Michael Moorcock, author of over fifty books, is known mainly for his science fiction works. Byzantium Endures is an historical novel: long, complex, richly peopled, as confusing, turbulent and intense as the events it describes—the factional fighting in the Ukraine in 1917–18. Moorcock purports to be presenting the recollections of one Colonel Pyat, an émigré washed up in the Portobello Road area in the Sixties and Seventies…. (pp. 85-6)

Pyat is an unlovable character, to put it kindly: a zenophobic anti-Semite with Pan-Slavic ideals, bombastic, insensitive, opinionated, a braggart….

And while he brags and proclaims, his brash and opportunistic personality shines through the lush precipitate prose, alternately exasperating and amusing…. He becomes a cocaine addict and discovers women and is imprisoned by the Bolsheviks and escapes death by good luck and by good management. And as the country seethes and boils around him he pontificates on life and on history and on ideas—with, presumably, the wisdom (if that is the right word) of hindsight. We are, after all, reading the memoirs of an old man, selected and slanted as they may be.

The novel must, I think, be reckoned a tour de force. I have to admit that I never really felt engaged, reading it; Pyat's deficiencies of personality, the enormous cast of characters bouncing in and out of the pages, the welter of places and bewildering shifts of fortune all contribute to confuse rather than compel…. It is inconclusive, like history; the reader is left with a feeling of anticlimax which is acceptable in an account of facts but not so in a work of fiction. But, that being said, one cannot but admire the pace of the book, the virtuosity, the descriptions of people and of places…. For many it will be a robust, absorbing read, even if it is difficult to emerge with a clear picture of what has been happening to whom, and why. (p. 86)