from one of Glogauer's alternate lives. These range in length from a few pages to over 25 pages, in the case of the fully-fledged story set in London in 1905.
   
4. A second return, again in italics, to the hotel room in 1971. These emphasise the gradual shift in the relationship between Glogauer and the Nigerian, and a kind of psychic and physical transference that occurs between them.
   
5. A cruel moral quandary written in the second person, and titled "What Would You Do?" These are harder-edged versions of a recurring feature Moorcock wrote for boys' publications early in his career.
   
   

The atrocity exhibition

The meat of Breakfast in the Ruins is in the historical vignettes which make up the bulk of the text. Greatly varied, they take advantage of the economy of narrative which Moorcock had developed in his short fiction during the 1960s. Each episode represents an essentially complete short story in its own right, although they vary significantly in length and complexity. They are also an outlet for Moorcock’s interest in history, specifically some of the darkest episodes of the 19th and 20th centuries. 

There are definite standouts. In 1898, Karl is the son of a cigar manufacturer in Havana during the Cuban War of Independence; he is witness to a brutal reprisal that strikes at the heart of his family. In 1935, Karl is a German Jew conscripted into the Italian Army and dies during Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. In 1968, Karl is an American soldier in Vietnam, who takes part in a harrowing massacre inspired by thereal-life atrocities at My Lai. 

Moorcock’s dark, kaleidoscopic vision of history is mesmerising. Karl’s myriad experiences suggest that the lines between victim, bystander, and perpetrator can be thin and blurred. An accident of birth can nudge any person into any category, or some combination of them all. The novel explores the troubling complexities of history; in 1944 Karl is kept from the gas chambers at Auschwitz only because the guards enjoy the way he plays the violin at their soirees. In 1947, he is a member of the Irgun, ambushing and butchering British soldiers. Violence begets violence, and there are no easy answers.

Dark night of the soul

Breakfast in the Ruins confronts a challenging topic - man’s inhumanity to man and the persistence of violence and cruelty across history. But the way that Moorcock structures the novel makes this dark night of the soul more bearable, and perhaps more useful. While this is a dark book, it is never a depressing one. Breakfast in the Ruins is another example of Moorcock’s unique contribution to fiction, and an interesting counterpart to Behold the Man.

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• I read the 1978 New English Library (NEL) edition, with cover art by Joe Petagno.
• The previous novel to feature Karl Glogauer, Behold the Man, is reviewed here.
  
• Ed Chang reviewed this novel in 2020; that review features more detailed overviews of each of Glogauer’s lives.