The trouble with a first-person narrator is that once he is set in motion ('I am a child of my century and as old as the century') he chugs on under his own steam and both author and reader are stuck with his manufactured personality, however bumpy the ride it produces. Since [Byzantium Endures] only takes the narrator up to the age of 20 and we are promised further instalments [to] bring the story up to date, it is prudent to ask how roadworthy Colonel Pyat really is. Michael Moorcock has, in fact, lumbered himself with a pretty ungainly and rickety hero, both from the point of view of character construction and the more delicate one of literary convention.

Pyat is supposed to be an engineer with a 'poor, baffled, terror-ridden mind'. He is endowed with three distinct literary styles. The first is a perfectly serviceable narrative prose which...