Cape £17.99 pp618

Michael Moorcock began his quartet of novels about Colonel Pyat — once a White Russian cavalry officer, latterly a vintage-clothing seller on Portobello Road — when Margaret Thatcher was in her first term. The third volume appeared over a dozen years ago. Moorcock explains in a preface that this final instalment was held up by threats of litigation from some of his minor characters, a story about as likely as the rest of the novel.

We rejoin Pyat in Tangier, circa 1930, in a spot of bother as usual. Rescued by a friend, he escapes to Majorca, where he meets Mussolini’s mistress at a party and finds himself appointed a government minister in Rome. Among his other talents, he is an engineer and Mussolini wants his plans for the “Land Leviathan”, a giant tank capable of crushing all resistance in its path. Moorcock seems to be inspired by a real idea advanced later, in 1944. The trouble was no bridge could carry tanks of the proposed size, so the scheme got shelved. Neither Pyat nor Mussolini spots that snag.

Pyat is a true believer in the Fascist dream of order and prosperity, seeing the dictators as a bulwark against the evils of Big Business and International Zionism. Moorcock always makes plain that his narrator is a deluded booby, and we are no doubt meant to notice that these same two bugbears are the obsession of the modern anti-globalisation, anti-war Left.

Pyat’s life in Rome, a joyous round of parties, cocaine and nice uniforms, soon ends when Mussolini sends him on a fact-finding errand to Germany. Stuck in Munich, Pyat cannot understand why the money orders stop coming. The reader, as ever, is ahead of him: Mussolini (very credibly portrayed) just wants a clear run at the poor fool’s American girlfriend.

It’s a good thing Pyat is bisexual, because he now finds a new sponsor in Ernst Röhm, leader of Hitler’s brownshirt Sturmabteilung (SA). Contemporary observers saw a posturing queeniness in the real Röhm which Pyat, who holds to Spartan notions of manly love but hates effeminacy, of course fails to register. Pyat’s “idyll” with Röhm goes on for over 200 pages. The big event is the apparent suicide of Hitler’s niece Geli, who supposedly shoots herself with Hitler’s gun. Not that anyone is fooled. On a Walther automatic, “You can’t pull the trigger without pressing down the safety at the same time”; no girl would know that. Possibly even Hitler wouldn’t. Röhm would, though, and he was trying to retrieve some of Hitler’s pornographic letters from the blackmailing Geli at the time.

If you ever find an old German pistol, remember novelists make things up. The Walther safety catch is set to “fire” in the up position, does not require constant pressure and will fire the first shot without being thumb-cocked. Even a girl could do it. If you do shoot your foot off, sue Moorcock and not me.

Hitler, missing his Geli, goes into a decline just when he should be schmoozing Big Business. Röhm forces Pyat to drag up as Geli risen from the dead and play the Führer’s favourite sex games: “I lift my left leg and bring the red spike heel down between Hitler’s naked shoulder blades . . . I piss in Hitler’s mouth . . . I shit in Hitler’s eyes . . . ” I don’t know about you, but I could have done without this. Hitler was repressed to the point of asexuality and his horrible kinks found expression in all too public a sphere. This is just Pynchonesque fantasy.

Come the Night of the Long Knives and the purge of Röhm’s SA, Pyat is in a spot of bother again. In Dachau, actually. The picture of camp life is cruelly plausible, and lit by perverse humour because Pyat is such an idiotic apologist. After further barmy escapes, he makes his life in post-war Notting Hill, railing at “commercial television, the Egg Marketing Board, immigration and the notion of individual rights over the common good”. Ah, yes, those Tony Hancock adverts for eggs. We should have known they were all part of the Red Multinational Zionist masterplan. By and large the novel is a pungent, repellent, magnificent agglomeration of man’s absurdity. Normal for Moorcock.

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