Gloriana

Albion is at the height of its power, an empire of peace and plenty ruled by Gloriana the First, whose person is the state and whose court is a machine for the production of harmony. The machinery has two operators. Lord Montfallcon, Chancellor, spent his career under Gloriana's monstrous father doing everything that reign required, and has dedicated his old age to ensuring the daughter never learns what her tranquillity costs. Captain Quire, whom he employs, is the instrument: an artist of manipulation who conducts his murders and seductions as a connoisseur and who tires of being used. And Gloriana herself, adored by a court of lovers, cannot achieve satisfaction with any of them, a private failure that Moorcock places at the exact centre of the realm's public perfection. The palace walls are riddled with a hidden population living in the spaces between rooms. Written in deliberate answer to Spenser and to Peake, the novel is baroque, cruel and gorgeous, and its argument is that an empire's serenity is always maintained somewhere out of sight by people its beneficiaries must never meet.