This is not the easiest book to read. It is told in very short chapters in an almost stochastic fashion with random seeming events drawing the familiar entourage of Jerry Cornelius stories together.

Jerry Cornelius has been brought up to date somewhat and now fits a little easier into the world of the 21st Century. He is still a Jesuit priest, now Monsignor Cornelius and just appointed by the secretary of the U.N. to be the first Catholic governer of Kashmir. He is still a sexual creature, that aspect of his character not suppressed for these AIDS ridden times, but he is now portrayed as a more sober sombre-looking man. He wears a sensible business suit and has a short cut hairstyle.

The world he inhabits is an sarcastic, anarchic version of ours, with events and trends taken to extremes. London has grown ever larger and extends as far south as the Sussex coast, Scotland is now a rogue state, and the United States seems to have imploded, fracturing into a myriad group of warring factions.

Indeed, war and violence seems very much to be the entire backdrop to this novella. There are many military characters popping up throughout - Major Nye, General "Wrong-Way" Lindbergh, Captain "Four-Eyes" Ewell and Captain Heemish "Flash" Gordon - as well as the plot visiting many places associated with violence and war in recent years, from the WTC Memorial Hall, through Burundi to Kashmir. There are references to various ethnic groups and their clashes and each chapter is preceeded by quotations from the Economist, the all Street Journal, various other sources referring to the Arab-Israeli conflict as well as the September 11th terrorist attacks.

This is by no means a straightforward story. The plot seems to proceed at random with linked vignettes setting moods and establishing ideas rather than continuing the narrative flow. To long time Michael Moorcock fans and readers of the previous Jerry Cornelius stories this is not likely to cause problems - there are enough familiar references and characters included here to make you feel at home. We meet Una Persson, Bishop Beesley, Mo Collier (who in a wonderful aside reflects on how he hates to buy dope from the clergy), and Trixie Brunner, daughter of the Baroness amongst an enormous cast of supporting characters for so short a work.

But is this a book that would serve to introduce new readers to the world of Jerry Cornelius and the wider worlds of Michael Moorcock - probably not. There's simply too much that needs to be known to get full value out of this. It's a book that will almost certainly appeal to anyone who's read and enjoyed the Cornelius Quartet but if you haven't read them, start there first - then you'll be in a position to get the most form this book.

Synopsis
In the 1960s Jerry Cornelius was the coolest assassin on the Ladbroke Grove block.

By the 1970s the Condition of Muzak had won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Final Programme was a feature film starring Jon Finch, Jenny Runacre, Hugh Griffiths and Sterling Hayden.

In the 1980s the world's first cyberpunk continued to inspire a generation of writers including William Gibson, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and bands like The Human League.

By the 1990s he was up and running towards the guns again in stories like 'The Spencer Inheritance', 'The Camus Connection' and 'Cheering For The Rockets', which dealt with the ikons and key events of the day.

Now, in Firing The Cathedral, he responds to the attacks on America of September 2001 and their consequences, to the realities of global warming and global terrorism and, once again, the apocalypse has never seemed more terrifying, never been more fun. Cooler, sharper, his fingers firmly on the pulse of the 21st century, Jerry Cornelius is back, counting names and taking heads. And modern life will never feel the same to you again.