Michael Moorcock’s Pyat Quartet, the Jewish experience of twentieth-century history, and the failure of the utopian

This article examines a number of ways in which Michael Moorcock’s Pyat Quartet (Byzantium Endures [1981], The Laughter of Carthage [1984], Jerusalem Commands [1992], The Vengeance of Rome [2006]) explores the failure of the twentieth century’s utopian impulses through its central character, Colonel Pyat. Pyat, a self-denying Jew who simultaneously performs and experiences anti-Semitism, is exposed directly to the century’s two great utopian movements, communism and fascism. He rejects the former and embraces the latter, but suffers from the practices of both. He is also an engineer who dreams of creating the type of technological utopia that informed many of the century’s most perfervid aspirations, but who experiences their repeated failures both in terms of the misapplication of technology embodied by the Holocaust and in the failure of technology to redeem the crumbling 1970s’ Britain from which the novels are narrated. Pyat, this article argues, is a twentieth-century everyman, who dreams the century’s utopias, and lives its failures.