Breakfast in the Ruins
Dust-jacket from the first edition
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| Author | Michael Moorcock |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Series | Karl Glogauer |
| Genre | Literary fiction |
| Publisher | New English Library |
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Publication date
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1972 |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 172 pp |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 591231 |
| 823/.9/14 | |
| LC Class | PZ4.M8185 Br PR6063.O59 |
Breakfast in the Ruins: A Novel of Inhumanity is a 1972 novel by Michael Moorcock, which mixes historical and speculative fiction. It was first published in the United Kingdom by the New English Library. The novel centres on Karl Glogauer, who is also the protagonist of Moorcock's Nebula Award winning novella, Behold the Man, his homosexual exploits with an unnamed man from Nigeria, and his fantasies of the past and lives that he could have led.
The novel is divided into nineteen chapters, the first of which is set in the 'present' (1971), the next seventeen spaced out at roughly ten-year intervals from 1871 through to 1990, with the last chapter set once again in the present. The chapters begin and end in the present, with a short scene involving Glogauer and the man, which vary from philosophical discussion to sex involving dominance and submission. The chapters are each also followed, except for chapter nineteen, by a short section entitled What would you do?, which presents sadistic choices, a Morton's Fork, such as:
You are told that you can save any two of them from death, but not all three. You are given five-minutes to choose. Which one would you sacrifice?
The novel's first chapter begins in London, with Karl Glogauer travelling through Kensington on his way to the Derry and Tom's Roof Gardens. There, on a bench in the Spanish Gardens, he fantasises about the past, trying to put "his mother, his childhood as it actually was, [and] the failure of his ambitions" out of his head with ideals of Regency-era London politics, gambling, women and duelling.
His imaginations are interrupted by a "deep, slightly hesitant, husky" voice, a greeting of "Good afternoon", a dark-skinned man who spends the entirety of the novel unnamed. He first asks if he may join Glogauer on the bench, and then goes on to explain that he's merely visiting London, and that he hadn't expected to find such a place in the middle of the city. Glogauer wrongly assumes him to be a rich American tourist, annoyed to have been disturbed from his reverie.
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