Breakfast in the Ruins

by Michael Moorcock

The novel's first chapter begins in London, with Karl Glogauer travelling through Kensington on his way to the Derry and Tom's Roof Gardens. There, on a bench in the Spanish Gardens, he fantasises about the past, trying to put "his mother, his childhood as it actually was, [and] the failure of his ambitions" out of his head with an imagined life in Regency-era London, filled with politics, gambling, women and duelling.

His imaginations are interrupted by a "deep, slightly hesitant, husky" voice, a greeting of "Good afternoon", a dark-skinned man who spends the entirety of the novel unnamed. He first asks if he may join Glogauer on the bench, and then goes on to explain that he's merely visiting London, and that he hadn't expected to find such a place in the middle of the city. Glogauer wrongly assumes him to be a rich American tourist, annoyed to have been disturbed from his reverie.

The man then asks Glogauer if he may photograph him; Glogauer, now flattered, assents. While he's being photographed, the man explains that he's from Nigeria, attempting to convince the government of England to buy copper at a higher price. Glogauer says that he's an illustrator. The man then invites Glogauer to have tea with him, and Glogauer, feeling guilty, and, despite recalling his mother's words to not have anything to do with people who make you feel guilty, agrees.

After journeying through the Tudor and Woodland gardens, they dine at the restaurant. During the meal, Glogauer attempts to introduce himself. The man, however, does not respond, merely offering Glogauer the sugar bowl. Glogauer realized that the man is using on him some of the same seduction techniques which Glogauer himself used when seducing girls in the past. When the Nigerian asks Glogauer to "come back with me", Glogauer says "Yes". The second chapter, introducing a format that is followed by most subsequent chapters, excluding the last, begins, in italics, with a short scene in the man's hotel suite. Glogauer has taken his clothes off, and lies naked on the bed. The man touches first his head, and then his shoulders. Glogauer closes his eyes, blocking reality out, and begins a fantasy, similar to that which was interrupted by the man in the first chapter. The ending of the chapter is also another scene, in italics, that is set in the present.

The bulk of the book takes place during a single night at the hotel suite, during which the two have little sleep. The Nigerian introduces Glogauer to various aspects of Homosexual sex. Though completely new to it, Glogauer quickly sheds all inhibitions and starts acting in an (unspecified) provocative manner, startling the Nigerian: "You know how to be offensive, don't you? A short time ago you were just an ordinary London lad. Now you are behaving like the bitchiest little Pansy I ever saw" (Ch.15). During the night the two of them quarrel, reconcile, and have some more sex and a little nap. The Nigerian also makes Glogauer paint his skin black. Gradually, it starts looking like the Nigerian is not what he seems. His English is suddenly changing; suddenly it looks like his eyes are blue; and at a certain moment Glogauer suddenly feels that he might be a woman, of an animal with teeth - and then he looks again like he was. The Nigerian says that "We are many people, there are a lot of different sides to one's personality". Later on, he expresses his objection to abortion because "I'm against the destruction of possibilities. Everything should be allowed to proliferate. The interest lies in seeing which becomes dominant. Which wins". This implies that the Nigerian is aware of Glogauer's experiencing the different lives he might have had - though he never refers to it. The Nigerian offers to make Glogauer a successful artist and get his paintings bought. Later on, he offers to take Glogauer with him. Glogauer, suddenly realizing that this is a famous man whose photos often appear in the papers, refuses. The Nigerian reacts: "I offered you an empire, and you've chosen a cabbage patch". Finally they part on roof garden where they first met - and the Nigerian (if he is that) has turned into a white man. The unnamed Nigerian could be an incarnation of Jerry Cornelius - an urban adventurer and hipster of ambiguous and occasionally polymorphous gender, who appears in several Moorcock books. In Behold the Man, and at the start of Breakfast in the Ruins, Glogauer is white but by the end of Breakfast he has become black (similarly, Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius is white in The Final Programme but black in A Cure for Cancer.