Jerusalem Commands

I've just finished Jerusalem Commands, the third novel in Michael Moorcock's Colonel Pyat quartet. Pyat is a Ukrainian half-Jew who is an anti-semitic monster, an unreliable narrator on an odyssey through the first half of the twentieth century. In his rants he appeals to the glory of Byzantium (Pyat is a late convert to the Orthodox Church) against the brutality of Carthage.

This passage begins with a pipe-dream of Utopia, describing Hollywood, of all places as a new Byzantium,

"I walk along her palm boulevards, beside her ocean, secure and tranquil beneath a beningn golden sun. And here the great spires and domes which rise above her tall trees shall be dedicated not to the cruel and drooling patriarch who shits upon the world like an ancient losing control of his bowels, but to his Son, his Successor, who is God re-born, God cleansed and whole, God not as our brooding master but as our partner in self-improvement. I speak of the Christian God, no God that Jew or Arab can claim. Their God is the God of Carthage, senile and confused, yet full of the blind brute rage which brought the Minotaur to ruin. He is a God of the bloody past. This is not a God to advise on the subtle problems of urban living. To call upon such a God in Notting Hill would be tantamount to summoning the devil. I speak of the God who revealed himself through Jesus Christ. I speak of that self-regenerated God who proclaimed the age of Peace and then watched in dismay as He saw what Man made of it."
Jerusalem Commands (Vintage, 2006) p.559


This is a fascinating theology--God is old and feeble and cruel, so he is replaces by his son Jesus. It could add an entirely new twist to the Gnostic myth!