Michael Moorcock, author of over fifty books, is known mainly for his science fiction works. Byzantium Endures is an historical novel: long, complex, richly peopled, as confusing, turbulent and intense as the events it describes—the factional fighting in the Ukraine in 1917–18. Moorcock purports to be presenting the recollections of one Colonel Pyat, an émigré washed up in the Portobello Road area in the Sixties and Seventies…. (pp. 85-6)

Pyat is an unlovable character, to put it kindly: a zenophobic anti-Semite with Pan-Slavic ideals, bombastic, insensitive, opinionated, a braggart….

And while he brags and proclaims, his brash and opportunistic personality shines through the lush precipitate prose, alternately exasperating and amusing…. He becomes a cocaine addict and discovers women and is imprisoned by the Bolsheviks and escapes death by good luck and by good management. And as the country seethes and boils around him he pontificates on life and...