'This was a gift-wrapped, throwaway age, Mr Cornelius. Now the gift-wrapping is off, it's being thrown away.' And through the debris stalks Jerry Cornelius: assassin, bon vivant, universal idiot genius, specialist in the resurrection gimmick, protagonist of many novels and stories by several hands and central character of the tetralogy now completed by The Condition of Muzak. His secret, though, is that he has no character at all in the normal sense of the word. He is a nomad of the territories of personality; even his skin colour and gender are as labile as his accomplishments ('Jerry could rarely speak German'). He is a set of co-ordinates: a peg on which to hang the costume of one's choice. A potentially infinite manifold of stylistic gestures—so long as they have style.

So he represents the zero-point of the novel: either its transcendence or its decomposition. Not only character is abandoned—consistency as a criterion of plot depends formally and actually on consistency of character. These four books employ at least a dozen major alternative universes, a dozen different histories of the twentieth century, as backdrops; and it is doubtful whether any of these is internally consistent. Many of the main protagonists die repeatedly, their resurrection usually going quite unremarked. If a protagonist's death carries no finality, then where are we to look for it? And without finality of any kind, what is left of plot?

The parodied Pater epigram in the title of the last novel gives at least one game away. If Mr Moorcock's art aspires to the condition of muzak, then it aspires to endlessness rather than the more conventional goal of eternity; and the difference is immense. The primary qualities of muzak are repetition, blandness, and consistency in the special sense of continuity, homogeneity. Mr Moorcock swings his glove in the face of Western culture's most central values. (pp. 21-2)

[The novels] are pulp-writing of a very blatant and conscious sort. There is nothing in Mr Moorcock's huge oeuvre to suggest that he is capable of orthodox characterisation and plotting at all. When he writes a conventionally structured book, it is two-dimensional and third-rate, bearing all the marks of honourable, in-it-for-the-money deadline work.

What he has contrived to do in the Jerry Cornelius books (some of the best of which are actually outside the tetralogy) is to make a virtue of his incapability. Out goes fuddy-duddy consistency, and associated values like depth, three-dimensionality and so on; in comes the new pragmatism of a surface excitement intended to take over from form and content altogether…. And there is a tremendous surface excitement here: dialogue worthy of the great Hollywood sophisticated comedies—from which it occasionally borrows—and scenery which changes too fast to become boring….

One can see Mr Moorcock as a gifted populariser of avant-garde techniques…. It is certainly true that he is a populariser rather than an original artist: a magpie of anschauungen who beautifully represents our culture's current eclecticism. But what concerns me is the actual nature of the trinkets that he assembles. A populariser is a bringer of news; and Mr Moorcock brings news of massive alienation….

He is right: the novels do tend towards the condition of muzak. Even the end of the world begins to pall when there are eight alternative versions in a single novel. To recapitulate the conditions of our suffering in an endless melisma of formal variations, an endless permutation of pseudo-insurrections, this is muzak. Perhaps one day a different message will crackle out of the loudspeakers, inflaming the supermarket shoppers.

But I do not think that Michael Moorcock will provide it. (p. 22)