The novel “A Cure for Cancer” by Michael Moorcock was published for the first time in 1971 after various parts were published in different magazines. It’s the second novel in the Jerry Cornelius series and follows “The Final Programme“.

A mirror image of Jerry Cornelius is looking for a device that was stolen from him. It’s capable of manipulating space-time with its cycles and therefore reality reality itself. He intends to use it for a very personal purpose but finding it in the chaotic Europe is difficult even for him.

In the 1960s Michael Moorcock started to promote the new wave literary current as editor of the magazine “New Worlds”, and as a writer he already started writing stories related to the concept of Eternal Champion, a hero with different identities in various universes. The combination of the new wave current and the idea of ​​Eternal Champion led to the birth of the character of Jerry Cornelius, who is not exactly a spotless hero but in some ways is more a likable rogue.

The Jerry Cornelius of “A Cure for Cancer” is not exactly the same present in “Final Program”, but his mirror image in the sense that his colors are reversed, so he’s all black with white hair. If Moorcock’s works are normally set in a multiverse, in this case the boundaries between universes and the realities in which the second novel is set become vague. Michael Moorcock introduces a device capable of manipulating the cycles of space-time as an excuse to fragment the narrative in a story that takes the concepts of the new wave movement to the extreme.

In this novel, the plot is vague, more a premise from which to start with a very experimentalist development. “Final program” already contained elements typical of the new wave movement, but had a relatively linear plot, this sequel seems in many ways more an anthology than a novel, a book divided into various vignettes that seem autonomous parts, even if they form a kind of mosaic.

Even in their structure, the various parts can be different, in the sense that for example parts of faux newspaper articles are occasionally reported and there’s one part made up of very short chapters of a few lines each. Honestly, there are cases in which I found difficult to read it because it was too fragmented. It’s a novel that could be defined as lysergic for the style used by Michael Moorcock. Not surprisingly, the new wave movement was based among other things on breaking patterns by adopting unconventional stylistic choices that can overwhelm the substance.

The portrait of the degenerate Europe in which Jerry Cornelius seeks his device is in many ways still strong. It was the time of the Cold War and the Vietnam War, and Michael Moorcock imagines a Europe involved in a war. In “A Cure for Cancer” Jerry Cornelius travels through British cities occupied by the US armies. The situation today is very different, but certain images remain strong.

Some elements of the novel are dated, starting with the sexual one. In the late 1960s, when Michael Moorcock started writing this series, adding sexual references to science fiction stories was still part of the break with traditional patterns. In “A Cure for Cancer” this element is even more pronounced than in the first book, but, decades later, it lost the provocative effect it had at the time. In those years, various works by the author got censored due to a sexual component that today can scandalize only a few bigots.

Before the start of “A Cure for Cancer”, a note warns that this book has an unconventional structure. In some ways, it’s the quintessence of the new wave novel. If you appreciate this science fiction current, you will certainly like it.