# (no subject) *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 08 Sep 1998* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### David Wells *08 Sep 1998, 10:25* From: Jim Jordan > > Subject: Re: (urth) Eco's tic > Eco's point in *Name* is that the world CAN be understood, something > Baskerville's > disciple fails to learn, [even more off topic, but briefly] I sometimes think that Michael Moorcock's "The War Hound and The World's Pain" is a kind of "anti-Name-of-the-Rose". There are (to my perhaps peculiar way of thinking) plot similarities in that both describe the not-completely-witting attempts of "philosopher" protagonists to end the Age of Unreason (a topic much more explicit in Moorcock's book). As a result, at the end of both books the world has "changed" in a subtle(ish) way. But, in keeping with Moorcock's status as the "anti-Wolfe"(*), von Bek is a semi-sociopathic atheist warrior who falls in with angels and demons, whereas Baskerville is a monk who falls in with matters of the material world. (Hmmm... I'm almost beginning to convince myself here). Anyway, I would recommend "Warhound" as a light contrast to Wolfe (with the caveat that Moorcock writes it with such lucidity that some of my friends have dismissed it as a "juvenile"), and the sequel "The City and the Autumn Stars", which is much more intricate and baroque. Both were recently (ish: 1995/7) republished in the UK in collected form as "Von Bek". newt (*) Moorcock is erudite, heavily-influenced, and writes often elliptical/baffling books about philosophical/theological topics. But... he's a proselytising atheist who writes in a lucid way about complex topics - the Anti-Wolfe! > Nutria (James B. Jordan) ---