Product Description

Gloriana rules an Albion whose empire embraces America and most of Asia. A new Golden Age of peace, enlightenment and prosperity has dawned. Gloriana is Albion and Albion is Gloriana; if one falls, so too will the other. And Gloriana is oppressed by the burden this places upon her - and by the fact that she remains incapable of orgasm. The maintenance of the delicate balance that keeps Albion and Gloriana thriving depends of Montfallcon, Gloriana's Chancellor, and on his network of spies and assassins - in particular on Quire, cold hearted seducer of virtue and murderer of innocence. When Quire falls out with Montfallcon, he forms an alliance with his greatest enemy and conceives a plan to ruin Gloriana, destroy Albion, the empire and the Golden Age itself. But even the utterly ruthless Quire does not fully understand what he has set in motion when he persuades the Queen to fall in love with him... Moorcock's masterly evocation of Gloriana's strange and secretive palace and of a vibrant London make this one of his most powerful and memorable novels.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #155021 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

About the Author
SALES POINTS * Part of the Fantasy Masterworks series * 'A great read...fiction writing at its best; a craftsman in full possession of his powers as Moorcock is here is a joy' Maxim Jakubowski, Vector * 'He is a giant. If you are at all interested in fantastic fiction, you must read Michael Moorcock' Tad Williams * 'Vastly entertaining' Science Fiction Review * 'A complex fantasy richly and convincingly textured' Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Locus * 'He casts a heady, enslaving spell' Ruth Rendell * A wonderful and brilliant fantasy set in a superbly realized alternate Elizabethan England.

Customer Reviews

So many books. Such high quality
There's a tendency, I think, to take Moorcock for granted because he has produced so much. 'Too much' as people say who mean they can't imagine reading it all. Yet what is unique about Moorcock is not his phenomenal output (Edgar Wallace and Barbara Cartland both easily break his record) but the extraordinary quality most of it retains. When you think of what he has turned out in the past few years, apart from Gloriana, you realise it includes some of the best books you have read in the past couple of decades! This book won the World Fantasy Award when that award was worth winning and it deserves all the awards and praise. Peter Ackroyd was a great enthusiast for the book and his own fiction carries odd echoes of Gloriana, not least a Platonic London and Judge Dee. For me this is the only peer to Peake and it seems to have been dedicated to Peake, so obviously Moorcock was writing a conscious tribute. Quire in his own way is as good and as complex a villain as Steerpike and Gloriana is a wonderful heroine, symbol of Britain (Albion) on one hand and complex, yearning woman on the other. There isn't a character who isn't fully drawn or a scene which doesn't have the richness and atmosphere of an Old Master. This book wasn't originally published in the fantasy genre and I think like Peake and T.H.White it belongs outside the general run. Moorcock's chief influences are German Romantics and French Existentialists, rather than genre writers, and these are enjoyed at their best in this gripping tale of blood, hate and high ideals. This should be the BBC's next epic. It's very sexy, too, in places! Feel the quality, feel the width. This is a gripping tale told on a rich and complex tapestry.

Best in the series yet
This is top quality stuff. Well up there with Peake, to whom it's dedicated. A queen whose lack of orgasm reflects her failure to find individual identity while she represents the State. Hers is a culture on the edge of enlightenment. Doctor Dee is here, as well as a Platonic London, and many other elements later found in Peter Ackroyd, a great admirer of this novel. It's well up to the best in the series so far, and a long way from Moorcock's hasty sword and sorcery epics.

An allegory of social responsibility
Unable to express her own passions, weighed down by her sense of duty, the sense that she embodies a virtuous State, Gloriana is unable to reach orgasm. Through the sinister and immoral Captain Quire, hired by her own chancellor to maintain the appearance of Albion's justice and gravitas, she learns that the State is not nearly as virtuous as she's been told and she finds fulfilment at last! Moorcock does a reverse on Spenser, whom he acknowledges in the front of the novel and whom he also parodies in the text, but this is not about Elizabeth so much as about England. A fine novel, which produces a perfect allegory without once pushing the themes down your throat. Like Philip Pullman, Moorcock is able to produce un-Christian parables, challenging the likes of C.S.Lewis without attitudinising or offering blatant arguments.
Written in the 1970s, winner of a couple of awards, short-listed for a Booker, this is a fine novel and one of the few outstaandingly literate works in this series. It ranks with Peake and is considerably subtler than Tolkien. The characters are delicious, the scenery gorgeous and the morality sharp as an assassin's dagger. Moorcock is a sophisticated moralist as well as a first-rate entertainer.