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Viriconium #1-4
Viriconium
This landmark collection gathers four groundbreaking fantasy classics from the acclaimed author of Light.
Set in the imagined city of Viriconium, here are the masterworks that revolutionized a genre and enthralled a generation of readers: The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium, and Viriconium Knights.
Contents:
The Pastel City, 1971 (novel)
A Storm of Wings, 1980 (novel)
In Viriconium, 1982 (novel)
The Lamia & Lord Cromis, 1971 (short story)
Viriconium Knights, 1981 (short story)
The Luck in the Head, 1984 (novelette)
Strange Great Sins, 1983 (short story)
The Lords of Misrule, 1984 (short story)
The Dancer from the Dance, 1985 (short story)
A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium, 1985 (short story)
Set in the imagined city of Viriconium, here are the masterworks that revolutionized a genre and enthralled a generation of readers: The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium, and Viriconium Knights.
Contents:
The Pastel City, 1971 (novel)
A Storm of Wings, 1980 (novel)
In Viriconium, 1982 (novel)
The Lamia & Lord Cromis, 1971 (short story)
Viriconium Knights, 1981 (short story)
The Luck in the Head, 1984 (novelette)
Strange Great Sins, 1983 (short story)
The Lords of Misrule, 1984 (short story)
The Dancer from the Dance, 1985 (short story)
A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium, 1985 (short story)
462 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2000
354 people are currently reading
7,236 people want to read
About the author
M. John Harrison
112books787followersaka Gabriel King (with Jane Johnson)
Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space.
Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space.
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November 2, 2018
Viriconium - a series of four books (three novels; one short story collection) set in a far-far-future world at the point where science fiction morphs into fantasy, that is, a world of futuristic airships, robots and computerized eagles but also a world where knights in armor ride horses into battle under a queen's banner.
T. John Harrison is breathtaking. I haven't read such world building, imagination firing fantasy since I paid a visit to J. R .R. Tolkien's Middle Earth forty years ago. Incidentally, not being an avid fan of the genre myself, I was drawn to Viriconium on the strength of Neil Gaiman's sparkling essay from his collection The View from the Cheap Seats.
I plan to review all four Viriconium books as I move through the cycle.
The Pastel City - a spectacular tale of adventure with philosophical overtones and undertones. Rather than shining the spotlight on the arch of events, here are a batch of notables a reader will encounter along the way:
The Order of Methven: An invasion from the north propels old warrior Lord tegeus-Cromis out of retirement. And to think, he was planning to live his remaining years in his tower as a recluse composing poetry and playing music. Sorry, Cromis! You must strap on your famous sword and ride your horse to gather your Methven friends who once fought ferociously on behalf of Viriconium since impending disaster requires you to defend your young queen and the lands within her domain.
We join tall, thin Cromis from the first to last chapter, the ideal main character for M. John Harrison since the aging champion radiates knightly virtue and is a keen observer of beauty both in nature and in art.
The New Earth: Viriconium and the Pastel City arose five hundred years following the collapse of the Afternoon Cultures with their highly technological and scientific achievements, cultures such as our own which left a vast wasteland of rust and decay. In this new age, the transformation of fauna and flora is striking - for example, there are docile giant lizards nearly the size of dinosaurs and great sloth-like beasts fifteen feet tall when standing upright, beasts known as albino megatheria so gentle and friendly the queen keeps one as a house pet.
Mysterious Messenger: A huge vulture approaches Cromis and delivers a message: "go at once to the tower of Cellur on the Girvan Bay." On closer inspection Cromis can see the vulture is made of intricately formed metal and is capable of engaging in dialogue, a creature, he reckons, made with know-how from the Afternoon cultures.
Energy Weapons: Diabolical instruments from the Afternoon Cultures that perhaps electrocute their victims. The author cleverly doesn't elaborate here; rather, he leaves the details of these deadly weapons to the reader's imagination.
Airboats: Yet again another piece of technology from the Afternoon Cultures, crafts frequently equipped with energy cannons. Not surprisingly, Viriconiums judge those Afternoon Cultures as geared toward war and destruction. Quite a statement on our present era.
Dwarf Eleven Feet Tall: One of the most fascinating parts of the novel: Cromis' old fighting friend, ax wielding Tomb the dwarf rigs himself with an immense motorized skeleton contraption with extended arms and legs so he can swing into battle towering above mere men, "a gigantic paradox suspended on the thin line between comedy and horror." Not only is Tomb a fighter and master mechanic, this dwarf spouts one-liners like a first-rate stand-up comic. Thanks, M. John! Every life and death adventure needs a spot of humor.
The Birdmaker: Cellur of Lendalfoot has gathered the wisdom of hundreds of years as he had passed beyond time into a state of exaltation. "He wore a loose, unbelted black robe - quilted in grouped arrangements of lozenges - which was embroidered in gold wire patterns resembling certain geometries cut into the towers of the Pastel City: those queer and uneasy signs that might equally have been the visual art or the language of the mathematics of Time itself."
Jolt of the Weird: Similar to British author Christopher Priest with his expanding of dimensions, such things as time, space, gravity or invisibility, an expansion I term "jolt of the weird," we likewise encounter such a weird jolt in the concluding chapters of The Pastel City.
In this way, Viriconium is NOT in the fantasy tradition of J. R. R. Tolkien. Nope, no fantasy novel for M. John Harrison. There is good reason the author has been called a genre contrarian. Some might even see him as a genre smasher - after all, he has spoken openly about his dissatisfaction with the boundaries and categories set for much genre fiction.
As to how exactly M. John Harrison expands, zigzags, reshapes and otherwise explodes and revitalizes the world of Viriconium, you will have to read for yourself.
A Storm of Wings is the second volume in the Viriconium four book cycle. Smash! Boom! Bang! - the sounds of British author M. John Harrison shattering expectations and boundaries surrounding the genres of fantasy and science fiction. As for the reader, novel as mindbender and bizarre mindmelter - all in a winged storm less than 150 pages. Remarkable.
We return to the lands and cities of Viriconium eighty years following events described in The Pastel City, that bygone era where Lord tegeus-Cromis, Tomb the Dwarf and the Reborn Men lead armies fighting under the banner of young Queen Jane in routing the barbarian Northmen. Now nearly everything has changed: the Reborn Men no longer dance in harmonies of grace and beauty, the landscape has been drained of its power and a pervasive hollowness reigns - this to say, the move from The Pastel City to A Storm of Wings is a shift from major to minor key, from tale of spirited high adventure to one of madness and chaos brought about in large measure by an alien abduction of psychic energies.
Pivotal to the tale is Alstath Fulthor, the very first of the Reborn Men to be resuscitated from his millennial entombment, brought to life once again in Viriconium, having last experienced individual identity during the years of those technologically advanced Afternoon Cultures very much like our own. Alas, poor Alstath � for decades a once respected lord in the Pastel City, he is currently sprinting across the surrounding foothills, propelled by a sudden madness.
After slowing his pace, Alstath Fulthor comes upon an old man who turns out to be none other than Cellur of Lendalfoot, former maker of birds, large warlike metal birds that played a critical part in The Pastel City. Both men decide to pay a visit to Methvet Nian, Queen Jane, Queen of Viriconium.
Meanwhile, Queen Jane hears the windows in her throne room calling out to her. What does it all mean? Perhaps such a calling is connected to the unsettling description of the Upper City's population: "Under a cold moon processions of men with insect faces went silently through the streets." Whoa. Are these men's faces contorted in grimaces that might remind one of insects or, as unbelievable as it might sound, do they, in fact, have the faces of insects? In keeping with the novel's overarching dense atmosphere, we are never given a clear indication.
On the same day, in the Lower City, in the Artists' Quarter, a large, burly man by the name of Galen Hornwrack enters the Bistro Californium, "that home of all errors and all who err." There is talk of a religion unlike any others invented in Viriconium - The Sign of the Locust, a religion maintaining a fundamental tenet: "the appearance of "reality" is quite false, a counterfeit or artifact of the human senses." Equally disturbing, a wave of murders sweeping the city has been linked to this religion where followers wear a steel MANTAS symbol around their necks and cover their bodies with tattoos of symbolical patterns.
The very air throughout all of Viriconium appears to be fetid, noxious, sickly even toxic during this dreaded times. Can anything be saved? Further along in the tale an unlikely band - Alstath Fulthor, Tomb the Dwarf, the mad Reborn Woman Fay Glass, Cellur of Lendalfoot and the above mentioned Galen Hornwrack, a lord without a domain who has spent his life as a hired assassin - ride north to determine what, if anything, can be done.
The further this band travels, the more bugged out and freakish their encounters - memory and sanity, their own and those around them, morph into dreaming and sheer madness. Among the weirdness confronted:
A tremendously fat former airboat pilot from another dimension, one Benedict Paucemanly, hangs in the sky above the adventurers and periodically conveys his version of disastrous happening throughout the realm. Benedict even waxes philosophic: "The material universe, it would appear, has little absolute substance. It hardly exists. It is a rag of matter, a wisp of gas, a memory of some former state. Each sentient species perceives the thin evidence of this state in a different way." Down to earth, practical Galen Hornwrack isn't overly impressed. What Galen desires is substantial help in defeating the forces destroying Viriconium.
A harbinger of future horrors, peering out from the port of Iron Chime, onlookers see a ship "its strange slattered metal sails, decorated with unfamiliar symbols, were melting as they fell. Captained by despair, it emerged from the mist like a vessel from Hell, its figurehead an insect-headed woman who had pierced her own belly with a sword." Some time thereafter, a captain living in the port city informs the travelers, "We're all mad here."
Further along in their travels, the party is suddenly surrounded by the walls of a maze causing the world to tumble sideways. Immediately thereafter, when Galen Hornwrack stumbles into a circular space, there's a giant mantis-fly insect crouching over Fay Glass. Curiously, such a desert maze echoes what we were told of the Reborn Men and Women, how many of them wondered off from cities to form communes or self-help groups (thanks, M. John - so 1970s) and how a number of Reborn colonies dedicated themselves to music or mathematics or "the carving of enormous mazes out of the sodden clinker and blowing sands of the waste." Was this grotesque maze constructed by the Reborn? Again, in keeping with the author's opaque aesthetic, nothing more definite is disclosed.
Neil Gaiman admits the difficulty in “explaining� M. John Harrison’s writing. As Neil expresses, Mike Harrison is a writer’s writer, an author who carefully chooses each and every word to convey the power of art and magic and how the nature of reality is continually shifting and changing, how there are cities hidden beneath cities and worlds within worlds. I entirely concur with Neil. For readers interested in more straightforward storytelling, my advice is to stick with The Pastel City. But for those who take delight in literary explosions, A Storm of Wings is your book. In many ways, I see M. John Harrison as the John Cage of speculative fiction. What a treat.
In Viriconium or The Floating Gods - Third book in the British author's Viriconium cycle, a short novel of great poetic power. But, beware, this is hardly a feel good adventure tale within the genres of either science fiction or fantasy. Nay, with In Viriconium we visit the city in the grip of plague, in many respects we might as well be back in medieval Europe during the Black Death, but with M. John Harrison's yarn there's some serious off-the-wall weirdness brewing.
Weirdness, as in the common people inhabiting the Lower City enshrouded in plague not in the usual sense but a kind of thin fog whereby they age quickly or fall victim to various debilitating illnesses. Meanwhile, the Upper City, although spared the fog's deadly infestation, sinks into decadence on all levels: material, spiritual, intellectual, artistic.
Weirdness, as in the twin princes of the city, the fat, meaty Barley brothers ("they weren't human, that's a fact") rumble and bumble, belch, fart and vomit while playing the part of mindless pranksters on stairways and bridges and garden patches, in streams and in the city's oddest corners. They even try to sell the rats they've cudgeled to shocked restauranteurs. Where did these two ominous slubberdegullions come from, really? Perhaps a new form of Reborn Men or outer space alien readers encountered in A Storm of Wings?
Weirdness, as in two heroes initially encountered in The Pastel City bent and transformed almost beyond recognition: Cellur the Brdmaker keeps to his room in an old tower, collects stuffed birds, apparently has lost his memory and admits he doesn't know how old he is. Tomb the dwarf now calls himself The Grand Cairo and heads the city as something of a counter to the Barley brothers. He even has his own police force. The Grand Cairo is a major player in the world of In Viriconium but you will have to look hard to detect any of the old noble fire so present in the first two novels in the cycle.
The tale is told in five chapters represented by five tarot cards, a tale revolving around Ashlyme the portrait painter attempting to rescue another artist, Audsley King, from her plight as a ravaged plague victim in the Lower City. Similar to A Storm of Wings, the language throughout is high baroque, an entire baroque cathedral made of words, thus the challenge for a reviewer to convey the inner spirit of the book since the story is all in the precise way it is told. With this in mind, I'll shift to a number of In Viriconium direct quotes revolving around the city's arts and literature and link my comments with these:
"He hung the painting in different places to find the best light and stood in front of them for long periods, thrilled by the stacked planes of the landscapes, the disquieting eros of her inner world." ---------- Ashlyme is viewing a series of Audsley King paintings. M. John Harrison doesn't describe the paintings in detail; rather, he delineates Ashlyme's reactions to them. In this way, we as readers are free to imagine the paintings for ourselves.
"He touched the mask with his fingers. It was the head of a trout, to which someone had added thick rubbery lips and a ludicrous crest of spines." ---------- Ashlyme dons a grotesque mask as a disguise in his attempt to carry Audsley out of the Low City. The rubber fish mask covers his head completely and can be seen as a microcosm for the grotesqueness of the entire city.
"He was popular in the salons. The Marchioness "L" called on him, with a new novelist." ---------- A snatch from a conversation Ashlyme has with decadent aristocrats from the Upper City. I would dearly love to read one of this novelist's novels! I would guess the story told is a cross between Boccaccio's The Decameron and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.
"In this case he had done the painting over a group portrait of the Baroness de B -- and her family which had never been collected from the studio. As the wet summer advanced and the new paint began to fade, the image of the Baroness was beginning to reemerge in the form of a very old woman holding a flower, slowly absorbing and distorting the figure of Audsley King." ---------- Ashlyme reuses the same canvas to save on his resources. Such a vivid image of a city pulled down into decadence - the old Baroness emerging to engulf a great vital young artist.
"A self-portrait painted at about this time. "Kneeling with raised arms," shows him, his eyes squeezed closed, apparently crawling and groping his way about his own studio, a whitish empty space. He seems to have come up against some sort of invisible barrier, against which he is pressing one side of his face so that it is distorted and whitened into a mask of frustration and despair." ---------- One of the many invisible barriers Ashlyme must break through if he is to be more of a positive force in the city he dearly loves.
"And the longer he stayed in his studio, biting his pen, listening to the rain dripping in the attic, trying to conjure up in his mind's eye a picture of the thin, intense provincial girl who had arrived in Viriconium twenty years ago to shock the artistic establishment of the day with the suppressed violence and frozen sexual somnambulism of her self-portraits." ---------- One can only wonder how Audsley King captured her own "frozen sexual somnambulism" in her self-portrait, keeping in mind such a person engages in sexual acts while in non rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep.
"Out of the tarot cards on the floor came an intense coloured flare of light, as if they had been illuminated suddenly from behind. Ashlyme felt it flash across his face, green and yellow, scarlet and deep blue, like light from a melting stain-glass window." ---------- The tarot cards are from the deck of fortune teller Fat Man Etteilla. This passage is an example of the rich, ornate visual impact on nearly every page.
After reading In Viriconium, Neil Gailman noted how he now sees all cities having a Lower City and an Upper City, and how, in a certain way, all cities are Viriconium. I've had this experience myself.
M. John Harrison, born 1945
February 24, 2013
How much you enjoy Viriconium will most likely depend on why you read fantasy. Actually, scratch that: how much you enjoy Viriconium relies on what you expect out of your reading, period.
If you see books as comfort food, you are probably going to hate Viriconium because this collection is the stark opposite of that. If you read fantastic literature for complex plots, strong character development and clear, lucid writing, then you are also probably going to hate Viriconium. Not because the novel lacks any of these things but because it refuses to gratify. The plot never quite coheres, most of the characters are unlikable and/or broken and the writing, while heart-stoppingly gorgeous, can be difficult to wrangle. I think Viriconium is a great book and everyone should read it at least once, but having fought my way through the thing over the course of a month I can see how some might detest the book. That said, if you can roll with the fact that the haziness of the plot, the deeply strange cast and the borderline hallucinogenic writing are all deliberate and by all means succeeding in keeping you off balance, then you might very well love this book.
Viriconium operates in far murkier waters than much of fantasy and science fiction, even the very best of it. The first part of the book is a relatively conventional, but unusually downbeat, take on sword and sorcery science fantasy. What follows spirals further and further down into surreality, beginning with one of the strangest and most memorable takes on an alien invasion story I've seen and ending with a story collection, presumably depicting the death throes of a fantastic city spinning its own tale into obsolescence. Characters reappear (or do they?), archetypes reoccur (and are subverted) and standard catharsis is sidestepped for something far more painful and interesting. There is a sense that the cast of Viriconium are lost in a grand tapestry whose significance they know nothing of, wandering between events of grand significance that they at times actively avoid. This would be very frustrating if Harrison wasn't already playing a deeper game here, telling stories of flawed, mundane people whose lives are insignificant and petty but also weirdly meaningful.
Interleaving all of this is a terrific sense of bleakness that sets in from the very first story, and only intensifies throughout the collection. The first story in the collection has (relatively) clearly defined heroes and villains, but from the second story on there are no heroes and no villains, only victims. Everyone is simply trying to get by, whether they be men, women, dwarfs or terrors from beyond, and conflict isn't so much resolved by "saving Viriconium" as it is by resetting its equilibrium. It's worth noting that in every case, the city changes with each telling despite the efforts of the cast to keep their lives and home intact. Everything in Viriconium is constantly changing or disintegrating, from the characters to the history of the city to the city's name, to the very premise of the stories themselves. It's very much like our own world in that way, although some might find it too close to our own world for comfort.
It comes down to this: if you read fantasy to catch a glimpse of something that lies outside the bonds of the familiar, then you should read Viriconium. It's sad, frustrating, beautifully written, bitterly human and probably without peer in what it sets out to do. It's not an easy read, but if you're up for the challenge I'd recommend taking a crack at it. It's not easy to love, but it's a book I respect quite a bit.
If you see books as comfort food, you are probably going to hate Viriconium because this collection is the stark opposite of that. If you read fantastic literature for complex plots, strong character development and clear, lucid writing, then you are also probably going to hate Viriconium. Not because the novel lacks any of these things but because it refuses to gratify. The plot never quite coheres, most of the characters are unlikable and/or broken and the writing, while heart-stoppingly gorgeous, can be difficult to wrangle. I think Viriconium is a great book and everyone should read it at least once, but having fought my way through the thing over the course of a month I can see how some might detest the book. That said, if you can roll with the fact that the haziness of the plot, the deeply strange cast and the borderline hallucinogenic writing are all deliberate and by all means succeeding in keeping you off balance, then you might very well love this book.
Viriconium operates in far murkier waters than much of fantasy and science fiction, even the very best of it. The first part of the book is a relatively conventional, but unusually downbeat, take on sword and sorcery science fantasy. What follows spirals further and further down into surreality, beginning with one of the strangest and most memorable takes on an alien invasion story I've seen and ending with a story collection, presumably depicting the death throes of a fantastic city spinning its own tale into obsolescence. Characters reappear (or do they?), archetypes reoccur (and are subverted) and standard catharsis is sidestepped for something far more painful and interesting. There is a sense that the cast of Viriconium are lost in a grand tapestry whose significance they know nothing of, wandering between events of grand significance that they at times actively avoid. This would be very frustrating if Harrison wasn't already playing a deeper game here, telling stories of flawed, mundane people whose lives are insignificant and petty but also weirdly meaningful.
Interleaving all of this is a terrific sense of bleakness that sets in from the very first story, and only intensifies throughout the collection. The first story in the collection has (relatively) clearly defined heroes and villains, but from the second story on there are no heroes and no villains, only victims. Everyone is simply trying to get by, whether they be men, women, dwarfs or terrors from beyond, and conflict isn't so much resolved by "saving Viriconium" as it is by resetting its equilibrium. It's worth noting that in every case, the city changes with each telling despite the efforts of the cast to keep their lives and home intact. Everything in Viriconium is constantly changing or disintegrating, from the characters to the history of the city to the city's name, to the very premise of the stories themselves. It's very much like our own world in that way, although some might find it too close to our own world for comfort.
It comes down to this: if you read fantasy to catch a glimpse of something that lies outside the bonds of the familiar, then you should read Viriconium. It's sad, frustrating, beautifully written, bitterly human and probably without peer in what it sets out to do. It's not an easy read, but if you're up for the challenge I'd recommend taking a crack at it. It's not easy to love, but it's a book I respect quite a bit.
March 22, 2012
ORIGINALLY POSTED AT .
Viriconium sits on the ruins of an ancient civilization that nobody remembers. The society that was technologically advanced enough to create crystal airships and lethal energy weapons is dead. These Afternoon Cultures depleted the world’s metal ores, leaving mounds of inscrutable rusted infrastructure with only a few odds and ends that still work. The current citizens of Viriconium are baffled by what they’ve dug up, but they have no idea what any of it is for.
The Pastel City, published in 1971, is the first part of M. John Harrison’s science fantasy epic VIRICONIUM which, according to sources, was inspired by Jack Vance’s DYING EARTH and the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Characterization and pacing are sometimes a bit weak, but the scenery in The Pastel City is grand, and I enjoyed the story. In many ways it reminded me of THE LORD OF THE RINGS � a group of comrades (including a dwarf) travel through beautiful and desolate landscapes (across rivers and marshes, through mountain tunnels, etc.) on a quest to destroy something so they can save the world. A major difference, and what saves the book from being simply another quest fantasy, is the post-apocalyptic vision of an unknown advanced civilization which died out mysteriously, leaving samples of their devastating handiwork behind. Thus, the dwarf arms himself with an 11-foot tall mechanical skeleton and carries some sort of laser. Cromis and his friends ride into one battle on horseback, but leave in a glass blimp. Cool.
A Storm of Wings is the second part of M. John Harrison’s VIRICONIUM sequence. Viriconium has been at peace for eighty years after the threat from the north was eliminated, but now there are new threats to the city. Something has detached from the moon and fallen to earth. A huge insect head has been discovered in one of the towns of the Reborn. The Reborn are starting to go mad. Also, a new rapidly growing cult is teaching that there is no objective reality. Are the strange events linked with the cult’s nihilistic philosophy? And what will this do to Viriconium’s peace? Tomb the dwarf and Cellur the Birdlord, whom we met in The Pastel City, set out to discover the truth.
A Storm of Wings was published in 1980 � nine years after The Pastel City � and M. John Harrison’s writing style has evolved. In some ways it’s better � characterization is deeper and the imagery is more evocative. This world feels fragile and moribund and the reader gets the sense that, as the cult proclaims, it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s just a warped perception. Or perhaps Viriconium is slipping from reality into a dream. Or into a different reality altogether. The story is strange, outlandish, and blurry.
In the third part of the VIRICONIUM omnibus, The Floating Gods (aka In Viriconium), we visit the old artists� quarter of Viriconium � a lazy decaying place where gardens bloom and the smell of black currant gin exudes from the taverns where the increasingly lackadaisical citizens used to sit and talk about art and philosophy. This part of the city used to be vibrant and innovative, but it has been deteriorating as a psychological plague has been creeping in from the high city. The artists� patrons, infected by this plague of mediocrity, have become dreamy and only want to purchase uninspired sentimental watercolor landscapes. And all they want to talk about is the debauched antics of the Barley Brothers, a couple of twins who act like buffoons but are rumored to be demi-gods.
This part is funny, witty, and brilliantly written with sharp humorous insights into disagreeable human behavior. As the plague crept closer, I could feel the beloved city of Viriconium decaying � its fountains drying up and its gardens becoming unkempt and shabby. Like the previous book, A Storm of Wings, The Floating Gods is intensely atmospheric. This is a better book, though, because the atmosphere is balanced by humor and plot.
Viriconium Nights is the last book in M. John Harrison’s VIRICONIUM epic. It’s a collection of seven short stories set in and around the city of Viriconium which contain some of the characters we’ve met in the previous VIRICONIUM books and include many allusions to recurring events and motifs: mechanical metal birds, tarot cards, locusts, the fish mask, big lizards, the Mari Lwyd, etc. Each story stands alone but focuses on the city of Viriconium and particularly the bohemian residents of the Artists� Quarter. All of Viriconium is decaying, but this part of the city feels especially bleak, probably because it’s peopled with brooding artistic types whose desperation results in freakish hedonistic behavior.
Though there are recurring characters in the VIRICONIUM works, we never get to know any of them very well. The haunting, weird, incomprehensible city is the main character. M. John Harrison has explained at his blog that he didn’t want Viriconium to be “tamed� or “controlled,� so he has confused and disoriented the reader by making it impossible to understand what it would be like to live in his world: “I made that world increasingly shifting and complex. You can not learn its rules. More importantly, Viriconium is never the same place twice.� I think this is more successful in the last three parts of VIRICONIUM � the first novel, The Pastel City, is almost a traditional quest fantasy.
VIRICONIUM is one of those works that I feel like I should give 5 stars just because it’s original and M. John Harrison’s prose is brilliant. Harrison is a master of style and his writing is superior to most of what’s offered on the SFF shelves. However, the truth is that though I recognize Harrison’s genius, I can’t say that I enjoyed every moment of VIRICONIUM, which may be a reflection on me more than on the work itself. Spending so much time in a city that’s unknowable and decaying resulted, for me, in an overwhelming feeling of disorientation and hopelessness. The characters and the plot, which feel like they are there only to support the role of the city, don’t make up for this. A month from now, I probably won’t remember any of the plots in Viriconium Nights. But I will remember Viriconium.
I listened to the audiobook version of VIRICONIUM which was produced by Neil Gaiman Presents and is narrated by Simon Vance who is one of the absolute best in the business. This is a high-quality production and highly recommended for anyone who wants to read one of M. John Harrison’s best-loved works.
Viriconium sits on the ruins of an ancient civilization that nobody remembers. The society that was technologically advanced enough to create crystal airships and lethal energy weapons is dead. These Afternoon Cultures depleted the world’s metal ores, leaving mounds of inscrutable rusted infrastructure with only a few odds and ends that still work. The current citizens of Viriconium are baffled by what they’ve dug up, but they have no idea what any of it is for.
The Pastel City, published in 1971, is the first part of M. John Harrison’s science fantasy epic VIRICONIUM which, according to sources, was inspired by Jack Vance’s DYING EARTH and the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Characterization and pacing are sometimes a bit weak, but the scenery in The Pastel City is grand, and I enjoyed the story. In many ways it reminded me of THE LORD OF THE RINGS � a group of comrades (including a dwarf) travel through beautiful and desolate landscapes (across rivers and marshes, through mountain tunnels, etc.) on a quest to destroy something so they can save the world. A major difference, and what saves the book from being simply another quest fantasy, is the post-apocalyptic vision of an unknown advanced civilization which died out mysteriously, leaving samples of their devastating handiwork behind. Thus, the dwarf arms himself with an 11-foot tall mechanical skeleton and carries some sort of laser. Cromis and his friends ride into one battle on horseback, but leave in a glass blimp. Cool.
A Storm of Wings is the second part of M. John Harrison’s VIRICONIUM sequence. Viriconium has been at peace for eighty years after the threat from the north was eliminated, but now there are new threats to the city. Something has detached from the moon and fallen to earth. A huge insect head has been discovered in one of the towns of the Reborn. The Reborn are starting to go mad. Also, a new rapidly growing cult is teaching that there is no objective reality. Are the strange events linked with the cult’s nihilistic philosophy? And what will this do to Viriconium’s peace? Tomb the dwarf and Cellur the Birdlord, whom we met in The Pastel City, set out to discover the truth.
A Storm of Wings was published in 1980 � nine years after The Pastel City � and M. John Harrison’s writing style has evolved. In some ways it’s better � characterization is deeper and the imagery is more evocative. This world feels fragile and moribund and the reader gets the sense that, as the cult proclaims, it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s just a warped perception. Or perhaps Viriconium is slipping from reality into a dream. Or into a different reality altogether. The story is strange, outlandish, and blurry.
In the third part of the VIRICONIUM omnibus, The Floating Gods (aka In Viriconium), we visit the old artists� quarter of Viriconium � a lazy decaying place where gardens bloom and the smell of black currant gin exudes from the taverns where the increasingly lackadaisical citizens used to sit and talk about art and philosophy. This part of the city used to be vibrant and innovative, but it has been deteriorating as a psychological plague has been creeping in from the high city. The artists� patrons, infected by this plague of mediocrity, have become dreamy and only want to purchase uninspired sentimental watercolor landscapes. And all they want to talk about is the debauched antics of the Barley Brothers, a couple of twins who act like buffoons but are rumored to be demi-gods.
This part is funny, witty, and brilliantly written with sharp humorous insights into disagreeable human behavior. As the plague crept closer, I could feel the beloved city of Viriconium decaying � its fountains drying up and its gardens becoming unkempt and shabby. Like the previous book, A Storm of Wings, The Floating Gods is intensely atmospheric. This is a better book, though, because the atmosphere is balanced by humor and plot.
Viriconium Nights is the last book in M. John Harrison’s VIRICONIUM epic. It’s a collection of seven short stories set in and around the city of Viriconium which contain some of the characters we’ve met in the previous VIRICONIUM books and include many allusions to recurring events and motifs: mechanical metal birds, tarot cards, locusts, the fish mask, big lizards, the Mari Lwyd, etc. Each story stands alone but focuses on the city of Viriconium and particularly the bohemian residents of the Artists� Quarter. All of Viriconium is decaying, but this part of the city feels especially bleak, probably because it’s peopled with brooding artistic types whose desperation results in freakish hedonistic behavior.
Though there are recurring characters in the VIRICONIUM works, we never get to know any of them very well. The haunting, weird, incomprehensible city is the main character. M. John Harrison has explained at his blog that he didn’t want Viriconium to be “tamed� or “controlled,� so he has confused and disoriented the reader by making it impossible to understand what it would be like to live in his world: “I made that world increasingly shifting and complex. You can not learn its rules. More importantly, Viriconium is never the same place twice.� I think this is more successful in the last three parts of VIRICONIUM � the first novel, The Pastel City, is almost a traditional quest fantasy.
VIRICONIUM is one of those works that I feel like I should give 5 stars just because it’s original and M. John Harrison’s prose is brilliant. Harrison is a master of style and his writing is superior to most of what’s offered on the SFF shelves. However, the truth is that though I recognize Harrison’s genius, I can’t say that I enjoyed every moment of VIRICONIUM, which may be a reflection on me more than on the work itself. Spending so much time in a city that’s unknowable and decaying resulted, for me, in an overwhelming feeling of disorientation and hopelessness. The characters and the plot, which feel like they are there only to support the role of the city, don’t make up for this. A month from now, I probably won’t remember any of the plots in Viriconium Nights. But I will remember Viriconium.
I listened to the audiobook version of VIRICONIUM which was produced by Neil Gaiman Presents and is narrated by Simon Vance who is one of the absolute best in the business. This is a high-quality production and highly recommended for anyone who wants to read one of M. John Harrison’s best-loved works.
December 2, 2020
These stories are enigmatic and maddening, poignant and magnetic, with beautiful writing and phantasmagoric imagery. They are not easy reading. Plots take a backseat to settings and mood, all of which are frayed and thick with a heavy fog. There are inconsistencies between the stories, characters and places who have the same name yet appear and act wholly different. A shifting reality, as if the stories are etched on a palimpsest. Yet there is something captivating about Harrison's mysterious, ancient and decrepit Viriconium, the "city in the waste". It drew me in, as its own citizens are drawn to it despite their reluctance. It is haunted by its own past, the countless millennia since the passing of the Morning and Afternoon cultures as the city sinks well into a gray and dreary Evening of dreams and echoes of what once was.
My individual reviews for each of the three novels and the collection of short stories -
The Pastel City
A Storm of Wings
The Floating Gods
Viriconium Nights
My individual reviews for each of the three novels and the collection of short stories -
The Pastel City
A Storm of Wings
The Floating Gods
Viriconium Nights
February 15, 2012
THE PASTEL CITY
This opening salvo in the series benefits from Harrison's icily fertile imagination and innate writing chops—but the latter was still at a raw, developing stage back in 1971 when The Pastel City was originally published, and there really isn't that much to distinguish it from other rote fantasy from the same period. A decrepit, grim, and feral atmosphere—reminiscent of Moorcock, or even Glen Cook's in its earlier incarnations—helps, but it cannot fully compensate for a rather weak story line and rushed ending. Furthermore, the characterization borders upon non-existent; surely I cannot be the only reader who finds tegeus-Cromis insufferably self-absorbed and whiney, a murderous, brooding baby. The only real standout is Tomb the Dwarf, essentially Chucky from Child's Play with a head more stretched and longer hair, encased in an eleven-foot high titanium exoskeleton and wielding a flesh-slicing energy axe in a maniacally gleeful fashion.
Eschewing the fantasy staples of sorcery and demons for a technology and automata left behind by the dead Afternoon Cultures, The Pastel City is another entry in the world-weary dystopia of an aged, decayed Earth which underlies such masterpieces as Gene Wolfe's and Jack Vance's . The stagnation and hopelessness that has become rampant in a tired empire living on salvaged wonders and miracles is nicely communicated—as are such deft touches as a vast, multi-palette marshland of rusting and disintegrated industrial scrap metal, and having the last of the Afternoon Empires spawn new stars in the sky to spell out a permanent message or warning to the eventide survivors, if only they could decipher its unknown code. It all pointed to Harrison's budding promise: The Pastel City is the creation of a young, aspiring apprentice; it is with the sequel A Storm of Wings that he would fully come into his own.
A STORM OF WINGS
Harrison had matured as a writer when he penned this sequel to —some nine years having passed in between—and it showed: he discarded or relegated to the background the weaker elements from the prior book and concentrated upon its, and his, strengths. Harrison has always excelled at painting atmospheric scapes and moods; at finding the sorrow and melancholy, the potentiality for loss and regret that is inherent in existence, in the passage of space through the straitening parameters of time, and wringing it forth onto the page—and doing so with crystalline prose. Thus the questing journeys and battle scenes that comprised the story arc of TPC have been mostly abandoned for the existential annals of a smattering of battered and wounded figures, shuffling through a tired and confused world—one bereft of purpose or hope, unable to read the past or divine the future—that suddenly finds itself challenged by an alien awareness. Harrison constructs A Storm of Wings in panels, dream sequences and buzz-bomb exchanges, where violence explodes off of the page and immediately subsides, where reality becomes progressively harder to distinguish from mirage—and all is tinged with the patina of listlessness that is Viriconium in the Evening. It's futuristic fantasy-science fiction with the arc-welding ambience of and the molting-matter creativity of blanketed by the dust of a creaking, rheumatic world à la .
In Storm Harrison brings back the strongest characters from the prior book—Tomb the Dwarf and Cellur the Birdlord—while replacing the brooding poet-warrior tegeus-Cromis with the more effective brooding dissolute aristocrat-assassin Galen Hornwrack; Queen Jane also remains, though she is a nominal figurehead, both politically and novelistically. He expands upon the apocryphal Methven aeronaut Benedict Paucemanly (last seen rocketing towards the Moon and now become very weird), and introduces a pair of characters from the Reborn Men, the Afternoon Culture personalities resurrected towards the end of The Pastel City to defeat the savage Northmen. The Reborn are a fascinating addition, humans trapped between the Afternoon and the Evening cultures, existing in a present day reality that is overlain with chimerical visions and hallucinations projected by the stirring, struggling memories of their pre-existing lives in a technologically rich, but morally decadent clime. Seemingly destined to overshadow the anemic denizens of the Eventide empire, the Reborn appear to be worryingly susceptible to mass insanity; meanwhile, a strange new religion�The Sign of the Locust—has arisen out of nowhere to infect the Viriconium citizenry with its alarming metaphysical doctrine. Into such troubled times comes a northern female Reborn bearing a man-sized insect head and incommunicable madness. The Pastel City powers come to suspect a disturbingly alar alien presence in the occluded northwestern wastes, one whose radically different ontology is seeking to surmount that of the Evening culture—and from this existential struggle the very fabric of reality is being torn asunder, awakening the demiurgical memories dormant in the earth's very bones. With these two irreconcilable verities assaulting each other, corporeal existence has begun to change—and the end result may well prove catastrophic for both native and invader.
This is a great book. I'm a fan of Harrison, especially the way he digs inside otherwise banal or routine situations and plucks out the peculiar, the touching, the sinister. His descriptive prowess is remarkable, and some of the set pieces—a metal-sailed vessel thrusting forth from a fogbound grey seaside, aflame and bloody and echoing with the crew's desperate shrieks, before the startled eyes of Hornwreck and company; a hallucinatory romp through a buzzing earthen maze; the honeycombed, amorphous twin of Viriconium shimmering amidst a barren continent—are fantastic. The bifurcation of the Reborn and their conflicting consciousnesses, the alien entities and their mosaic mindset, are deftly handled; and though at times the plot threatens to recede behind the rich and lustrous atmospheric prose, the one actually reinforces the other. A Storm of Wings is the case of the sequel bettering the original; and with its own followup, , this happy trend would continue.
IN VIRICONIUM
With In Viriconium, the novella that comprises the third part of Harrison's tetrad, we arrive fully into the twilit mystery of the great chromatic city and its cryptic story: gone are the neo-feudal battles and heroic swordplay from the first book, the baroque arcana and incongruous metaphysical dichotomy between chitin and flesh that thickened the second. From start to finish we are in a Viriconium that is both recognizable and alien, native and foreign, comfortable and disturbing. The street names are familiar, but tegeus-Cromis would gaze upon the denizens of the High City with an uncomprehending eye, a medieval warrior stranded amidst a metropolis concerned only with frills and frippery, with tired prurience and distraction, that recalls the decadent apathy of Baudelairean Paris. Harrison has elevated his art to a new level, depicting a decrepitude and decay—physical, mental, spiritual—that has infected not only the commoners of the Low City and the aristocrats of the High, but the very structures and thoroughfares themselves. Enervation has come to define the city, which remains a capital, but of an Empire that is neither seen nor sensed. For all we know, the world, the very universe ends at the city's edge—and lethargic Viriconium and its desperate, despairing citizenry are enacting the final act of a macabre, sepulchral play before Time, one in which the sole onlooker, though thoroughly weary and distracted, still manages to croak out a laugh every now and then.
The story is centered around Ashlyme, a portrait painter of the High City who captures his patrons with a cruel accuracy. He is enraptured by Audsley King—the foremost artist in Viriconium, who has bedazzled the city with her self-portraits and scapes of startling hues, veiled violence, and cobwebbed sexuality. Audsley has fallen victim to the plague, an enigmatic affliction that has been visited upon the Low City in the form of a thin, filmy fog; whatever has been touched by this mist becomes apathetic and rundown: roads crater, brickwork crumbles, humans stumble in a somnambulant daze—and tasks are left undone, meals uneaten, drawings half-finished. The arrival of the plague coincided with that of the Barley Brothers, apocryphal sky gods or sorcerers who have fallen from their former heavenly projected eminence into the bloated forms of a pair of raucous and smelly football hooligans who amuse a grateful citizenry with their drunken antics and rowdy horseplay. The Barleys are accompanied by a strange dwarf out of the north, a half-pint mixture of urbane vanity and acrobatic violence who has set himself—with the title of Grand Cairo—in opposition to what passes as rule by the loutish twins. In an aimless and hopeless time, these two governments are conducting senseless building programs, creating police forces, and enforcing a quarantine to try and stem the plague's advance; however, all they seem capable of is importing the native violence, surveillance, conspiracies, and paranoia of the grim, wind-swept barbarian north. Having risen from out of these wasted gutters, the Barleys and Grand Cairo would drag all back in.
Ashlyme is endeavoring, against pandemic procrastination, to spirit Audsley out of her studio in the Low City—which the plague has claimed—to the Higher reaches that have so far resisted the latter's steady, remorseless advance. He sees in Audsley the princess requiring rescue, the sole remaining exemplar of all that art should be in an age seeking only comfort and diversion from an enduring malaise. But with the allies he has been given (including an enthusiastic, but senescent, astronomer and the Grand Cairo himself); the sneering Barley's and their rat-hunting dogs; the haughty artistic elite and their ineffectual patrons; the crumbling, deceptive nature of the Low City warrens; and the advancing instability of Audsley herself, this won't prove an easy task to accomplish. It is fully possible that these listless dwellers of Viriconium, adrift in the Evening Cultures anemic current, have created the plague themselves—and if this is so, it will require more than the desperate efforts of Ashlyme to dispel its pernicious and deadly effects.
In Viriconium is just about perfect. Its themes are ones the Harrison has a powerful resonance with, and this melancholy and creaky decay is imbued with a wonderful comedic touch and a sinister menace in equal proportions. The Barleys and the Cairo are superb creations—especially the latter with his ridiculous mannerisms and shamanistic slyness. The tale is unfolded in five chapters that coincide with the pentad of Tarot cards that are played by the fortuneteller Fat Mam Eteilla (a carryover from Storm) in her divinations, and which are integral in the hazy nowhere notime that enshrouds this conurbation of variegated parts and periods and its ambiguous connections with the past and future. A unique work in the annals of fantasy, a smoky, darkling mirror image of our own world, one in which a weak science and pallid reason are vainly struggling against the pull of inertia and sleepy magic. The series reaches its apogee with this effort—but the short stories that makeup the final work, , would see Harrison attempting to climb ever higher (though failing to pass his previous elevation, in my humble opinion).
VIRICONIUM NIGHTS
The final book of the Viriconium tetralogy consists of seven short stories that explore the deceptive and mutative nature of the Pastel City. Characters from the first three books weave their way into and out of these tales with details of their personal histories changed and reconfigured within the realms of memory, time, and space: heroes are now villains, old friends rivals, regal monarchs become terrifying crones; and the horse-skulled alien insects always present in furtive movements never captured from the corner of the eye, or a quiet thrumming that cannot quite be placed. All seven entail the grim and bitter process of loss and regret that an individual life consists of, the enduring exploration of contingency and repetition; of how identity ofttimes clutches desperately to symbols and totems that prove false or brittle in the end, of the mournful and melancholy passage of days that builds upon the soul like so much rust, the manner in which memory is like a handful of sand, leaking slowly away however strong and determined the effort to hold it—and subject to sudden and brutal gusts of wind that blast it away and leave the palms empty.
The linchpin to these stories is, of course, Viriconium (Uroconium, Vira Co, Low and High Cities)—though the city itself is as mutable as its denizen's lives: names change, neighborhoods shift, quarters arise and sink, rivers alter, buildings stand forth only to be misplaced or laid low by a process of time that rarely moves along a straightforward path, but loops and twists, bends back and suddenly cramps; in the end, the city might even disappear within itself, accessible only through the bathroom mirrors of small cafés or the casually discarded rubbish espied in a lonely gutter. There is little of happiness in these tales, little reprieve no matter the proffered rewards of a quest undertaken, only cold and grey death awaiting at the end of a gruesomely bright rainbow. Such is the world in which Viriconium—linked somehow to every metropolis that has been birthed and grown, a rippling shadow of our own urban conglomerations—stands forth as the slippery center of a liquid empire, ever alert to the contortions of her stern mistress Time: for the latter may forget, but she never forgives.
This opening salvo in the series benefits from Harrison's icily fertile imagination and innate writing chops—but the latter was still at a raw, developing stage back in 1971 when The Pastel City was originally published, and there really isn't that much to distinguish it from other rote fantasy from the same period. A decrepit, grim, and feral atmosphere—reminiscent of Moorcock, or even Glen Cook's in its earlier incarnations—helps, but it cannot fully compensate for a rather weak story line and rushed ending. Furthermore, the characterization borders upon non-existent; surely I cannot be the only reader who finds tegeus-Cromis insufferably self-absorbed and whiney, a murderous, brooding baby. The only real standout is Tomb the Dwarf, essentially Chucky from Child's Play with a head more stretched and longer hair, encased in an eleven-foot high titanium exoskeleton and wielding a flesh-slicing energy axe in a maniacally gleeful fashion.
Eschewing the fantasy staples of sorcery and demons for a technology and automata left behind by the dead Afternoon Cultures, The Pastel City is another entry in the world-weary dystopia of an aged, decayed Earth which underlies such masterpieces as Gene Wolfe's and Jack Vance's . The stagnation and hopelessness that has become rampant in a tired empire living on salvaged wonders and miracles is nicely communicated—as are such deft touches as a vast, multi-palette marshland of rusting and disintegrated industrial scrap metal, and having the last of the Afternoon Empires spawn new stars in the sky to spell out a permanent message or warning to the eventide survivors, if only they could decipher its unknown code. It all pointed to Harrison's budding promise: The Pastel City is the creation of a young, aspiring apprentice; it is with the sequel A Storm of Wings that he would fully come into his own.
A STORM OF WINGS
Harrison had matured as a writer when he penned this sequel to —some nine years having passed in between—and it showed: he discarded or relegated to the background the weaker elements from the prior book and concentrated upon its, and his, strengths. Harrison has always excelled at painting atmospheric scapes and moods; at finding the sorrow and melancholy, the potentiality for loss and regret that is inherent in existence, in the passage of space through the straitening parameters of time, and wringing it forth onto the page—and doing so with crystalline prose. Thus the questing journeys and battle scenes that comprised the story arc of TPC have been mostly abandoned for the existential annals of a smattering of battered and wounded figures, shuffling through a tired and confused world—one bereft of purpose or hope, unable to read the past or divine the future—that suddenly finds itself challenged by an alien awareness. Harrison constructs A Storm of Wings in panels, dream sequences and buzz-bomb exchanges, where violence explodes off of the page and immediately subsides, where reality becomes progressively harder to distinguish from mirage—and all is tinged with the patina of listlessness that is Viriconium in the Evening. It's futuristic fantasy-science fiction with the arc-welding ambience of and the molting-matter creativity of blanketed by the dust of a creaking, rheumatic world à la .
In Storm Harrison brings back the strongest characters from the prior book—Tomb the Dwarf and Cellur the Birdlord—while replacing the brooding poet-warrior tegeus-Cromis with the more effective brooding dissolute aristocrat-assassin Galen Hornwrack; Queen Jane also remains, though she is a nominal figurehead, both politically and novelistically. He expands upon the apocryphal Methven aeronaut Benedict Paucemanly (last seen rocketing towards the Moon and now become very weird), and introduces a pair of characters from the Reborn Men, the Afternoon Culture personalities resurrected towards the end of The Pastel City to defeat the savage Northmen. The Reborn are a fascinating addition, humans trapped between the Afternoon and the Evening cultures, existing in a present day reality that is overlain with chimerical visions and hallucinations projected by the stirring, struggling memories of their pre-existing lives in a technologically rich, but morally decadent clime. Seemingly destined to overshadow the anemic denizens of the Eventide empire, the Reborn appear to be worryingly susceptible to mass insanity; meanwhile, a strange new religion�The Sign of the Locust—has arisen out of nowhere to infect the Viriconium citizenry with its alarming metaphysical doctrine. Into such troubled times comes a northern female Reborn bearing a man-sized insect head and incommunicable madness. The Pastel City powers come to suspect a disturbingly alar alien presence in the occluded northwestern wastes, one whose radically different ontology is seeking to surmount that of the Evening culture—and from this existential struggle the very fabric of reality is being torn asunder, awakening the demiurgical memories dormant in the earth's very bones. With these two irreconcilable verities assaulting each other, corporeal existence has begun to change—and the end result may well prove catastrophic for both native and invader.
This is a great book. I'm a fan of Harrison, especially the way he digs inside otherwise banal or routine situations and plucks out the peculiar, the touching, the sinister. His descriptive prowess is remarkable, and some of the set pieces—a metal-sailed vessel thrusting forth from a fogbound grey seaside, aflame and bloody and echoing with the crew's desperate shrieks, before the startled eyes of Hornwreck and company; a hallucinatory romp through a buzzing earthen maze; the honeycombed, amorphous twin of Viriconium shimmering amidst a barren continent—are fantastic. The bifurcation of the Reborn and their conflicting consciousnesses, the alien entities and their mosaic mindset, are deftly handled; and though at times the plot threatens to recede behind the rich and lustrous atmospheric prose, the one actually reinforces the other. A Storm of Wings is the case of the sequel bettering the original; and with its own followup, , this happy trend would continue.
IN VIRICONIUM
With In Viriconium, the novella that comprises the third part of Harrison's tetrad, we arrive fully into the twilit mystery of the great chromatic city and its cryptic story: gone are the neo-feudal battles and heroic swordplay from the first book, the baroque arcana and incongruous metaphysical dichotomy between chitin and flesh that thickened the second. From start to finish we are in a Viriconium that is both recognizable and alien, native and foreign, comfortable and disturbing. The street names are familiar, but tegeus-Cromis would gaze upon the denizens of the High City with an uncomprehending eye, a medieval warrior stranded amidst a metropolis concerned only with frills and frippery, with tired prurience and distraction, that recalls the decadent apathy of Baudelairean Paris. Harrison has elevated his art to a new level, depicting a decrepitude and decay—physical, mental, spiritual—that has infected not only the commoners of the Low City and the aristocrats of the High, but the very structures and thoroughfares themselves. Enervation has come to define the city, which remains a capital, but of an Empire that is neither seen nor sensed. For all we know, the world, the very universe ends at the city's edge—and lethargic Viriconium and its desperate, despairing citizenry are enacting the final act of a macabre, sepulchral play before Time, one in which the sole onlooker, though thoroughly weary and distracted, still manages to croak out a laugh every now and then.
The story is centered around Ashlyme, a portrait painter of the High City who captures his patrons with a cruel accuracy. He is enraptured by Audsley King—the foremost artist in Viriconium, who has bedazzled the city with her self-portraits and scapes of startling hues, veiled violence, and cobwebbed sexuality. Audsley has fallen victim to the plague, an enigmatic affliction that has been visited upon the Low City in the form of a thin, filmy fog; whatever has been touched by this mist becomes apathetic and rundown: roads crater, brickwork crumbles, humans stumble in a somnambulant daze—and tasks are left undone, meals uneaten, drawings half-finished. The arrival of the plague coincided with that of the Barley Brothers, apocryphal sky gods or sorcerers who have fallen from their former heavenly projected eminence into the bloated forms of a pair of raucous and smelly football hooligans who amuse a grateful citizenry with their drunken antics and rowdy horseplay. The Barleys are accompanied by a strange dwarf out of the north, a half-pint mixture of urbane vanity and acrobatic violence who has set himself—with the title of Grand Cairo—in opposition to what passes as rule by the loutish twins. In an aimless and hopeless time, these two governments are conducting senseless building programs, creating police forces, and enforcing a quarantine to try and stem the plague's advance; however, all they seem capable of is importing the native violence, surveillance, conspiracies, and paranoia of the grim, wind-swept barbarian north. Having risen from out of these wasted gutters, the Barleys and Grand Cairo would drag all back in.
Ashlyme is endeavoring, against pandemic procrastination, to spirit Audsley out of her studio in the Low City—which the plague has claimed—to the Higher reaches that have so far resisted the latter's steady, remorseless advance. He sees in Audsley the princess requiring rescue, the sole remaining exemplar of all that art should be in an age seeking only comfort and diversion from an enduring malaise. But with the allies he has been given (including an enthusiastic, but senescent, astronomer and the Grand Cairo himself); the sneering Barley's and their rat-hunting dogs; the haughty artistic elite and their ineffectual patrons; the crumbling, deceptive nature of the Low City warrens; and the advancing instability of Audsley herself, this won't prove an easy task to accomplish. It is fully possible that these listless dwellers of Viriconium, adrift in the Evening Cultures anemic current, have created the plague themselves—and if this is so, it will require more than the desperate efforts of Ashlyme to dispel its pernicious and deadly effects.
In Viriconium is just about perfect. Its themes are ones the Harrison has a powerful resonance with, and this melancholy and creaky decay is imbued with a wonderful comedic touch and a sinister menace in equal proportions. The Barleys and the Cairo are superb creations—especially the latter with his ridiculous mannerisms and shamanistic slyness. The tale is unfolded in five chapters that coincide with the pentad of Tarot cards that are played by the fortuneteller Fat Mam Eteilla (a carryover from Storm) in her divinations, and which are integral in the hazy nowhere notime that enshrouds this conurbation of variegated parts and periods and its ambiguous connections with the past and future. A unique work in the annals of fantasy, a smoky, darkling mirror image of our own world, one in which a weak science and pallid reason are vainly struggling against the pull of inertia and sleepy magic. The series reaches its apogee with this effort—but the short stories that makeup the final work, , would see Harrison attempting to climb ever higher (though failing to pass his previous elevation, in my humble opinion).
VIRICONIUM NIGHTS
The final book of the Viriconium tetralogy consists of seven short stories that explore the deceptive and mutative nature of the Pastel City. Characters from the first three books weave their way into and out of these tales with details of their personal histories changed and reconfigured within the realms of memory, time, and space: heroes are now villains, old friends rivals, regal monarchs become terrifying crones; and the horse-skulled alien insects always present in furtive movements never captured from the corner of the eye, or a quiet thrumming that cannot quite be placed. All seven entail the grim and bitter process of loss and regret that an individual life consists of, the enduring exploration of contingency and repetition; of how identity ofttimes clutches desperately to symbols and totems that prove false or brittle in the end, of the mournful and melancholy passage of days that builds upon the soul like so much rust, the manner in which memory is like a handful of sand, leaking slowly away however strong and determined the effort to hold it—and subject to sudden and brutal gusts of wind that blast it away and leave the palms empty.
The linchpin to these stories is, of course, Viriconium (Uroconium, Vira Co, Low and High Cities)—though the city itself is as mutable as its denizen's lives: names change, neighborhoods shift, quarters arise and sink, rivers alter, buildings stand forth only to be misplaced or laid low by a process of time that rarely moves along a straightforward path, but loops and twists, bends back and suddenly cramps; in the end, the city might even disappear within itself, accessible only through the bathroom mirrors of small cafés or the casually discarded rubbish espied in a lonely gutter. There is little of happiness in these tales, little reprieve no matter the proffered rewards of a quest undertaken, only cold and grey death awaiting at the end of a gruesomely bright rainbow. Such is the world in which Viriconium—linked somehow to every metropolis that has been birthed and grown, a rippling shadow of our own urban conglomerations—stands forth as the slippery center of a liquid empire, ever alert to the contortions of her stern mistress Time: for the latter may forget, but she never forgives.
May 21, 2017
Viriconium: A baroque, decaying, phantasmagoric dream city
Originally posted at
This is one of those compendiums that really isn’t a traditional sequence at all. Instead, it’s more like four disparate, elusive, and impressionistic paintings that try to capture the essence of an ineffable dream in the form of a city sometimes called Viriconium. The books and stories contained in VIRICONIUM were written over a number of years by the eclectic British writer M. John Harrison.
He has also written The Centauri Device (1974), a bizarre space opera that may have been intended as a tribute to Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1956), some of the space operas of Samuel R. Delany like Babel-17 or Nova or a parody of the genre itself, and has inspired many later writers such as Iain M. Banks. More recently, he’s written some very free-wheeling and difficult-to-grasp books collectively known as THE KEFAHUCHI TRACT or EMPTY SPACE trilogy, consisting of Light (2002), Nova Swing (2006), and Empty Space (2012). Reviews are very polarized, with some loving them and many others unable to finish even one.
I listened to the four individual books that make up VIRICONIUM in the Neil Gaiman Presents series of audiobooks meant to reintroduce classic lesser-known works in the genre. It is narrated by the excellent and versatile Simon Vance, so that is already a point in its favor. I’ll keep my reviews restricted mainly to my impressions, since I've already forgotten most of the story details of each book.
The Pastel City (1971, 3.5 stars):
This is the shortest book in the sequence, a tribute to Jack Vance’s seminal The Dying Earth (1950) and The Eyes of the Overworld (1966). Set in the twilight days of a world from which the Afternoon Cultures have already disappeared, it is steeped in mysterious ancient technology, primitive medieval city-states, and the strange being and creatures. An aging fighter named Cromis is asked to come to the aid of a young queen to fight against Northmen bent on toppling her kingdom. The plot is a typical sword-and-sorcery quest, including the assembling of a rag-tag group of companions and need to seek the aid of a mysterious recluse named Cellar the Birdlord, but really what distinguishes the story is the beautiful evocation of a world that has truly outlived its halcyon age and is slowly sinking into the mulch of its own history. While entertaining, it is certainly the least distinctive book in the sequence, essentially an early sketch that hewed too close to its Dying Earth inspiration.
A Storm of Wings (1980, 4.5 stars):
This was by far the best book in the sequence for me. In fact, I only knew about this book because it was selected by David Pringle for his Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels. The opening paragraphs set an unmistakable tone:
In this time, the Time of the Locust, when we have nothing to ourselves but the hollowness within us, in the Time of Bone, when we have nothing to do but wait, nothing human moves here. Nothing human has moved here for eighty years. Fire, were it brought here, would be pale and dim, hard to kindle. Passion would fade here on a whisper. Something in the tower’s fall has poisoned the air here, and drained the landscape of its power. White and sickly and infinitely slow, the hemlock creeps out of the water to run sad rubbery fingers over the rubbish in the fallen rooms. The collapse of the tower seems complete, the defeat of artifice accomplished.
But the story is far more than a moribund description of decay and despair, though there is plenty of that. Something insectile and alien has detached itself from the moon and descended to the Earth, causing various strange and grotesque happening in the city of Viriconium. The Reborn Men are a group of ancient people revived from death, living in waking dreams, trapped between the present and vague memories of their past lives. Then there is Tomb the Dwarf, a tough and surly character who reminds himself he is “a dwarf and not a philosopher�. The leader of the group (if there is such a designation) would be Galen Hornwrack, another older mercenary tasked with finding out what all the ill portents imply.
Their investigations take them through a city inundated with strange and disturbing images, severed locust heads, all manner of bizarre events, and it all forms a fairly disturbing malaise of weirdness, but the writing is so crisp, colorful, outlandish, and florid that it kept me in a fascinated trance as I listened. In fact, just a few days after finishing the series, I cannot really remember any specific events, only the striking images and melancholy moods that the story evokes. It’s interesting that what I liked about the book was exactly what Kat didn’t like. It is much closer to listening to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring than any other metaphor I can think of. If I were to listen to any of the VIRICONIUM stories again, it would be this one.
In Viriconium (1982; 3 stars):
This is the third book in the sequence, and in it Viriconium is beset by a mysterious plague that affects the artists quarter and drains their vitality and hope. As artist Audsley King slowly dies from the plague, her portrait artist friend Ashlyme tries to save her from this psychological malaise that seems to be taking over the city. This story abandons the sword-and-sorcery setting of the first two books in favor of a much grittier urban setting like an alternative London. It is a semi-comic, semi-tragic story of artists struggling against both the madness of their patrons and the strange loss of vitality that the plague brings. It is very much a metaphor for the struggle inherent in the artistic process, and being one of the most unartistic persons I know, I found it hard to care much about their travails. This book was Kat’s favorite among the sequence, mainly for its coherent storyline, humor, and evocative writing. For my part, I found my attention drifting fairly quickly, and can now recall almost nothing of the books events, much like a strange dream that fades upon waking.
Viriconium Nights (1985, 3.5 stars):
By the time I reached this point in the sequence, I felt like Harrison’s goals in writing these stories were those of the musical composer, painter, or sculptor. Viriconium, in all of its mysterious, contradictory, grotesque, and dreamlike unreality is the canvas upon which Harrison can try different paints, angles, lighting, themes, and ideas. In this case, he uses short stories, which I found more interesting than In Viriconium, and featured some of the characters of the previous books. In a sense I didn’t feel that he broke any new artistic ground with these stories necessarily, but they certainly shared the same positive qualities of the earlier books in the sequence.
Originally posted at
This is one of those compendiums that really isn’t a traditional sequence at all. Instead, it’s more like four disparate, elusive, and impressionistic paintings that try to capture the essence of an ineffable dream in the form of a city sometimes called Viriconium. The books and stories contained in VIRICONIUM were written over a number of years by the eclectic British writer M. John Harrison.
He has also written The Centauri Device (1974), a bizarre space opera that may have been intended as a tribute to Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1956), some of the space operas of Samuel R. Delany like Babel-17 or Nova or a parody of the genre itself, and has inspired many later writers such as Iain M. Banks. More recently, he’s written some very free-wheeling and difficult-to-grasp books collectively known as THE KEFAHUCHI TRACT or EMPTY SPACE trilogy, consisting of Light (2002), Nova Swing (2006), and Empty Space (2012). Reviews are very polarized, with some loving them and many others unable to finish even one.
I listened to the four individual books that make up VIRICONIUM in the Neil Gaiman Presents series of audiobooks meant to reintroduce classic lesser-known works in the genre. It is narrated by the excellent and versatile Simon Vance, so that is already a point in its favor. I’ll keep my reviews restricted mainly to my impressions, since I've already forgotten most of the story details of each book.
The Pastel City (1971, 3.5 stars):
This is the shortest book in the sequence, a tribute to Jack Vance’s seminal The Dying Earth (1950) and The Eyes of the Overworld (1966). Set in the twilight days of a world from which the Afternoon Cultures have already disappeared, it is steeped in mysterious ancient technology, primitive medieval city-states, and the strange being and creatures. An aging fighter named Cromis is asked to come to the aid of a young queen to fight against Northmen bent on toppling her kingdom. The plot is a typical sword-and-sorcery quest, including the assembling of a rag-tag group of companions and need to seek the aid of a mysterious recluse named Cellar the Birdlord, but really what distinguishes the story is the beautiful evocation of a world that has truly outlived its halcyon age and is slowly sinking into the mulch of its own history. While entertaining, it is certainly the least distinctive book in the sequence, essentially an early sketch that hewed too close to its Dying Earth inspiration.
A Storm of Wings (1980, 4.5 stars):
This was by far the best book in the sequence for me. In fact, I only knew about this book because it was selected by David Pringle for his Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels. The opening paragraphs set an unmistakable tone:
In this time, the Time of the Locust, when we have nothing to ourselves but the hollowness within us, in the Time of Bone, when we have nothing to do but wait, nothing human moves here. Nothing human has moved here for eighty years. Fire, were it brought here, would be pale and dim, hard to kindle. Passion would fade here on a whisper. Something in the tower’s fall has poisoned the air here, and drained the landscape of its power. White and sickly and infinitely slow, the hemlock creeps out of the water to run sad rubbery fingers over the rubbish in the fallen rooms. The collapse of the tower seems complete, the defeat of artifice accomplished.
But the story is far more than a moribund description of decay and despair, though there is plenty of that. Something insectile and alien has detached itself from the moon and descended to the Earth, causing various strange and grotesque happening in the city of Viriconium. The Reborn Men are a group of ancient people revived from death, living in waking dreams, trapped between the present and vague memories of their past lives. Then there is Tomb the Dwarf, a tough and surly character who reminds himself he is “a dwarf and not a philosopher�. The leader of the group (if there is such a designation) would be Galen Hornwrack, another older mercenary tasked with finding out what all the ill portents imply.
Their investigations take them through a city inundated with strange and disturbing images, severed locust heads, all manner of bizarre events, and it all forms a fairly disturbing malaise of weirdness, but the writing is so crisp, colorful, outlandish, and florid that it kept me in a fascinated trance as I listened. In fact, just a few days after finishing the series, I cannot really remember any specific events, only the striking images and melancholy moods that the story evokes. It’s interesting that what I liked about the book was exactly what Kat didn’t like. It is much closer to listening to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring than any other metaphor I can think of. If I were to listen to any of the VIRICONIUM stories again, it would be this one.
In Viriconium (1982; 3 stars):
This is the third book in the sequence, and in it Viriconium is beset by a mysterious plague that affects the artists quarter and drains their vitality and hope. As artist Audsley King slowly dies from the plague, her portrait artist friend Ashlyme tries to save her from this psychological malaise that seems to be taking over the city. This story abandons the sword-and-sorcery setting of the first two books in favor of a much grittier urban setting like an alternative London. It is a semi-comic, semi-tragic story of artists struggling against both the madness of their patrons and the strange loss of vitality that the plague brings. It is very much a metaphor for the struggle inherent in the artistic process, and being one of the most unartistic persons I know, I found it hard to care much about their travails. This book was Kat’s favorite among the sequence, mainly for its coherent storyline, humor, and evocative writing. For my part, I found my attention drifting fairly quickly, and can now recall almost nothing of the books events, much like a strange dream that fades upon waking.
Viriconium Nights (1985, 3.5 stars):
By the time I reached this point in the sequence, I felt like Harrison’s goals in writing these stories were those of the musical composer, painter, or sculptor. Viriconium, in all of its mysterious, contradictory, grotesque, and dreamlike unreality is the canvas upon which Harrison can try different paints, angles, lighting, themes, and ideas. In this case, he uses short stories, which I found more interesting than In Viriconium, and featured some of the characters of the previous books. In a sense I didn’t feel that he broke any new artistic ground with these stories necessarily, but they certainly shared the same positive qualities of the earlier books in the sequence.
April 18, 2018
It's hard to write about Viriconium without being infected by its style.
This is a collection of three short novels and some short stories about Harrison's imagined city of Viriconium.
The first two novels, Pastel City and Storm of Wings, are recognizable as fantasies. They offer heroes, monsters, queens, epic battles. Pastel City might be the most traditional, with an Elric vibe. The third novel, In Viriconium, changes course, presenting the lives of artists and criminals without much fantastic or epic content. The short stories follow the third novel in theme and content, except for the last one.
Harrison presents a fairly consistent world with this city. Characters, locations, and some history recur from story to story. Lord Cromis, for example, appears frequently, as do certain cafes. Images and themes persist, like horseheads, dwarves, mirrors, locusts, paintings.
Viriconium occurs in a dying Earth setting. Early on we're told things take place following the "Afternoon cultures". Entropy rules Viriconium, ravaging buildings and people with decay. Melancholy and futility seep from nearly every page, despite the occasional energies of some rare, manic characters. Villains (bad guys, alien insects, a robot plague) fade from view over the course of the book. Technology is a thing of the past, either present as a background ruin (quiet, useless machines as part of the landscape) or available as bad archaeology (weapons of the past dug up to ill effect, usually working poorly). Harrison loves addressing the physical, tactile details of this saddening everyday life: old clothes, malfunctioning weapons, abandoned buildings, sour smells. Most of these details are non-fantastic, easily recognizable, especially in the book's second half. I'm reminded of Phil Dick's love of kibble and junk, or maybe Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun without its energetic, explanatory protagonist.
The effect is hypnotic, elegiac. Plots are quiet, incremental, allusive after Pastel City. I slowed down my reading to dwell in each paragraph, listening hard to the often cryptic dialog, poetry, and songs. I admired the linguistic precision in descriptions, the way each sentence densely and quickly sketches settings and backgrounds, gesturing to plots that probably don't progress. The earlier stories read a bit like Clark Ashton Smith with impressive, sonorous vocabulary, while the later ones return to the 20th century. Ultimately all of Viriconium but the last story feels like a text escaped from that other world, lacking any interface with or concessions to our own. Yes, like an anthology from Tlön. Like Delany's Dhalgren it refuses our familiarity. And naturally draws us back to savor, reread, and read aloud.
The effect can be alienating and distancing, unsettling and, famously, weird.
The exception is the book's final story, "A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium". It takes place in our world (specifically the British city of York), and concerns several people obsessed with Viriconium. They seek clues in this world, and some apparently travel to the other through a cafe bathroom's mirror. Our world is even more decrepit and sad than Viriconium at its most entropic, which helps explain the desire to escape.
Where does Viriconium sit in a reader's mind? You can see the full span of the New Weird movement in this book, from dark adventure stories to the surrealism of Ambergris. The second half of the volume fits Bruce Sterling's "slipstream" idea very well. There are connections to magical realism, and naturally to surrealism.
Read this book. It's urgent to do so if you're in America, since we barely see any traces of M. John Harrison here. Viriconium is an alternative view to most of current sf and mainstream fiction, an alien artifact you need to install within your mental armature. Consider it an upgrade, a book of dreams you don't remember upon wakening, but which Harrison has returned to you.
This is a collection of three short novels and some short stories about Harrison's imagined city of Viriconium.
The first two novels, Pastel City and Storm of Wings, are recognizable as fantasies. They offer heroes, monsters, queens, epic battles. Pastel City might be the most traditional, with an Elric vibe. The third novel, In Viriconium, changes course, presenting the lives of artists and criminals without much fantastic or epic content. The short stories follow the third novel in theme and content, except for the last one.
Harrison presents a fairly consistent world with this city. Characters, locations, and some history recur from story to story. Lord Cromis, for example, appears frequently, as do certain cafes. Images and themes persist, like horseheads, dwarves, mirrors, locusts, paintings.
Viriconium occurs in a dying Earth setting. Early on we're told things take place following the "Afternoon cultures". Entropy rules Viriconium, ravaging buildings and people with decay. Melancholy and futility seep from nearly every page, despite the occasional energies of some rare, manic characters. Villains (bad guys, alien insects, a robot plague) fade from view over the course of the book. Technology is a thing of the past, either present as a background ruin (quiet, useless machines as part of the landscape) or available as bad archaeology (weapons of the past dug up to ill effect, usually working poorly). Harrison loves addressing the physical, tactile details of this saddening everyday life: old clothes, malfunctioning weapons, abandoned buildings, sour smells. Most of these details are non-fantastic, easily recognizable, especially in the book's second half. I'm reminded of Phil Dick's love of kibble and junk, or maybe Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun without its energetic, explanatory protagonist.
The effect is hypnotic, elegiac. Plots are quiet, incremental, allusive after Pastel City. I slowed down my reading to dwell in each paragraph, listening hard to the often cryptic dialog, poetry, and songs. I admired the linguistic precision in descriptions, the way each sentence densely and quickly sketches settings and backgrounds, gesturing to plots that probably don't progress. The earlier stories read a bit like Clark Ashton Smith with impressive, sonorous vocabulary, while the later ones return to the 20th century. Ultimately all of Viriconium but the last story feels like a text escaped from that other world, lacking any interface with or concessions to our own. Yes, like an anthology from Tlön. Like Delany's Dhalgren it refuses our familiarity. And naturally draws us back to savor, reread, and read aloud.
A tower once stood here in the shadow of the estuarine cliffs, made too long ago for anyone to remember, in a way no one left can understand, from a single obsidian monolith fully two hundred feet in length. For ten thousand years wind and water scoured its southern face, finding no weakness; and at night a yellow light might be discerned in its topmost window, coming and going as if someone there passed before a flame. Who brought it to this rainy country, where in winter the gales drive the white water up the Minch and fishermen from Lendalfoot shun the inshore ground, and for what purpose, is unclear. Now it lies in five pieces.
The effect can be alienating and distancing, unsettling and, famously, weird.
The exception is the book's final story, "A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium". It takes place in our world (specifically the British city of York), and concerns several people obsessed with Viriconium. They seek clues in this world, and some apparently travel to the other through a cafe bathroom's mirror. Our world is even more decrepit and sad than Viriconium at its most entropic, which helps explain the desire to escape.
Where does Viriconium sit in a reader's mind? You can see the full span of the New Weird movement in this book, from dark adventure stories to the surrealism of Ambergris. The second half of the volume fits Bruce Sterling's "slipstream" idea very well. There are connections to magical realism, and naturally to surrealism.
Read this book. It's urgent to do so if you're in America, since we barely see any traces of M. John Harrison here. Viriconium is an alternative view to most of current sf and mainstream fiction, an alien artifact you need to install within your mental armature. Consider it an upgrade, a book of dreams you don't remember upon wakening, but which Harrison has returned to you.
June 27, 2021
A world trying to remember itself
Phthisic. Muculent. Gelid. M. John Harrison marshals an arsenal of arcane vocabulary to describe the fetid desuetude of the world of his mythical city of Viriconium. In a handful of stories written over the span of more than a decade, starting in 1971, he traces the fractured, half-remembered rise and fall of the eponymous imagined future city, founded many millennia after the demise of our own civilization. Or was it?
Harrison's unparalleled way with words is what makes this pioneering SF/fantasy mashup cycle, collected here under the rubric Viriconium, a classic that remains of interest to a non-reader of the fantasy genre such as myself. This is some of the most delectable prose I've ever come across. I spent three months reading this book not because I'm a slow reader but because I wanted to take my time and savor every passage. I enjoyed every moment I was steeped in this world. These stories absolutely drip atmosphere, and he has a knack for poetic, evocative descriptions of locale that transport you into a world of byzantine complexity.
Viriconium. Its achingly formal gardens and curious geometries.
Viriconium clearly raised the bar for fantasy, injecting a more literary quality into the swords and sorcery genre. This is a new kind of fantasy - all about atmosphere, place, detail, memory. The fabric of the narrative consists largely of highly specific, florid descriptions of sensory perceptions of this world, like a kind of Proustian Tolkien. This creates an uncanny sense of presence and place that brings this strange yet familiar world alive in the mind of the reader, while still having a poetic opacity that leaves room for the imagination. Oddly specific passing descriptions of local customs and observances like the following create an indelible impression as if traveling through a real foreign city:
The burial of the 'Holly Man' on Plough Monday, the sound of the hard black lupin seeds popping and tapping against the window in August, while his mother sang quietly in the kitchen the ancient carols of the Oei'l Voirrey.
Viriconium exists on a continuum of decay. Picking up where Alexandria and Rome left off, it traces the rise and fall of civilizations, transformed through the ages into different facades, the canvas for humanity's never-ending race towards destruction. The whole cycle is like an homage to entropy, with nothing but darkness at the end of the tunnel: an anti-heroic fantasy in which the heroes slink off into ignominious obscurity after killing their sidekicks.
The world was being rhythmically eroded; underneath could be glimpsed the bony grin of nothingness.
Internecine warfare topples kingdoms; the clash of different forms of existence destroys races; a metaphysical plague engulfs the fabric of reality in a haze of wan laxity from which civilization eventually re-emerges to begin the cycle anew. The world, and Viriconium, are stuck in an endless cycle of decay and renewal. This extends to the city's inhabitants. Erstwhile characters recur in distorted fashion, only vaguely recognizable, to trace similar trajectories in their orbit around the city. Heroes of old, now only half-forgotten memories distorted through the haze of time, are reborn, but not to fulfill some hopeful prophecy, but through a mirror darkly, as it were - as disturbed criminals or outcasts more concerned with their own skin than the fate of the city. History repeats itself, but in corrupted form, spiraling downwards towards some final cataclysm.
The silence of the caesura was over everything; judgment in abeyance.
Just as we trace the history of a city, so we also trace the artistic maturation of its historian. He began as an SF-influenced Tolkien epigone in the first novella, The Pastel City, which is a fine little novella in its own right, but still feels a little hesitant, the ramifications and possibilities of the concept slightly underexplored, the story constantly poised to go somewhere it never does.
Clouds of coloured vapour streamed through the galleries, which curled over them in a flaking mineral wave.
Harrison came into his own in the nearly decade-removed follow-up, A Storm of Wings, which is undoubtedly the high point of the collection. Harrison here ceases aping the tropes of epic fantasy, finding himself with a more ephemeral narrative, razor-sharp prosody, meticulous character delineation, and dense world-building. Just as an erstwhile reader might perhaps have remembered only imprecisely the events of the previous story from several years before, so history here takes on an imprecise, brittle, deteriorating quality. The plot hinges on a conceit that comes across as a fascinating blend of Kant and metafiction: different species with different perceptions of reality meet and infect one another. Reality itself becomes as malleable and unreliable as fiction.
A philosophy like a single drop of poison at the center of a curved mirror.
The trappings of fantasy are abandoned altogether in the novella that followed in short order, In Viriconium. While the previous is perhaps the most satisfying of the three, this one is the most sophisticated. Harrison's maturity is signaled by more restrained and measured storytelling and writing. His focus is on recreating a sense of a living and breathing city with a highly developed artistic culture and nuanced social stratification. He does this masterfully by focusing on the story of a dying artist, evoking a sense of weary decadence that has whiffs of fin-de-siecle Paris during the belle epoque, with its artistes and flaneurs hanging out in cafes discussing philosophy. The novella's weakness - an almost perverse and willful excision of any conventional semblance of plot and action - is simultaneously its strength, as the superficial contrivances that carry fantasy plots forward are shed in favor of a dense portrait of a city in the grips of existential terror. The artist has finally molted out of his genre cocoon.
The City! Its end is near. It expands and contracts, like a lung.
If the stories are lacking in one thing, it's breadth. Just as we latch on to a set of characters in anticipation of the story legging up to a new stage in an epic journey, we're thrown to the ground and the reset button is hit and we zoom out to a new time and a new set of characters. Any attempt to latch on to an even slightly redeemable protagonist is dashed as the characters become more and more beyond redemption with every passing generation. Just as the world becomes more fractured, the stories seem to seize up. Harrison obviously realized very early on that grandiose, long-form storytelling of the kind that influenced the first outing was not really in his nature. The stories gradually become more static and inward-turned until we reach the completely immobile and anti-epic In Viriconium. This tendency reaches its peak with the final outing in the collection.
The wind stank of delerium, gangrene, and false compass bearings.
The short stories that intersperse these three novellas originate from a subsequently published collection entitled Viriconium Nights. I have no qualms with interspersing them with the novellas the way the publisher has chosen to do here. It underscores how these stories are fractured reflections of one another, the constant shifts in time and locale and cast being appropriate to this world's surreal mixture of past and present, real and imaginary. But the short stories are shadows of the novellas in the sense that they are populated by distant echoes of past characters and situations. These can only be discerned if one read these stories after first reading the three novellas that provide the basis for the world of Viriconium. So in retrospect I might have preferred to read them afterwards.
Hopping and whirling despite himself down the million fractured perspectives of the mosaic universe.
These stories are simultaneously unnecessary add-ons that merely serve to flesh out the universe with flourishes of colorful detail, and the logical next step to which Harrison's storytelling had to be taken. The gradual honing and narrowing of focus could only have led to short stories. The world of Viriconium is really best served by small portraits of different characters at different points in time enacting distorted version of the age old mummer's play starring the tropes we see paraded before us in different guises. Much as I appreciate the novellas - and I think they're magnificent; I was tempted to re-read them immediately - I feel that they are, to some extent, failed attempts at creating an epic series. In the course of writing them, Harrison realized this and changed tack. The purpose of each novella evolved organically as Harrison discovered his true calling, towards a kind of panopticon, a vantage from which Harrison could obsessively flesh out the intricacies of his world in minute detail, from the perspective of different periods of time.
People are always pupating their own disillusion, decay, age.
In the end, Viriconium is a magnificent epic in reverse. A vast world taking itself apart, one generation at a time. A master class in atmosphere and world-building. I only wish there were more.
Phthisic. Muculent. Gelid. M. John Harrison marshals an arsenal of arcane vocabulary to describe the fetid desuetude of the world of his mythical city of Viriconium. In a handful of stories written over the span of more than a decade, starting in 1971, he traces the fractured, half-remembered rise and fall of the eponymous imagined future city, founded many millennia after the demise of our own civilization. Or was it?
Harrison's unparalleled way with words is what makes this pioneering SF/fantasy mashup cycle, collected here under the rubric Viriconium, a classic that remains of interest to a non-reader of the fantasy genre such as myself. This is some of the most delectable prose I've ever come across. I spent three months reading this book not because I'm a slow reader but because I wanted to take my time and savor every passage. I enjoyed every moment I was steeped in this world. These stories absolutely drip atmosphere, and he has a knack for poetic, evocative descriptions of locale that transport you into a world of byzantine complexity.
Viriconium. Its achingly formal gardens and curious geometries.
Viriconium clearly raised the bar for fantasy, injecting a more literary quality into the swords and sorcery genre. This is a new kind of fantasy - all about atmosphere, place, detail, memory. The fabric of the narrative consists largely of highly specific, florid descriptions of sensory perceptions of this world, like a kind of Proustian Tolkien. This creates an uncanny sense of presence and place that brings this strange yet familiar world alive in the mind of the reader, while still having a poetic opacity that leaves room for the imagination. Oddly specific passing descriptions of local customs and observances like the following create an indelible impression as if traveling through a real foreign city:
The burial of the 'Holly Man' on Plough Monday, the sound of the hard black lupin seeds popping and tapping against the window in August, while his mother sang quietly in the kitchen the ancient carols of the Oei'l Voirrey.
Viriconium exists on a continuum of decay. Picking up where Alexandria and Rome left off, it traces the rise and fall of civilizations, transformed through the ages into different facades, the canvas for humanity's never-ending race towards destruction. The whole cycle is like an homage to entropy, with nothing but darkness at the end of the tunnel: an anti-heroic fantasy in which the heroes slink off into ignominious obscurity after killing their sidekicks.
The world was being rhythmically eroded; underneath could be glimpsed the bony grin of nothingness.
Internecine warfare topples kingdoms; the clash of different forms of existence destroys races; a metaphysical plague engulfs the fabric of reality in a haze of wan laxity from which civilization eventually re-emerges to begin the cycle anew. The world, and Viriconium, are stuck in an endless cycle of decay and renewal. This extends to the city's inhabitants. Erstwhile characters recur in distorted fashion, only vaguely recognizable, to trace similar trajectories in their orbit around the city. Heroes of old, now only half-forgotten memories distorted through the haze of time, are reborn, but not to fulfill some hopeful prophecy, but through a mirror darkly, as it were - as disturbed criminals or outcasts more concerned with their own skin than the fate of the city. History repeats itself, but in corrupted form, spiraling downwards towards some final cataclysm.
The silence of the caesura was over everything; judgment in abeyance.
Just as we trace the history of a city, so we also trace the artistic maturation of its historian. He began as an SF-influenced Tolkien epigone in the first novella, The Pastel City, which is a fine little novella in its own right, but still feels a little hesitant, the ramifications and possibilities of the concept slightly underexplored, the story constantly poised to go somewhere it never does.
Clouds of coloured vapour streamed through the galleries, which curled over them in a flaking mineral wave.
Harrison came into his own in the nearly decade-removed follow-up, A Storm of Wings, which is undoubtedly the high point of the collection. Harrison here ceases aping the tropes of epic fantasy, finding himself with a more ephemeral narrative, razor-sharp prosody, meticulous character delineation, and dense world-building. Just as an erstwhile reader might perhaps have remembered only imprecisely the events of the previous story from several years before, so history here takes on an imprecise, brittle, deteriorating quality. The plot hinges on a conceit that comes across as a fascinating blend of Kant and metafiction: different species with different perceptions of reality meet and infect one another. Reality itself becomes as malleable and unreliable as fiction.
A philosophy like a single drop of poison at the center of a curved mirror.
The trappings of fantasy are abandoned altogether in the novella that followed in short order, In Viriconium. While the previous is perhaps the most satisfying of the three, this one is the most sophisticated. Harrison's maturity is signaled by more restrained and measured storytelling and writing. His focus is on recreating a sense of a living and breathing city with a highly developed artistic culture and nuanced social stratification. He does this masterfully by focusing on the story of a dying artist, evoking a sense of weary decadence that has whiffs of fin-de-siecle Paris during the belle epoque, with its artistes and flaneurs hanging out in cafes discussing philosophy. The novella's weakness - an almost perverse and willful excision of any conventional semblance of plot and action - is simultaneously its strength, as the superficial contrivances that carry fantasy plots forward are shed in favor of a dense portrait of a city in the grips of existential terror. The artist has finally molted out of his genre cocoon.
The City! Its end is near. It expands and contracts, like a lung.
If the stories are lacking in one thing, it's breadth. Just as we latch on to a set of characters in anticipation of the story legging up to a new stage in an epic journey, we're thrown to the ground and the reset button is hit and we zoom out to a new time and a new set of characters. Any attempt to latch on to an even slightly redeemable protagonist is dashed as the characters become more and more beyond redemption with every passing generation. Just as the world becomes more fractured, the stories seem to seize up. Harrison obviously realized very early on that grandiose, long-form storytelling of the kind that influenced the first outing was not really in his nature. The stories gradually become more static and inward-turned until we reach the completely immobile and anti-epic In Viriconium. This tendency reaches its peak with the final outing in the collection.
The wind stank of delerium, gangrene, and false compass bearings.
The short stories that intersperse these three novellas originate from a subsequently published collection entitled Viriconium Nights. I have no qualms with interspersing them with the novellas the way the publisher has chosen to do here. It underscores how these stories are fractured reflections of one another, the constant shifts in time and locale and cast being appropriate to this world's surreal mixture of past and present, real and imaginary. But the short stories are shadows of the novellas in the sense that they are populated by distant echoes of past characters and situations. These can only be discerned if one read these stories after first reading the three novellas that provide the basis for the world of Viriconium. So in retrospect I might have preferred to read them afterwards.
Hopping and whirling despite himself down the million fractured perspectives of the mosaic universe.
These stories are simultaneously unnecessary add-ons that merely serve to flesh out the universe with flourishes of colorful detail, and the logical next step to which Harrison's storytelling had to be taken. The gradual honing and narrowing of focus could only have led to short stories. The world of Viriconium is really best served by small portraits of different characters at different points in time enacting distorted version of the age old mummer's play starring the tropes we see paraded before us in different guises. Much as I appreciate the novellas - and I think they're magnificent; I was tempted to re-read them immediately - I feel that they are, to some extent, failed attempts at creating an epic series. In the course of writing them, Harrison realized this and changed tack. The purpose of each novella evolved organically as Harrison discovered his true calling, towards a kind of panopticon, a vantage from which Harrison could obsessively flesh out the intricacies of his world in minute detail, from the perspective of different periods of time.
People are always pupating their own disillusion, decay, age.
In the end, Viriconium is a magnificent epic in reverse. A vast world taking itself apart, one generation at a time. A master class in atmosphere and world-building. I only wish there were more.
May 19, 2008
From ISawLightningFall.blogspot.com
Have you ever gotten something you yearned for -- an oft-delayed vacation, a new car or a fine, aged wine -- only to discover it doesn’t live up to your longing? If so, you may understand my response to M. John Harrison’s Viriconium. Consistently praised in the speculative-fiction community, it is a compendium spanning three novels and seven short stories, all of which center on a city of the same name. Sounds simple, yet describing what Viriconium is and what happens around, in and to it is challenging. That’s because Harrison reinvents his creation from piece to piece.
In the first novel, The Pastel City, Viriconium is a far-future metropolis threatened by civil strife. As one of its last defenders, the warrior/poet tegeus-Cromis must lead a ragtag group of soldiers through the poisonous Metal-Salt Marsh to the Great Brown Waste, where hidden wonders of the lost Afternoon Cultures lie beneath rusted scrap that slowly sifts to silt. There he and his band must face the rebel Canna Moidart and the ancient threat she has unearthed -- fearsome automatons called the geteit chemosit. It reads like a blending of and Dune. There are ferocious battles in blasted landscapes, miraculous technologies and a piercing poignancy over a civilization that might be the earth’s last if things go wrong. It’s great fun.
A Storm of Wings, the next in the cycle, is anything but. It has the right ingredients -- the return of old friends, peril from beyond the stars, and several desperate and doomed sorties. Yet a combination of muddled plotting and fever-dream description manages to muck up the proceedings. The swarms of intergalactic insects menacing Viriconium do so not through superior weaponry or numbers, but through a kind of Gnostic telepathy that reworks reality itself. Ludicrous word choices doom it even further. Examples? There are plenty. A procession marches “in a lunar chiaroscuro of gamboge and blue.� During a mental crisis, a character watches “precarious flowers bloom in his secret heart.� A foundering fleet lost in treacherous waters “turned quietly turtle in the gelid sea.� Imagine one or more of these groaners per page. Now try to conjure up some excitement for what is the collection’s longest section.
While the purplest of this prose gets excised in the remaining material, a new wrinkle appears -- the transition of Viriconium from a city rooted in space and time to myth. Harrison tries to achieve this by reintroducing previous characters and then fundamentally altering some part of them. Virtues and vices, biographical details, professional achievements, even hairstyles -- all get freely mixed and matched. The effort proves about as intelligible as the plots, which range from adequate (“The Lamia & Lord Cromis�) to obscure (“The Dancer From the Dance�) to well-nigh impenetrable (“The Luck in the Head�). As for In Viriconium, the last of the novels, Neil Gaiman writes in the introduction that the protagonist “barely understands the nature of the story he finds himself in.� The same could likely be said for many who read it.
It is distasteful to so roundly criticize a work, especially one from as talented an author as Harrison. He is incredibly imaginative and interested in grand ideas. Those willing to commit multiple readings to Viriconium and struggle through the vexing vocabulary, screwy character switch-ups and bewildering shifts in action will likely be rewarded. If only Harrison hadn’t given the rest of us such good excuses not to.
Have you ever gotten something you yearned for -- an oft-delayed vacation, a new car or a fine, aged wine -- only to discover it doesn’t live up to your longing? If so, you may understand my response to M. John Harrison’s Viriconium. Consistently praised in the speculative-fiction community, it is a compendium spanning three novels and seven short stories, all of which center on a city of the same name. Sounds simple, yet describing what Viriconium is and what happens around, in and to it is challenging. That’s because Harrison reinvents his creation from piece to piece.
In the first novel, The Pastel City, Viriconium is a far-future metropolis threatened by civil strife. As one of its last defenders, the warrior/poet tegeus-Cromis must lead a ragtag group of soldiers through the poisonous Metal-Salt Marsh to the Great Brown Waste, where hidden wonders of the lost Afternoon Cultures lie beneath rusted scrap that slowly sifts to silt. There he and his band must face the rebel Canna Moidart and the ancient threat she has unearthed -- fearsome automatons called the geteit chemosit. It reads like a blending of and Dune. There are ferocious battles in blasted landscapes, miraculous technologies and a piercing poignancy over a civilization that might be the earth’s last if things go wrong. It’s great fun.
A Storm of Wings, the next in the cycle, is anything but. It has the right ingredients -- the return of old friends, peril from beyond the stars, and several desperate and doomed sorties. Yet a combination of muddled plotting and fever-dream description manages to muck up the proceedings. The swarms of intergalactic insects menacing Viriconium do so not through superior weaponry or numbers, but through a kind of Gnostic telepathy that reworks reality itself. Ludicrous word choices doom it even further. Examples? There are plenty. A procession marches “in a lunar chiaroscuro of gamboge and blue.� During a mental crisis, a character watches “precarious flowers bloom in his secret heart.� A foundering fleet lost in treacherous waters “turned quietly turtle in the gelid sea.� Imagine one or more of these groaners per page. Now try to conjure up some excitement for what is the collection’s longest section.
While the purplest of this prose gets excised in the remaining material, a new wrinkle appears -- the transition of Viriconium from a city rooted in space and time to myth. Harrison tries to achieve this by reintroducing previous characters and then fundamentally altering some part of them. Virtues and vices, biographical details, professional achievements, even hairstyles -- all get freely mixed and matched. The effort proves about as intelligible as the plots, which range from adequate (“The Lamia & Lord Cromis�) to obscure (“The Dancer From the Dance�) to well-nigh impenetrable (“The Luck in the Head�). As for In Viriconium, the last of the novels, Neil Gaiman writes in the introduction that the protagonist “barely understands the nature of the story he finds himself in.� The same could likely be said for many who read it.
It is distasteful to so roundly criticize a work, especially one from as talented an author as Harrison. He is incredibly imaginative and interested in grand ideas. Those willing to commit multiple readings to Viriconium and struggle through the vexing vocabulary, screwy character switch-ups and bewildering shifts in action will likely be rewarded. If only Harrison hadn’t given the rest of us such good excuses not to.
May 21, 2015
How have I not read this collection of short novels and stories sooner? M. John Harrison is a writer who plays right into my personal tastes. These stories are imaginative, literary and dark. My favorite is A STORM OF WINGS, the second novel in the series, filled with warped perceptions and evocative imagery. It is outlandish and sometimes difficult to follow, but worth the effort. I'll admit, I'm a sucker for challenging and imaginative reads, and enjoyed this collection immensely, but if you're one of those readers who needs your characters to be likable (a common trend that puzzles me, as I think "nice" and "likable" characters are boring), as well as easy to follow narrative arcs, VIRICONIUM is not for you.
October 8, 2008
Viriconium is reminiscent of Vance's Dying Earth or Aldiss's Hothouse or Moorcock's Elric: A dying (or decadent) Earth and its last civilizations. It's actually a collection of three short novels and a handful of short stories.
Harrison is not simply telling a tale but is attempting "serious literature" and the reader shouldn't come to these stories expecting to while away a quiet weekend idyll. The most accessible book is the first one, The Pastel City, written in 1971. It narrates the clearest, most readable plot.
But let me digress for a moment to give the basic background: Earth is nearing the end of its life. The Morning Cultures have given way to the Afternoon, and they in turn have given way to the Evening Cultures, leaving in their wake a planet polluted with their waste and detritus and largely uninhabitable. Viriconium is the capital of an empire whose people sleepwalk through their lives. I would characterize the feeling I got while reading these stories as "optimistically bleak." I'm not sure that an of the main characters are ever happy or understand what is happening to them but the author likes them enough so that, in the end, they all achieve some measure of satisfaction. As John Clute writes in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (TEoF), "...MJH shows some signs of not punishing his protagonists for their attempts to make sense of things." (p. 454)
Back to the books: As I wrote above, The Pastel City is the most accessible read, being largely straightforward and sparing in its prose (certainly compared to later efforts). Barbarians from the north are overrunning Viriconium using machines resurrected from the graveyards of some forgotten Afternoon Culture. tegeus-Cromis, Tomb the Dwarf, Birkin Grif and several others disable the machines and save Viriconium (in the process Tomb resurrects people from the Afternoon, with tragic consequences in subsequent books).
A decade later, Harrison returned to Viriconium in A Storm of Wings, where his prose is much richer and his storytelling far more elliptical. Here, intelligent insects have descended from the moon but their reality (Umwelt) is clashing with that of humanity's and the resulting chaos is destroying both races.
The second novel is a tough read, not just because of the style. Many readers will be put off by the sometimes turgid prolixity but when it works, it works well. Particularly near the end of the book when the "hero" Galen Hornwrack almost inadvertently saves human reality.
No, it's also a tough read because Harrison is trying to argue a philosophical point and, as too often happens when authors go this route, the story tends to suffer. The point is that the inhabitants of Viriconium have a limited and frail grasp upon "reality" and are locked into a useless and enervating contemplation of the past to the detriment of their affecting the present. They can only move and affect the "real" when they slough off their obsessions with fantasy and come wholly into the world. (TEoF, pp. 453-54)
I haven't read enough Harrison to know whether I accept Clute's interpretation entirely but is does gel with how the author's characters behave and the decreasing fantasy elements of the stories. I'm put in mind particularly of In Viriconium, whose style is very realistic (relative to the first two), and the short story "A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium," set in modern-day England and where Viriconium is a mental construction rather than a real place.
The third book, In Viriconium, is a reimagining of Viriconium that falls somewhere between The Pastel City and A Storm of Wings in terms of style. In all three books characters reappear but are reimagined. For example, Tomb the Dwarf is a character common to all three novels but is a different character in each one; and Fat Mam Eteilla, who died in A Storm of Wings, lives in In Viriconium.
In sum, I have a qualified liking for the stories. A Storm of Wings is the weakest of the three novels, never quite succeeding in its ambitions. In Viriconium is certainly the most poignant. If you're looking for just a solid adventure you'll want to stop at The Pastel City but if you're interested in some mental exercise, grappling with ideas about reality and perception, then M. John Harrison is an interesting author who, even if you don't accept his viewpoint or have difficulty with his style, is worth reading.
Harrison is not simply telling a tale but is attempting "serious literature" and the reader shouldn't come to these stories expecting to while away a quiet weekend idyll. The most accessible book is the first one, The Pastel City, written in 1971. It narrates the clearest, most readable plot.
But let me digress for a moment to give the basic background: Earth is nearing the end of its life. The Morning Cultures have given way to the Afternoon, and they in turn have given way to the Evening Cultures, leaving in their wake a planet polluted with their waste and detritus and largely uninhabitable. Viriconium is the capital of an empire whose people sleepwalk through their lives. I would characterize the feeling I got while reading these stories as "optimistically bleak." I'm not sure that an of the main characters are ever happy or understand what is happening to them but the author likes them enough so that, in the end, they all achieve some measure of satisfaction. As John Clute writes in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (TEoF), "...MJH shows some signs of not punishing his protagonists for their attempts to make sense of things." (p. 454)
Back to the books: As I wrote above, The Pastel City is the most accessible read, being largely straightforward and sparing in its prose (certainly compared to later efforts). Barbarians from the north are overrunning Viriconium using machines resurrected from the graveyards of some forgotten Afternoon Culture. tegeus-Cromis, Tomb the Dwarf, Birkin Grif and several others disable the machines and save Viriconium (in the process Tomb resurrects people from the Afternoon, with tragic consequences in subsequent books).
A decade later, Harrison returned to Viriconium in A Storm of Wings, where his prose is much richer and his storytelling far more elliptical. Here, intelligent insects have descended from the moon but their reality (Umwelt) is clashing with that of humanity's and the resulting chaos is destroying both races.
The second novel is a tough read, not just because of the style. Many readers will be put off by the sometimes turgid prolixity but when it works, it works well. Particularly near the end of the book when the "hero" Galen Hornwrack almost inadvertently saves human reality.
No, it's also a tough read because Harrison is trying to argue a philosophical point and, as too often happens when authors go this route, the story tends to suffer. The point is that the inhabitants of Viriconium have a limited and frail grasp upon "reality" and are locked into a useless and enervating contemplation of the past to the detriment of their affecting the present. They can only move and affect the "real" when they slough off their obsessions with fantasy and come wholly into the world. (TEoF, pp. 453-54)
I haven't read enough Harrison to know whether I accept Clute's interpretation entirely but is does gel with how the author's characters behave and the decreasing fantasy elements of the stories. I'm put in mind particularly of In Viriconium, whose style is very realistic (relative to the first two), and the short story "A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium," set in modern-day England and where Viriconium is a mental construction rather than a real place.
The third book, In Viriconium, is a reimagining of Viriconium that falls somewhere between The Pastel City and A Storm of Wings in terms of style. In all three books characters reappear but are reimagined. For example, Tomb the Dwarf is a character common to all three novels but is a different character in each one; and Fat Mam Eteilla, who died in A Storm of Wings, lives in In Viriconium.
In sum, I have a qualified liking for the stories. A Storm of Wings is the weakest of the three novels, never quite succeeding in its ambitions. In Viriconium is certainly the most poignant. If you're looking for just a solid adventure you'll want to stop at The Pastel City but if you're interested in some mental exercise, grappling with ideas about reality and perception, then M. John Harrison is an interesting author who, even if you don't accept his viewpoint or have difficulty with his style, is worth reading.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 14, 2024
Overall
Rating:
Overall: 3
Writing: 5
Plot: 3
My enjoyment as a reader: 3
Although many fantasy and science fiction authors revere (among others these include who wrote the forward for this collection; ; ; ; , and ), this collection of fantasy/science fiction novels and short stories will probably not be for most readers.
Harrison uses language idiosyncratically, using sol d’or for daffodil, for example. Maybe some of this is local British usage.
can write. (Understatement of the millenium).
He is the genius poet of modern fantasy and in some ways the precursor of much of it (science fiction too). Here’s an example:
“A melancholy heath dipped away inland—shadowy, sheep-cropped turf, black gorse, and bent hawthorn trees.�
There are also some “Easter Eggs� hidden away in the text. For example, in “In Viriconium�, the third novel, one character, Ashlyme, picks up a knife that may have belonged to another character, Hornwrack, in the previous novel, A Storm of Wings. Also the painter Ashlyme, and the poet Verdigris in one or more previous novels both have their hair in “red coxcombs�. Are they the same person?
Harrison also has a genius for writing memorable, eccentric, self-centered, comical, unlikeable characters with unforgettable names like Ashlyme or Ansel Verdigris or Galen Hornwrack or St. Elmo Buffin or Paucemanly. But it’s nearly impossible for the reader to care about such narcissistic characters.
He is brilliant at evoking a sense of dreamlike malaise. There are deliberately ambiguous or unresolved plot elements.
I can see Harrison’s effect on other writers. For example in , a novella about a war, I can see how he may have influenced , who wrote .
His stories and the characters within them resemble Hieronymous Bosch paintings brought to life. Not in the details, but in the overall ambience.
However, only a few of his characters change or grow during his stories. He isn’t great at character arcs.
Also, while the plots are interesting, the pace varies from slow to glacial. It can be easy to get antsy while reading his work.
I also found many of the stories confusing. This is one of those rare instances where listening and reading at the same time seemed to add to the confusion rather than clarifying it.
Harrison was certainly ahead of his time, and his work was the basis for much science fiction and fantasy that followed.
Audio Narration
Although I’ve enjoyed many of Simon Vance’s audio narrations, I’m not sure he was a suitable reader for this. His narration style was mostly aristocratic and detached, but brittle and histrionic at other times. It didn’t enhance my enjoyment of the book.
Rating:
Overall: 3
Writing: 5
Plot: 3
My enjoyment as a reader: 3
Although many fantasy and science fiction authors revere (among others these include who wrote the forward for this collection; ; ; ; , and ), this collection of fantasy/science fiction novels and short stories will probably not be for most readers.
Harrison uses language idiosyncratically, using sol d’or for daffodil, for example. Maybe some of this is local British usage.
can write. (Understatement of the millenium).
He is the genius poet of modern fantasy and in some ways the precursor of much of it (science fiction too). Here’s an example:
“A melancholy heath dipped away inland—shadowy, sheep-cropped turf, black gorse, and bent hawthorn trees.�
There are also some “Easter Eggs� hidden away in the text. For example, in “In Viriconium�, the third novel, one character, Ashlyme, picks up a knife that may have belonged to another character, Hornwrack, in the previous novel, A Storm of Wings. Also the painter Ashlyme, and the poet Verdigris in one or more previous novels both have their hair in “red coxcombs�. Are they the same person?
Harrison also has a genius for writing memorable, eccentric, self-centered, comical, unlikeable characters with unforgettable names like Ashlyme or Ansel Verdigris or Galen Hornwrack or St. Elmo Buffin or Paucemanly. But it’s nearly impossible for the reader to care about such narcissistic characters.
He is brilliant at evoking a sense of dreamlike malaise. There are deliberately ambiguous or unresolved plot elements.
I can see Harrison’s effect on other writers. For example in , a novella about a war, I can see how he may have influenced , who wrote .
His stories and the characters within them resemble Hieronymous Bosch paintings brought to life. Not in the details, but in the overall ambience.
However, only a few of his characters change or grow during his stories. He isn’t great at character arcs.
Also, while the plots are interesting, the pace varies from slow to glacial. It can be easy to get antsy while reading his work.
I also found many of the stories confusing. This is one of those rare instances where listening and reading at the same time seemed to add to the confusion rather than clarifying it.
Harrison was certainly ahead of his time, and his work was the basis for much science fiction and fantasy that followed.
Audio Narration
Although I’ve enjoyed many of Simon Vance’s audio narrations, I’m not sure he was a suitable reader for this. His narration style was mostly aristocratic and detached, but brittle and histrionic at other times. It didn’t enhance my enjoyment of the book.
September 19, 2014
I'm going to review this now, even though I haven't quite got to the end because, quite frankly, I don't know if I ever will.
This is an omnibus that includes three novels and one short story collection. The stories are arranged in what I can only assume is some sort of chronological order. The first novel "The Pastel City" was published in 1971 and then there is a nine year break after which the two remaining novels and finally the short story collection were published throughout the early 1980's. Stylistically, there is a big difference between the first novel and the rest of the stories. Harrison had obviously evolved as a writer over this time and, for me, this was not a good thing. He had obviously become far less concerned with story and far more concerned with style.
So, I thoroughly enjoyed "The Pastel City" but I really struggled with "A Storm of Wings" (the second novel). It followed on some years after the events in the first story and with some of the same characters but was far less cohesive, far more abstract. There was an intense focus on imagery and plot development and dialogue took a back seat. I ploughed through it but it was not an enjoyable experience. I have completed most of the short stories and with one or two exceptions, they are all rather dull and seem pointless to me.
At some point I want to try and finish the collection and tackle the final novel but I just can't face it right now.
This is an omnibus that includes three novels and one short story collection. The stories are arranged in what I can only assume is some sort of chronological order. The first novel "The Pastel City" was published in 1971 and then there is a nine year break after which the two remaining novels and finally the short story collection were published throughout the early 1980's. Stylistically, there is a big difference between the first novel and the rest of the stories. Harrison had obviously evolved as a writer over this time and, for me, this was not a good thing. He had obviously become far less concerned with story and far more concerned with style.
So, I thoroughly enjoyed "The Pastel City" but I really struggled with "A Storm of Wings" (the second novel). It followed on some years after the events in the first story and with some of the same characters but was far less cohesive, far more abstract. There was an intense focus on imagery and plot development and dialogue took a back seat. I ploughed through it but it was not an enjoyable experience. I have completed most of the short stories and with one or two exceptions, they are all rather dull and seem pointless to me.
At some point I want to try and finish the collection and tackle the final novel but I just can't face it right now.
December 3, 2008
I was drawn into Viriconium by an old paperback copy of The Pastel City, which I thought was a fantastic read.
Little did I know that Harrison had other ideas for the others in the series. He subverts the tropes of a Tolkien-style fantasy by refusing to construct a consistent world; each story must be read by itself, and is an ever-fading echo of the original telling, more baroque and ornate each repetition. The scale shrinks from a world-traveling conflict to intimate character pieces in an almost Dickensian style.
Little did I know that Harrison had other ideas for the others in the series. He subverts the tropes of a Tolkien-style fantasy by refusing to construct a consistent world; each story must be read by itself, and is an ever-fading echo of the original telling, more baroque and ornate each repetition. The scale shrinks from a world-traveling conflict to intimate character pieces in an almost Dickensian style.
September 30, 2024
Consisting of 3 short novels plus a few assorted novellas and/or short stories these stories concern the fabled city of Viriconium.
Most of the stories appear to take place far off in the distant future as mention is made of large swathes of the kingdom polluted by long-discarded industrial waster.
Harrison is much concerned with landscape and many of the descriptions remind me of areas of Northern England.
Although superbly written throughout it's not until the final 2 pieces "In Viriconium" & "A Young Man's Journey To Viriconium" that things get really interesting. In these 2 pieces Harrison starts to pull away from direct fantasy in a more muddled and confused mixture of the fantastical and the mundane, pointing the way to his later work set in contemporary Britain where what look to be perfectly ordinary (even boring) people appear to be involved in rituals and practices of an arcane and unknown nature. Meaning is elusive as weird events take place against very mundane backdrops.
Most of the stories appear to take place far off in the distant future as mention is made of large swathes of the kingdom polluted by long-discarded industrial waster.
Harrison is much concerned with landscape and many of the descriptions remind me of areas of Northern England.
Although superbly written throughout it's not until the final 2 pieces "In Viriconium" & "A Young Man's Journey To Viriconium" that things get really interesting. In these 2 pieces Harrison starts to pull away from direct fantasy in a more muddled and confused mixture of the fantastical and the mundane, pointing the way to his later work set in contemporary Britain where what look to be perfectly ordinary (even boring) people appear to be involved in rituals and practices of an arcane and unknown nature. Meaning is elusive as weird events take place against very mundane backdrops.
February 6, 2008
I was on a dark fantasy kick for a few weeks. I like the first story in this one a lot.
June 26, 2018
O carte ce conține mai multe romane și nuvele. Primele două sunt extraordinare - o istorie a literaturii fantasy și un ghid pentru cei care urmăresc evoluția motivelor în literatură. Celelalte sunt frumoase estetic, dar mult mai obscure.
April 5, 2017
Sometimes, your favorite authors love a book, tell you how wonderful it is, how masterful, how pivotal the work is. So you buy it, and put it on your shelf, peruse it periodically, and wait until it's just the right moment, the right time, the moon and the stars are just right and you look at it and decide that now, now is the time to read Viriconium.
It doesn't click, but you keep reading. Sometimes books just need time. You need to let your mind shift, click in with the author, see the beauty and the drama of the text, fall into the author's universe. And so you keep reading. Maybe another twenty pages, seventy-five pages. A hundred?
Eventually it comes clear that you and this author just don't mesh, and you realize that there are dozens of other books waiting to be read, hundreds and thousands of words to be read, and they'll probably all be much more enjoyable than this book is for you.
So it goes.
It doesn't click, but you keep reading. Sometimes books just need time. You need to let your mind shift, click in with the author, see the beauty and the drama of the text, fall into the author's universe. And so you keep reading. Maybe another twenty pages, seventy-five pages. A hundred?
Eventually it comes clear that you and this author just don't mesh, and you realize that there are dozens of other books waiting to be read, hundreds and thousands of words to be read, and they'll probably all be much more enjoyable than this book is for you.
So it goes.
Want to read
August 5, 2016Added because in the acknowledgements of Perdido Street Station, M John Harrison is one of only two authors credited (the other being the wonderful Mervyn Peake).
And then Forrest recommended this specific one (see comments under my copy of light: /review/show...
And then Forrest recommended this specific one (see comments under my copy of light: /review/show...
Read
January 28, 2015M. John Harrison's VIRICONIUM cycle:
As stated in a previous post, what led me to Harrison's science/fantasy omnibus was a quote that it was: "inspired by Jack Vance's Dying Earth series and Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, although the works are also influenced in their imagery by the poems of T.S. Eliot." The introduction by Neil Gaiman didn't hurt the book's chances either. And then the blurbs (which by nature are alway burbling blurbs) were mostly filled with what can only be described as awe and respect. None of this "a fast moving thriller" or "races to a satisfactory denouement!" Instead: "A Zen master of prose" - Iain Banks and "Exemplary fictions of unease shot through with poetic insight and most beautifully written," by no less than Angela Carter. Or ...brilliant, beautiful and absolutely essential reading. The breadth of imagination alone in these books is unparalleled. It is truly one of a kind and will continue to haunt you in the best possible way for years..." Jonathan Carroll. (author of the much-prized and strangest book this reader has experienced -THE LAND OF LAUGHS.)
The first book THE PASTEL CITY is on the surface a post-apocalyptic Sword and Sorcery tale, rich in language, surprising in turns, and poetic by nature. Viriconium and its environs are delineated in crisp and unerring detail to give one a complete sensory immersion in the dying city left over from "the Afternoon of the World" a millenia ago, with it's bizarre and puzzling machines left to run or rust intermittently. An impressive start and yes, a lot of T.S. Eliot influence especially "bone" imagery (and, oh, didn't we young poets, under Master Eliot's influence, just love our bone imagery!) And then, of course, Harrison's employer and mentor, Michael Moorcock. But I detected another influence and one that is not talked about at all. That influence was Keith Roberts. Keith Roberts was a writer and artist who died of complications of MS. PAVANE is his best known work. He was as respected as a writer by his colleagues as he was criticized for his abrasive personality. But I figure that a man with an actual death sentence hanging over his head might be more apt to speak his mind openly than to do the awkward dance of social niceties. Moorcock, Harrison and Roberts all worked for Moorcock's British Speculative Fiction magazine NEW WORLDS and, I imagine, discoursed upon and read each other's work. Roberts used the genre to tell the stories of real people no matter what weirdness decorated their setting or time. Three essential books of Robert's oeuvre are PAVANE, THE CHALK GIANTS and KITE WORLD. That I go on about Roberts is that I see so much of his influence here that is essentially unrecognized.
The next book A STORM OF WINGS is unlike any book I've had the pleasure to read ( and I've read all the "unique" books, or so I thought). An imagist panoply, a madness, a dense forest full of the bracken and detritus of the interior. The landscape, strange, frightening, made more alien by its familiarity. Here we begin to see the Mervyn Peak influence, but it is the Peake of the last novel TITUS ALONE. Plot is secondary and moves back and forth like a turgid tide. A hard but rewarding read, there are passages that take away one's breath, too many at times. Have a dictionary ready as Harrison doesn't believe in lazy readers.
Listen:
"The Sign of the Locust is unlike any other religion invented in Viriconium. Its outward forms and observances - its liturgies and rituals, its theurgic or metaphysical speculations, its daily processionals - seem less an attempt by men to express an essentially human invention than the effort of some raw and independent Idea - a theophneustia, existing without recourse to brain or blood: a Muse or demiurge - to express itself. It wears its congregation like a disguise: we did not so much create the Sign of the Locust as invite it into ourselves, and now it dons us nightly like a cloak and domino to go abroad in the world."
The third, IN VIRCONIUM tells a small tale with just enough reference to the ancient history of Viriconium to anchor it. A tale of undying love in a dying city beset by a plague that saps even the streets, houses, and their inhabitants with a sere debilitating aging. Entropy is personified in the Barley Brothers - two lost gods that seek to revel in human excesses....Again, the Peake influence (mostly in the names and milieu of artists that we find in TITUS ALONE) but its main impetus seems to be the Symbolist personages, poetry and novels of the late 19th century: Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud and the novels of J.K. Huysmans. Remember, these were the poets that influenced T.S. Eliot's WASTELAND. This last long work in the book foregoes the dense imagery (but keep that dictionary handy!) And instead is filled with consumptive flowers and night grotesques with circus strange faces (he even brings in the Mari Lwyd ceremony). It is the last gasp of Art with a capital "A" against Dylan Thomas's virtual 'dying of the light'. Pathos? Yes. Bathos? non!
I've read many longer works much harder with no ultimate reward and closed those books (or threw them across the room) with only a sense of futility and wasted time. Not so with IN VIRICONIUM. Harrison, always labeled a "writer's writer" leaves the steadfast reader with a glimpse of a wholly realized, strange world and an intimacy with his wounded characters in a language as rich as any I've had the pleasure to experience...
As stated in a previous post, what led me to Harrison's science/fantasy omnibus was a quote that it was: "inspired by Jack Vance's Dying Earth series and Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, although the works are also influenced in their imagery by the poems of T.S. Eliot." The introduction by Neil Gaiman didn't hurt the book's chances either. And then the blurbs (which by nature are alway burbling blurbs) were mostly filled with what can only be described as awe and respect. None of this "a fast moving thriller" or "races to a satisfactory denouement!" Instead: "A Zen master of prose" - Iain Banks and "Exemplary fictions of unease shot through with poetic insight and most beautifully written," by no less than Angela Carter. Or ...brilliant, beautiful and absolutely essential reading. The breadth of imagination alone in these books is unparalleled. It is truly one of a kind and will continue to haunt you in the best possible way for years..." Jonathan Carroll. (author of the much-prized and strangest book this reader has experienced -THE LAND OF LAUGHS.)
The first book THE PASTEL CITY is on the surface a post-apocalyptic Sword and Sorcery tale, rich in language, surprising in turns, and poetic by nature. Viriconium and its environs are delineated in crisp and unerring detail to give one a complete sensory immersion in the dying city left over from "the Afternoon of the World" a millenia ago, with it's bizarre and puzzling machines left to run or rust intermittently. An impressive start and yes, a lot of T.S. Eliot influence especially "bone" imagery (and, oh, didn't we young poets, under Master Eliot's influence, just love our bone imagery!) And then, of course, Harrison's employer and mentor, Michael Moorcock. But I detected another influence and one that is not talked about at all. That influence was Keith Roberts. Keith Roberts was a writer and artist who died of complications of MS. PAVANE is his best known work. He was as respected as a writer by his colleagues as he was criticized for his abrasive personality. But I figure that a man with an actual death sentence hanging over his head might be more apt to speak his mind openly than to do the awkward dance of social niceties. Moorcock, Harrison and Roberts all worked for Moorcock's British Speculative Fiction magazine NEW WORLDS and, I imagine, discoursed upon and read each other's work. Roberts used the genre to tell the stories of real people no matter what weirdness decorated their setting or time. Three essential books of Robert's oeuvre are PAVANE, THE CHALK GIANTS and KITE WORLD. That I go on about Roberts is that I see so much of his influence here that is essentially unrecognized.
The next book A STORM OF WINGS is unlike any book I've had the pleasure to read ( and I've read all the "unique" books, or so I thought). An imagist panoply, a madness, a dense forest full of the bracken and detritus of the interior. The landscape, strange, frightening, made more alien by its familiarity. Here we begin to see the Mervyn Peak influence, but it is the Peake of the last novel TITUS ALONE. Plot is secondary and moves back and forth like a turgid tide. A hard but rewarding read, there are passages that take away one's breath, too many at times. Have a dictionary ready as Harrison doesn't believe in lazy readers.
Listen:
"The Sign of the Locust is unlike any other religion invented in Viriconium. Its outward forms and observances - its liturgies and rituals, its theurgic or metaphysical speculations, its daily processionals - seem less an attempt by men to express an essentially human invention than the effort of some raw and independent Idea - a theophneustia, existing without recourse to brain or blood: a Muse or demiurge - to express itself. It wears its congregation like a disguise: we did not so much create the Sign of the Locust as invite it into ourselves, and now it dons us nightly like a cloak and domino to go abroad in the world."
The third, IN VIRCONIUM tells a small tale with just enough reference to the ancient history of Viriconium to anchor it. A tale of undying love in a dying city beset by a plague that saps even the streets, houses, and their inhabitants with a sere debilitating aging. Entropy is personified in the Barley Brothers - two lost gods that seek to revel in human excesses....Again, the Peake influence (mostly in the names and milieu of artists that we find in TITUS ALONE) but its main impetus seems to be the Symbolist personages, poetry and novels of the late 19th century: Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud and the novels of J.K. Huysmans. Remember, these were the poets that influenced T.S. Eliot's WASTELAND. This last long work in the book foregoes the dense imagery (but keep that dictionary handy!) And instead is filled with consumptive flowers and night grotesques with circus strange faces (he even brings in the Mari Lwyd ceremony). It is the last gasp of Art with a capital "A" against Dylan Thomas's virtual 'dying of the light'. Pathos? Yes. Bathos? non!
I've read many longer works much harder with no ultimate reward and closed those books (or threw them across the room) with only a sense of futility and wasted time. Not so with IN VIRICONIUM. Harrison, always labeled a "writer's writer" leaves the steadfast reader with a glimpse of a wholly realized, strange world and an intimacy with his wounded characters in a language as rich as any I've had the pleasure to experience...
August 1, 2021
I liked "The Pastel City" a great deal. The rest of it felt to me like various shades and degrees of suppurating meh. "A Storm of Wings", in particular, felt like a pale imitation of "The Pastel City", but weak, wan, a bit unpleasant, and - worst of all - drawn-out and boring. I started skipping and quickly found myself just skipping to the end. Having reached the end, I felt a momentary urge to go back and read it all properly, but it passed very quickly. The rest I also skipped and skimmed at high speeds.
Now, I get it that the repetetiveness and pale-copyness are in fact part of the over-arching meta-point, I do, but it just didn't really work for me, except in a few isolated moments. Perhaps I am old-fashioned, pedestrian, philistine, but I like to have a proper plot that can be made sense of eventually.
Anyway, "The Pastel City" on its own is a solid 4.5 at least. The rest, like I said...
P.S.
Mr. Harrison's vocabulary is amazing, especially in words that pertain to shades and colours. I think I know my English pretty well - but, this, this was the true glimpse of a wholly different world for me.
P.P.S
Please read Charles Heywood's review. /review/show...
He sums it up admirably:
I do wonder, though, if according to this logic we should not be compelled to pronounce Norvin Trinor, the seeker for vitality, as the true tragic hero of the book? And does that not undermine Mr. Heywood's and mine own reading of the text?
Now, I get it that the repetetiveness and pale-copyness are in fact part of the over-arching meta-point, I do, but it just didn't really work for me, except in a few isolated moments. Perhaps I am old-fashioned, pedestrian, philistine, but I like to have a proper plot that can be made sense of eventually.
Anyway, "The Pastel City" on its own is a solid 4.5 at least. The rest, like I said...
P.S.
Mr. Harrison's vocabulary is amazing, especially in words that pertain to shades and colours. I think I know my English pretty well - but, this, this was the true glimpse of a wholly different world for me.
P.P.S
Please read Charles Heywood's review. /review/show...
He sums it up admirably:
Unfortunately, the delicate and successful balance that Harrison achieves here, between reality and heroism, is destroyed in the sequels that Harrison wrote in the 1980s. These are awful books, full of squalor and nihilism, morbidly bizarre, totally lacking the heroic edge and flashes of faded beauty and glory that make the feeling of unalterable decline in "The Pastel City" bearable for both characters and reader.
I do wonder, though, if according to this logic we should not be compelled to pronounce Norvin Trinor, the seeker for vitality, as the true tragic hero of the book? And does that not undermine Mr. Heywood's and mine own reading of the text?
August 2, 2014
The idea to chart the final decay of civilisation from multiple realities � each more entropic than the last � was a premise full of possibility, and it set high expectations. The book’s intelligent, flamboyant style was, at times, quite beautiful. But as Lou Reed once sang: ‘Between thought and expression there lies a lifetime.� And it’s in this space that I found the cycle as a whole disappointing � especially in the final third.
The narrative arc was lacking, and it felt like an impressionistic picture where no recognisable image emerged as you stepped back from the canvas. To me, the link between obviously related people in the stories seemed tenuous - so that what might have been a unifying device and opportunity to deepen the characters ended up seeming like a confusing gimmick. There are conceivable reasons why the author may have done this, but his intention remains unclear and the affect is distracting.
In fact, there are many examples of this sort of promising concept that end up serving a decorative function instead of providing an integrated plot element. And the story fizzles out into a grey obscurity set against the puzzling apotheosis of the Bewlay brothers or something�
There must be some kind of meaning I missed, or else that plague of torpor and lassitude was one of the few promising concepts which also served as an integrated plot element in the final act.
The narrative arc was lacking, and it felt like an impressionistic picture where no recognisable image emerged as you stepped back from the canvas. To me, the link between obviously related people in the stories seemed tenuous - so that what might have been a unifying device and opportunity to deepen the characters ended up seeming like a confusing gimmick. There are conceivable reasons why the author may have done this, but his intention remains unclear and the affect is distracting.
In fact, there are many examples of this sort of promising concept that end up serving a decorative function instead of providing an integrated plot element. And the story fizzles out into a grey obscurity set against the puzzling apotheosis of the Bewlay brothers or something�
There must be some kind of meaning I missed, or else that plague of torpor and lassitude was one of the few promising concepts which also served as an integrated plot element in the final act.
July 16, 2024
A firm 3 out of 5 for M. John Harrison's Viriconium Sequence. Reading this collection was both strange and disorienting, something I am sure the author intended. Harrison's rich, dense, and Gothic prose evokes the atmosphere of the eternal, multidimensional, and labyrinthine city of his creation, Viriconium. Is Viriconium every city there ever was? This is a modern myth: chivalrous lightsaber-wielding dandies, black multi-weaponed robots that steal and store people's brains, and strange orders featuring partly insectoid men reforming reality in the image of the locust.
Be warned that this isn't an easy, breezy read. Harrison's stanzas perplex with their complexity and density. Like an ever-flowing deluge of words, a veritable tsunami of diction that flows forward always, never ceasing, the experience of reading this was akin to drowning. These stories must be read slowly; there is so much packed into every sentence that it's easy to get lost and miss important information.
My opinions on the four parts of this collection are as follows:
The Pastel City - 3/5
A somewhat straightforward "sword and sorcery" style tale with a queen, a knight, and a war set against the backdrop of the ancient city Viriconium, built from the leftovers of the "Afternoon cultures" (1000+ years in the past) in all their technological decadence. This world is decaying and spent from the pollution of the incomprehensible "Afternoon cultures" that people today, while not understanding, repurpose the detritus of this world to build cities and lightsaber-like weapons (this book was published in 1971 and thus predates Star Wars: A New Hope by six years).
The setting is fascinating, with some evocative images: swamps contaminated with iridescent metallic sludge seeping into the mutated wildlife, giant and gentle black komodo dragons stalking the desert-like wastes outside the city, robotic cyclops-like automatons, The Getite Chemosit on a singular mission being revived from a technological age that has in most part been forgotten, and ancient talking metallic eagles forged long ago in the armory of the ancient and enigmatic Cellur "The Bird Lord." This was an effortless and vivid science-fantasy that has no qualms about mixing up and blurring the genre categories so common today. I loved the freedom with which Harrison disregards genre conventions to create something truly unique and that aspires to a higher art as a result.
However, while the backdrop of the story is so imaginative, the plot and characterisation are weaknesses that stand out. With all the evocative imagery, this is a straightforward tale. Did I care about any of these characters? Nope. The intrigue and rivalry that trigger the war are also nebulous. I kept asking, who cares? Why should we care about the "good" guys? There is a purple-eyed queen and a lightsaber-wielding knight persuaded into chivalry to protect her honour. However, she is distant, lacking verve or the diplomacy expected from a great queen to drive the intrigue that surrounds her. Ok, she keeps a species of giant sloths as pets, but again, I kept asking, who cares?
The story feels like the setup for something more, a first chapter in a longer and more interesting tale. Unfortunately, the proceeding stories become more abstract and bizarre as you progress and cannot really be called sequels to this opening story. I was hoping for something deeper with an emotional punch set in this world.
Some of the names of characters in these stories are tongue-twisty at best and comical at worst: Methvet Nian, Tegius Chromis, Mammy Vooly, Fat Mam Etalier.
A Storm of Wings - 4/5
A Storm of Wings, while abstract and often bizarre, is the strongest in this collection. However, be aware going in that this story is experimental with twists that are unexpected and a story that is strange and surreal. The strangeness of this tale evokes some off-putting emotions. I wasn't sure about it as it progressed but can see its literary merit. Many might not like this story, but it is well written and creatively deployed. Genre conventions evaporate with the wildness and stakes here.
In Viriconium - 2/5
By far the weakest of the collection, for me completely pointless (I did a full review on this book's page on ŷ earlier here). I lost valuable time reading this that I will never get back. I spent the entire time waiting for something to happen. Harrison is so talented a stylist and so evocative with his diction I assumed that something would be worthwhile in this. For me, it's an epic fail! The stakes? Nonexistent. The story revolves around a "plague" blighting the "low city" that has no epidemiology. The symptoms are amorphous and who it attacks is similarly vague. The city is also beset by a bizarre and destructive duo called the Barley brothers that are alluded to be possible gods of the city? They roll around causing mischief and provoking mayhem. Their purpose in the story is never resolved. What is their connection to the plague? Why don't they ever speak? I don't want to reiterate my criticisms, but the only saving grace the story has is Harrison's evocative writing. However, lush and expressive prose cannot save a dull story with no stakes and pointless characters that lack motivations. This was comical at worst and pretentious at best.
Viriconium Nights - 3/5
A middling collection of shorts evoking the multidimensional, fractal, and eternal nature of Viriconium. We see different iterations of the city with slightly different names: Virico, Uriconium. Similar characters with familiar names: Chrome. And motifs in earlier stories like the sign of the locust. I thought this collection was okay; several stories stood out but some were dull. Overall, I would like to reread as there was some interesting stuff here.
3 + 4 + 2 + 3 = 12/4 = 3/5
January 15, 2020
I read "The Pastel City" and "A Storm of Wings". I won't be continuing the series because, altough it is interesting at times, it doesn't hold my interes.
Both novels are set in phantasmagorical, post-apocalyptical world. The nature is strange and warped, and creatures are not much different. "The Pastel City" concerns a war between 2 queens, and "A Storm of Wings" deals with an alien force intruding on a weakened world after the battle(s). At times it all reminded me of Gormenghast, but one where I didn't care for the characters, which dampened my enjoyment.
Both novels are set in phantasmagorical, post-apocalyptical world. The nature is strange and warped, and creatures are not much different. "The Pastel City" concerns a war between 2 queens, and "A Storm of Wings" deals with an alien force intruding on a weakened world after the battle(s). At times it all reminded me of Gormenghast, but one where I didn't care for the characters, which dampened my enjoyment.
October 26, 2020
I approached this expecting a more straightforward Moorcock-style pulpy adventure.
That was a mistake, and so I was very disappointed as the narrative (and characters, and world) disintegrated in a kind of dreamlike manner as the book progressed.
I'll get around to re-reading this sooner or later.
That was a mistake, and so I was very disappointed as the narrative (and characters, and world) disintegrated in a kind of dreamlike manner as the book progressed.
I'll get around to re-reading this sooner or later.
January 22, 2012
I can't say enough about how influential these were on me. Amazed by the few stars. These were my ideal: you know how when you're young and want to be a writer, there's one writer you dream of writing like? The Viriconium series was It for me. Not that that turned out... just to express how I felt about them.
February 11, 2017
Do you like your fantasies with detailed histories, sumptuous maps detailing farflung lands and exciting tales where the aims are clear and the morality is never in doubt? Do you like to read fantasy because it allows you to imagine other cool places to live? Is the answer yes to all of that? If that's true then you might want to steer clear of this series, which comes across as someone who took all the standard high fantasy texts and lit them on fire and then tried to publish the smoke that's created in book form. If there's anyone who is a ready audience for this, it may be all those people who think that those Gene Wolfe novels are just too darn concrete and straightforward.
Viriconium is a city but it might as well be a state of mind and what it really is are words on a series of pages that were originally published between 1971 and 1985 consisting of about three novels and a handful of short stories. Except for a few rare instances there are hardly any continuing characters, the city itself seems to be built entirely out of metaphor and at times it reaches "did I take drugs before I started reading this" levels of weird. If you're in the right mood, its actually kind of intoxicating but if you're not ready for it or try to read too much at once then you'll be begging for someone to unironically shout "Have at thee!" and denounce evil. Here, you have weird insect robots that steal brains and they're not even the main event. If at times you feel like you've entered some strange fantasy version of Grant Morrison's "Doom Patrol" you may not be that far off.
The big difference here is that Harrison is an excellent prose stylist who seems to be going out of his way to sustain the stories entirely on mood and atmosphere alone, which sometimes means that plot is a bit of a secondary concern. If you're on the same wavelength as this then you're going to be in for a rather unique experience and while you can probably read these and imagine a young China Mieville taking very, very careful notes, for me the acid test of whether you're going to find this intriguing or tedious depends on how you like Mervyn Peake's "Gormenghast", series, which is one of those perennial contenders for fictional places that feel more real than actual places that exist thanks to a barrage of pretty arresting imagery.
Harrison doesn't quite reach those heady heights but man, he sure does come close. Dipping into the city via the longer and shorter stories both helps and hurts the series . . . the moodiness works in the short tales because they float along as pure impressionism, a glimpse into what it's like to live in a place that's seriously weird but smart enough not to stick around too long before you start asking for a slightly meatier plot. In the longer stories the plot does at times seem almost secondary but there's generally identifiable aims and actual characters even if they are being filtered through a warped sensibility. It seems very often that Harrison very rarely gives concrete descriptions of Viriconium as a city and as such it seems to exist more in a dream-state, a nebulous and easily adapted location that can take on any shape the story needs. The fact that he's able to conjure a place that lives so strongly in the mind without having to lay it out in exacting detail speaks to the power of his prose (its telling that the opening paragraph of "Viriconium Knights", with its description of aristocrats whistling in the dark as they spend the night maneuvering to kill each other, stayed with me in the decade it took me to actually read the book after buying it . . . its as strong a first impression as Peake's description of the people who clean the walls in Castle Gormenghast) . . . he's one of those writers that seems to give a lot of thought to the weight of every word and how it fulfills the construction of the scene. It verges on the overwritten at times but again, I think it depends on your tolerance.
What makes the stories easier to understand when read in sequence is that there seems to be a gradual stripping back of the initial concept so that everything about it gets hazier and more nebulous as the stories pile on, depicting a city that seems to be receding into dreams and myth, where the vague heroics of the early stories are hardly even memories by the end and people are more concerned with getting by in a city that doesn't even seem to have a fair recollection of itself. It reminds me to some extent what Moorcock did to Jerry Cornelius in the original quartet, criticizing genre conceits by bringing forward the realistic elements and pointing out how odd it must seem. Harrison seems to be doing the opposite, giving us a world where the fantasy stuff is the actual fantasy but the world itself is the same even when the concerns are different. Its asks "Wouldn't it be strange to live here?" And yeah, it is. Boy howdy, is it.
It's been said that a lot of people who eventually followed the stories were kind of tricked by the first novel "The Pastel City" since it comes across as nearly a standard fantasy novel at first glance, albeit with a very ornate style of prose. On the surface its the standard story of heroes gathering and getting involved in a war between two queens for the city Viriconium, where a former warrior who has retired has to come out of retired and regather the party to save his city. It doesn't take too long before things start to get weird (the first appearance of the geteit chemosit comes straight out of left field and even that doesn't prepare you for what they're actually doing) and even when Harrison is being straightforward there's a blurry off-kilter sensibility to the proceedings that comes across like the description of someone else's opium laced dream.
"A Storm of Wings" takes things in an even stranger direction. It brings back most of the same characters from the previous novel but there's a more despairing and ruined feel to events this time out, a sense that Harrison is playing at more than telling a story and attempting to tap into a very eerie sense of Otherness. To say this kind of thing isn't for everyone is understating the case slightly and he does his best to push most of the stuff that would have turned off readers the first time around well past what the general fantasy reader might find tolerable . . . the prose fashions itself into a precise machine for icy metaphors, achieving a rhythm that seems almost unearthly in how elegantly exact it is, while in the meantime the plot goes six steps past "linear" until its pretty clear the plot is the least of the story's concerns as all the themes the story is wrestling with are the "real" plot. Its not an easy read, I enjoyed being immersed in the unrelenting strangeness but because of that strangeness (mixed with the prose) sometimes you feel at a remove from the story itself. As a writerly exercise in creating a world both recognizable and completely alien, it succeeds but it may take more than one read to be really in tune with what he's trying to say.
"In Viriconium" dispenses with conventional fantasy entirely and if people hadn't already deduced that Harrison was using his series to deconstruct both fantasy and itself, this is where it becomes more obvious. It maintains the same doomed feel, as an aging artist slowly dies in a portion of the city that's become a plague zone while her friend (another artist) tries to put together a plan to get her out, which becomes a series of plans that pretty much all fail. The vaguely heroic characters from the earlier novels are all gone and in place are people called things like "The Grand Cairo", a cross between a dwarf and a crimelord and who seems inordinately vexed by the Barley brothers, a pair that seems like a very warped take on the Katzenjammer Kids. If all of this comes across as incredibly metaphorical and symbolic you aren't far off course and its another one where the real plot seems to be happening somewhere else, or under the skin of the tale. So , yes,you're in Everything Means More Than One Thing territory but what Harrison excels at here is the depiction of artists living in a city where nothing seems to matter, and the paralyzing sense that something has gone wrong somewhere but they're unable to explain it or figure out how to combat it. Or if they even want to. By the time you reach the end of it (and the short story "A Young Man's Guide to Viriconium") you're about as far as you can get from what you saw in "The Pastel City".
Interspersed with the novels are short stories that basically serve as further evidence for the progression of the city (or regression) from fantasy showcase to vaporous metaphor. Most of them feel somewhat plotless, sustaining themselves on mood and its the accumulated weight of the stories as they form that gradual change in the city that only really becomes apparent after you've read everything. On their own they work as surreal and tragic vignettes, sometimes supremely sad in their condensed telling in a way the novels don't always attain.
The whole sequence from beginning to end is fascinating and its one of the few fantasy works that probably gets deeper and richer with rereading. It sounded bizarre when I first heard about it years ago (and the cover to the UK Fantasy Masterworks edition, a painting called "The Gates of the Inferno" sums up the feel of the city as well as anything else I've ever seen) and after waiting over ten years for the chance to experience it, its exactly what I expected, which is to say I've never read anything like it. Singular and strange, with deeper aims than initial impressions might convey, it didn't always a hundred percent "click" with me but what parts did work masterfully. I feel like the work as a whole is Harrison's attempt to tap into the places where stories and myths are created, and not just channel those places but critique how we go about creating those tales, and what time does to them. What makes this series so unique for me is the sense that, unlike so many other fantasy series that try to convince us that fictional places are real, Harrison tries to explore how you can take a place that was once real and turn it into fiction.
Viriconium is a city but it might as well be a state of mind and what it really is are words on a series of pages that were originally published between 1971 and 1985 consisting of about three novels and a handful of short stories. Except for a few rare instances there are hardly any continuing characters, the city itself seems to be built entirely out of metaphor and at times it reaches "did I take drugs before I started reading this" levels of weird. If you're in the right mood, its actually kind of intoxicating but if you're not ready for it or try to read too much at once then you'll be begging for someone to unironically shout "Have at thee!" and denounce evil. Here, you have weird insect robots that steal brains and they're not even the main event. If at times you feel like you've entered some strange fantasy version of Grant Morrison's "Doom Patrol" you may not be that far off.
The big difference here is that Harrison is an excellent prose stylist who seems to be going out of his way to sustain the stories entirely on mood and atmosphere alone, which sometimes means that plot is a bit of a secondary concern. If you're on the same wavelength as this then you're going to be in for a rather unique experience and while you can probably read these and imagine a young China Mieville taking very, very careful notes, for me the acid test of whether you're going to find this intriguing or tedious depends on how you like Mervyn Peake's "Gormenghast", series, which is one of those perennial contenders for fictional places that feel more real than actual places that exist thanks to a barrage of pretty arresting imagery.
Harrison doesn't quite reach those heady heights but man, he sure does come close. Dipping into the city via the longer and shorter stories both helps and hurts the series . . . the moodiness works in the short tales because they float along as pure impressionism, a glimpse into what it's like to live in a place that's seriously weird but smart enough not to stick around too long before you start asking for a slightly meatier plot. In the longer stories the plot does at times seem almost secondary but there's generally identifiable aims and actual characters even if they are being filtered through a warped sensibility. It seems very often that Harrison very rarely gives concrete descriptions of Viriconium as a city and as such it seems to exist more in a dream-state, a nebulous and easily adapted location that can take on any shape the story needs. The fact that he's able to conjure a place that lives so strongly in the mind without having to lay it out in exacting detail speaks to the power of his prose (its telling that the opening paragraph of "Viriconium Knights", with its description of aristocrats whistling in the dark as they spend the night maneuvering to kill each other, stayed with me in the decade it took me to actually read the book after buying it . . . its as strong a first impression as Peake's description of the people who clean the walls in Castle Gormenghast) . . . he's one of those writers that seems to give a lot of thought to the weight of every word and how it fulfills the construction of the scene. It verges on the overwritten at times but again, I think it depends on your tolerance.
What makes the stories easier to understand when read in sequence is that there seems to be a gradual stripping back of the initial concept so that everything about it gets hazier and more nebulous as the stories pile on, depicting a city that seems to be receding into dreams and myth, where the vague heroics of the early stories are hardly even memories by the end and people are more concerned with getting by in a city that doesn't even seem to have a fair recollection of itself. It reminds me to some extent what Moorcock did to Jerry Cornelius in the original quartet, criticizing genre conceits by bringing forward the realistic elements and pointing out how odd it must seem. Harrison seems to be doing the opposite, giving us a world where the fantasy stuff is the actual fantasy but the world itself is the same even when the concerns are different. Its asks "Wouldn't it be strange to live here?" And yeah, it is. Boy howdy, is it.
It's been said that a lot of people who eventually followed the stories were kind of tricked by the first novel "The Pastel City" since it comes across as nearly a standard fantasy novel at first glance, albeit with a very ornate style of prose. On the surface its the standard story of heroes gathering and getting involved in a war between two queens for the city Viriconium, where a former warrior who has retired has to come out of retired and regather the party to save his city. It doesn't take too long before things start to get weird (the first appearance of the geteit chemosit comes straight out of left field and even that doesn't prepare you for what they're actually doing) and even when Harrison is being straightforward there's a blurry off-kilter sensibility to the proceedings that comes across like the description of someone else's opium laced dream.
"A Storm of Wings" takes things in an even stranger direction. It brings back most of the same characters from the previous novel but there's a more despairing and ruined feel to events this time out, a sense that Harrison is playing at more than telling a story and attempting to tap into a very eerie sense of Otherness. To say this kind of thing isn't for everyone is understating the case slightly and he does his best to push most of the stuff that would have turned off readers the first time around well past what the general fantasy reader might find tolerable . . . the prose fashions itself into a precise machine for icy metaphors, achieving a rhythm that seems almost unearthly in how elegantly exact it is, while in the meantime the plot goes six steps past "linear" until its pretty clear the plot is the least of the story's concerns as all the themes the story is wrestling with are the "real" plot. Its not an easy read, I enjoyed being immersed in the unrelenting strangeness but because of that strangeness (mixed with the prose) sometimes you feel at a remove from the story itself. As a writerly exercise in creating a world both recognizable and completely alien, it succeeds but it may take more than one read to be really in tune with what he's trying to say.
"In Viriconium" dispenses with conventional fantasy entirely and if people hadn't already deduced that Harrison was using his series to deconstruct both fantasy and itself, this is where it becomes more obvious. It maintains the same doomed feel, as an aging artist slowly dies in a portion of the city that's become a plague zone while her friend (another artist) tries to put together a plan to get her out, which becomes a series of plans that pretty much all fail. The vaguely heroic characters from the earlier novels are all gone and in place are people called things like "The Grand Cairo", a cross between a dwarf and a crimelord and who seems inordinately vexed by the Barley brothers, a pair that seems like a very warped take on the Katzenjammer Kids. If all of this comes across as incredibly metaphorical and symbolic you aren't far off course and its another one where the real plot seems to be happening somewhere else, or under the skin of the tale. So , yes,you're in Everything Means More Than One Thing territory but what Harrison excels at here is the depiction of artists living in a city where nothing seems to matter, and the paralyzing sense that something has gone wrong somewhere but they're unable to explain it or figure out how to combat it. Or if they even want to. By the time you reach the end of it (and the short story "A Young Man's Guide to Viriconium") you're about as far as you can get from what you saw in "The Pastel City".
Interspersed with the novels are short stories that basically serve as further evidence for the progression of the city (or regression) from fantasy showcase to vaporous metaphor. Most of them feel somewhat plotless, sustaining themselves on mood and its the accumulated weight of the stories as they form that gradual change in the city that only really becomes apparent after you've read everything. On their own they work as surreal and tragic vignettes, sometimes supremely sad in their condensed telling in a way the novels don't always attain.
The whole sequence from beginning to end is fascinating and its one of the few fantasy works that probably gets deeper and richer with rereading. It sounded bizarre when I first heard about it years ago (and the cover to the UK Fantasy Masterworks edition, a painting called "The Gates of the Inferno" sums up the feel of the city as well as anything else I've ever seen) and after waiting over ten years for the chance to experience it, its exactly what I expected, which is to say I've never read anything like it. Singular and strange, with deeper aims than initial impressions might convey, it didn't always a hundred percent "click" with me but what parts did work masterfully. I feel like the work as a whole is Harrison's attempt to tap into the places where stories and myths are created, and not just channel those places but critique how we go about creating those tales, and what time does to them. What makes this series so unique for me is the sense that, unlike so many other fantasy series that try to convince us that fictional places are real, Harrison tries to explore how you can take a place that was once real and turn it into fiction.
October 21, 2022
Tak tohle se mi líbilo moc, tomu říkám opravdový "weird". Konečně vím, kde se vzala v hlavě Chiny Miévilla představa Nového Krobuzonu a v kterém světě stojí Gormenghast.
Název trošku mate, nejde jen o jeden román, je to hned několik příběhů, z nichž každý je jiný a trochu jinak napsaný, dějí se v různých časech a mění se průběžně i samotné Viriconium. Spolu ale dávají jednotlivé části dohromady fascinující obraz dožívajícího světa a jeho více či méně bizarních obyvatel. Jsou tu básníci a šermíři, soupeřící královny, vraždící trpaslíci, záhadné a mocné stroje a zbraně ze zapomenuté minulosti lidstva i invaze z vesmíru. Nečte se to úplně lehce, svět Viriconia je tak starý a ošoupaný, že realita sama nedrží pohromadě. Příčina nemusí předcházet důsledku, a to, co bylo pravdou včera, dneska už nemusí platit. Kdo má rád knížky z laserovské edice "New weird", je tady jasná cílová skupina. A ti ostatní by to měli taky zkusit, je to originální a jiné, a navíc momentálně v Levných knihách za pár korun :)
Název trošku mate, nejde jen o jeden román, je to hned několik příběhů, z nichž každý je jiný a trochu jinak napsaný, dějí se v různých časech a mění se průběžně i samotné Viriconium. Spolu ale dávají jednotlivé části dohromady fascinující obraz dožívajícího světa a jeho více či méně bizarních obyvatel. Jsou tu básníci a šermíři, soupeřící královny, vraždící trpaslíci, záhadné a mocné stroje a zbraně ze zapomenuté minulosti lidstva i invaze z vesmíru. Nečte se to úplně lehce, svět Viriconia je tak starý a ošoupaný, že realita sama nedrží pohromadě. Příčina nemusí předcházet důsledku, a to, co bylo pravdou včera, dneska už nemusí platit. Kdo má rád knížky z laserovské edice "New weird", je tady jasná cílová skupina. A ti ostatní by to měli taky zkusit, je to originální a jiné, a navíc momentálně v Levných knihách za pár korun :)
February 26, 2018
Each sentient species perceives the thin evidence of this state in a different way, generating out of this perception its physical and metaphysical Umwelt: its little bubble or envelope of ‘reality.� These perceptual systems are hermetic and admit of no alternative. They are the product of a particular set of sense organs, evolutionary beginnings, and planetary origins. If the cat were to define the world, he would exclude the world of the housefly in his mouth. Each species has its fiction, and that fiction is to all intents and purposes real; and the actual thin substance of the universe becomes more and more debatable, oneiric, hard to achieve, like the white figures that will not focus at the edge of vision. . . .
February 6, 2025
Not really my cup of tea, and mostly I wasn't able to pay attention for such a long time. A clear case of: it's me, not you.
Non è proprio il mio genere ed inoltre non sono stata in grado di prestare attenzione per così lungo tempo. Un chiaro caso di: non sei tu, sono io.
Non è proprio il mio genere ed inoltre non sono stata in grado di prestare attenzione per così lungo tempo. Un chiaro caso di: non sei tu, sono io.
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