The Whispering Swarm by Michael Moorcock

Set in London in the 1950s, Michael Moorcock's The Whispering Swarm blends autobiography and fantasy – aiming, he says, for a sort of book he hasn’t seen before. It’s an odd, unsettling mix that carries him from the post-war city of austerity to a world of monks, magic and beautiful maidens. Moorcock is both narrator and central character – a budding editor stumbling upon his sci-fi heroes in pubs around Fleet Street. Then he meets a Carmelite Monk, follows him through a locked gate and into another world.

There is plenty of detail to keep regular fans of Moorcock’s work busy. The two worlds he describes are kaleidoscopic, and there are all the fancy movements of time and space that you might expect. He adopts a grandfatherly fireside tone for recounting his childhood stories of the 1950s, of working the arcades and making it as a fantasy writer. It is homely and digressive, but it lands a little heavily on the side of telling rather than showing. This is fine for the 1950s, but feels a little too slow when we slip into the fantasy world. The trick is to forget about the direction of the story, and let this master of the genre tell you about monks and cosmolabes and vast theories of the multiverse.