The trouble with a first-person narrator is that once he is set in motion ('I am a child of my century and as old as the century') he chugs on under his own steam and both author and reader are stuck with his manufactured personality, however bumpy the ride it produces. Since [Byzantium Endures] only takes the narrator up to the age of 20 and we are promised further instalments [to] bring the story up to date, it is prudent to ask how roadworthy Colonel Pyat really is. Michael Moorcock has, in fact, lumbered himself with a pretty ungainly and rickety hero, both from the point of view of character construction and the more delicate one of literary convention.

Pyat is supposed to be an engineer with a 'poor, baffled, terror-ridden mind'. He is endowed with three distinct literary styles. The first is a perfectly serviceable narrative prose which carries the bulk of the story…. But, to express the alleged demonic side of his nature, he periodically bursts into black rhapsodies…. And an appendix gives samples of the polyglot raving into which he supposedly plunges from time to time….

The three modes do not fuse convincingly into the evocation of a human mind. But an even bigger impediment to belief arises from Pyat's alleged racial origins. He is portrayed as being violently anti-Semitic but inadvertently reveals that he is the illegitimate son of a dead Jewish father. Since the reader has no difficulty in interpreting the clues that Pyat uncomprehendingly relays, and the man is credited with shrewdness as well as high intelligence, his stubborn naivety strains our credulity. He looks Jewish and is circumsised. Almost everyone he meets assumes he is a Jew but he blunders on serenely unaware of his Semitic blood. (p. 24)

The sad truth is I found Colonel Pyat a bore and his odyssey unconvincing. Michael Moorcock, fortified by deep research, strives to bring a historical epoch to life but almost any single page of Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry conveys more of Russia's revolutionary agony than the whole of this book.

Oddly enough, Mr Moorcock's third-person Jerry Cornelius novels are, in their quirky, free-wheeling way, truer and more moving than this massive fiction. There is here a sense of overexertion, as if Mr Moorcock were striving to demonstrate that he is not just the thinking hippy's bard but, as Mrs Cornelius might have put it, a 'jenewine orffer'. His Ukraine is conceived as the central arena of history where Rome, Carthage, Greece and Israel pursue their ancient struggles in modern permutations. But this ambitious notion is both too schematic and too diffuse to serve as a satisfactory basis for fiction. Byzantium may indeed endure but Byzantium Endures does not, alas, live. (pp. 24-5)