Gloriana by Michael Moorcock

I think I can best describe this book as both overwhelming and tasteless. It's unnecessarily sexually explicit and I found it sort of confusing and too tangled in its descriptions of court intrigue. At first I was really excited to read an alternate-universe Faerie Queene, but I became less and less interested and invested as it went on. It's certainly very colourful and full of adventure, but it's excessively gruesome and violent in parts. I also felt like Moorcock was trying too hard to write about female sexuality in a particular way that was popular at the end of the 1970s (very like the fairy tale erotic explorations of The Bloody Chamber, which I heartily detest). What I found interesting is the groupings of things that are similar and opposite (which is very vague thing to say), what I mean is that in many ways, the characters are explicitly the same as their parallels in our world (the red-haired queen of the Golden Age Gloriana is Elizabeth, one of the her councilors is similar in appearance and manner to Walsingham, etc), but in many ways they are the exact opposite (instead of being the Virgin Queen, Gloriana indulges in sexual excess and has nine children), yet they are still recognisably the same figures. I thought it this was a clever way of playing with binaries and what is seemingly polar opposites to show that they are not opposed to each other at all, but complement each other (for example, we recognise Elizabeth in Gloriana even though she is the opposite of Elizabeth's much-vaunted virginity). But besides this, I found it excessive and disgusting in its depictions of violence, especially sexual violence. And now I feel like Goldilocks, because I was complaining that The Essex Serpent isn't twisted enough, and now I'm complaining that this is too twisted.