Gloriana

Gloriana, or The Unfulfill'd Queen is set in Albion, an empire that stretches from Virginia to the borders of Tartary and looks something like Elizabethan England seen in a distorting mirror. Queen Gloriana replaced her tyrannical father, King Hern, on the throne thirteen years earlier and has given her people a golden age of peace. Privately she is miserable. She has nine daughters and lovers of both sexes, and she searches every night for a sexual fulfillment she never finds. Her Lord Chancellor, Perion Montfallcon, keeps the golden age running with terror and informers, and his best agent is Captain Quire, a bisexual assassin who regards his crimes as art.

When Montfallcon insults him, Quire turns against the state he has served. He takes money from foreign agents, works through the exiles and criminals who live in the forgotten passages behind the palace walls, and sets out to undo the court and to seduce the queen herself, while the Caliph of Arabia and the King of Poland compete for her hand. The court around them includes Doctor Dee, the poet Wheldrake and Gloriana's friend Una, Countess of Scaith. The book is arranged around four seasons, each with its festival or masque. In the penultimate chapter Montfallcon dies at Quire's hand, and the fate of Gloriana's long lost mother comes to light.

This is a dense, deliberately ornate book. Moorcock writes in a pastiche of late seventeenth century prose, with long winding sentences and lists, and the palace becomes a map of a mind, public halls above and buried rooms below. It rewards readers who like the Gormenghast novels of Mervyn Peake, to whose memory the book is dedicated, and who enjoy language for its own sake. Readers should know that the ending exists in two versions: in the original, Quire rapes the queen; in the revision Moorcock made later, she turns his own dagger on him and there is no rape.