“Champion of Garathorm” by Michael Moorcock picks up soon after the end of “Count Brass” the first novel in the “Chronicles of Castle Brass” trilogy. The twist ending of the “Count Brass” leaves the main character, Hawkmoon, in a delicate mental and emotional state, wasting away in his room in Castle Brass, playing with toy soldiers trying to refight the battles of the war again and again to see how to fight the battle with all the main heroes surviving.

Castle Brass is visited by a noble warrior woman, Katinka Van Bak who has stories to tell of invaders across the mountains that are just enough to get Hawkmoon interested in a taking a temporary break from his toy soldiers and think he can be a hero again.

As they get farther from Castle Brass and farther, Hawkmoon gets in better physical condition, they run into Eternal Companion, Jhary-a-Conel, and then we find out they don’t really need Hawkmoon. Katinka and Jhary have other plans for the Champion Eternal, they just need his soul, and playing with his toy soldiers, he wasn’t really using it.

Through some magic, Hawkmoon becomes Ilian, a royal princess of Garathorm, in a far away place that needs help fighting invaders from another dimension.

I’d read this book once before as a teenager in the mid-80’s. At the time I didn’t like this trilogy at all, and in this one I was particularly disappointed in because I didn’t like the hero, Hawkmoon, becoming a woman.

Now that I’m older, now that I’ve read a lot more books overall, seen more of the world and met a lot more random people, my previous main issue with it didn’t bother me at all.

Overall I enjoyed it. It was a quick book to get through. But it didn’t leave me in awe like other novels, it was simply a nice, enjoyable read. ( )

After saving Count Brass, Hawkmoon returns to Kamarg to find Yisselda and his children gone - it was Yisselda, not Count Brass, that had died in the Battle of Londra and so his children were never born. In this untenable set of circumstances, Hawkmoon goes insane. He locks himself in a tower of Castle Brass playing Army trying to find a way to replay the Battle of Londra so that none of the six die - and this simply pushes him farther and farther off the edge until his body is wasted and his spirit is hanging on by a thread. Hope arrives in the person of Katinka van Bak who asks for Hawkmoon's help to recover a her adopted land that is overrun by a vast Army of outsiders. Hawkmoon agrees to help her, but he doesn't quite know how he's supposed to help. We quickly find that Hawkmoon himself is not required, but the spirit of the Eternal Champion is needed to animate the body of another aspect of the Champion who has had her spirit stolen by Baron Kalan of Granbretan.

It's amazing how much trouble Kalan and others have caused in the multiverse. Messing around with trans-dimensional portals and mucking about in the time streams apparently cause issues even for the Lords of Law and Chaos. I guess I'll shut down my own experiments - just in case. ( )

http://www.sfreader.com/read_review.asp?book=1111 ( )