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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ancient city layered with time and eclectic civilizations,
By
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This review is from: Viriconium (Paperback)
Beginning in 1971 with The Pastel City and culminating in 1985 with Viriconium Nights, M. John Harrison created a mystical world that is literally weighted down with the relics of ancient civilizations, one empire on top of another. Now, Harrison's three major works, The Pastel City, A Storm Of Wings, and In Viriconium are brought together in one book, along with the 1985 collection Viriconium Nights.
In The Pastel City, the background of the Afternoon Cultures of Viriconium is laid down, and we are brought into the Evening Cultures beginning with the hero Methven Nian. Sensing a Dark Age, Methven put together the Order of Methven to fight against the wild Northern Tribes. Methven's brother, Methvel, married a northern princess and had a daughter named Canna Moidart. Methven himself had a daughter named Methvet, otherwise known as Queen Jane. When Methvel and Methven die, Moidart and Jane are pitted against each other in the War of Two Queens. Jane recruits the help of the remaining Order of Methven, including Tomb The Dwarf, Birkin Grif, and swordsman teagus-Cromis (my favorite character). Using resurrected machines and magicks from the Afternoon Cultures that were dug up from the Rust Desert and revitalized, Tomb and Cellur the Bird Lord find a way to resurrect warriors from the Afternoon Cultures called The Reborn. The Pastel City is the most lucid of the stories in Viriconium. A Storm Of Wings introduces Galen Hornwrack, a dispossessed lordling who has long lived as an assassin and thief in the Low City. The Sign Of The Locust clouds Viriconium, so Queen Jane accepts the help of Tomb The Dwarf, Galen Hornwrack, Cellur, and Alstath Fulthor, Lord of The Reborn. Hovering over them is the projected image of Benedict Paucemanly, suspended for one hundred years on the dark side of the moon. 'Storm' is a much slower story, a little too dreamy and surreal when compared to Pastel City. It was hard to separate the character's fugues from what was really happening to them. In Viriconium is a beautiful tale of two artists in Viriconium, Audsley King who is dying of plague in the Low City and Ashlyme, a portrait painter living in the High City. Vying for police power over the spreading plague-areas is the dwarf called the Grand Cairo, and The Barley Brothers, strange godlike-men who romp and play rudely through the streets. Ashlyme wants nothing more than to save Audsley King from her illness by bringing her to the High City, but somehow never manages to help her. Note: The ending is slightly different in this version than the 1985 version. 'In Viriconium' and 'Viriconium Nights' were both stories in the book 'Viriconium Nights' published in 1985. The rest of the tales from the original 'Viriconium Nights' are present except for 'Lamia Mutable' and 'Events Witnessed From A City'. Added to this collection are two (I believe) newer shorts, 'The Dancer From The Dance' and 'A Young Man's Journey To Viriconium'. In short, the rest of the stories are: 'The Lamia And Lord Cromis'. teagus-Cromis takes his swordsmanship into the wastelands, in search of the Lamia of the Sixth House. 'Viriconium Nights'. A young Ignace Retz learns what its like to defend Mammy Vooley's honor. 'The Luck In The Head'. A man named Crome is subject to dreams of a lamb, prompting a strange visit by a strange women who promises to ease his malaise. This story was also made into a graphic novel in 1991. 'Strange Great Sins' is a tale told by a Sin-Eater about his uncle's stay in Viriconium. 'Lords Of Misrule' is an intriguing tale told in first person by teagus-Cromis in his younger years, about a visit to one of the city's old Defenders. 'The Dancer From The Dance' tells the story of Vera Ghillera, a ballerina, and her trip into the odd Allman's Heath. 'A Young Man's Journey To Viriconium' is a nice finish to the book, a young man in our world trying to find his way to Viriconium. Harrison's beautiful, dreamlike prose conjures visions of that touch all five of the senses, lining your mouth and nose with the taste and smell of his fantasy world. I could hear the sucking swamps and the dry desert winds, and feel the cold mists. If you like China Mieville, K.J. Bishop, Jeff VanderMeer, Philip Dick, or Neil Gaiman, you should like Harrison's world of Viriconium. Highly recommended, but not a light or easy read. Enjoy!
31 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the all-time classics,
By Lynn Walker "owlcroft" (Ritzville, WA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Viriconium (Paperback)
This is a long review because it is a review of four distinct long books, The Viriconium Cycle. And there is a marked and progressive set of changes as the reader moves through the four.
The first, The Pastel City, can be taken as an extraordinarily well-wrought specimen of that class of bittersweet science-fiction tales about what Harrison here calls "the Evening Cultures" of humankind--those that come late in the history of the world and the race, when both are old, confused, tired . . . The bitter derives from the pervasive atmosphere in such tales of ending, of the morning and afternoon of life as but memories, of the same rue and futility as those of the old who feel their lives underlived yet slipping away as they watch; the sweet comes from the fact of actual living, of the reality of those human lives whose owners' appetites and deeds participate meagerly if at all in the race's larger melancholy. In this first venture at Viriconium, Harrison gives us an adequate but not striking plot and a well-wrought but not unique setting; but he also gives us rich characterizations and, above all, superb, jewel-perfect prose. He captures elegantly the late-autumn mood of the world he imagines. His protagonists do the needful things, some surprises occur, the book comes to an end; this one comes to what might be called a conventional, almost a traditional "happy" ending, in that, for all the pain and losses, those who survive have hopes, and futures that may contain those hopes. By the second book--though it seems to proceed directly from the first, saving only a lapse of some decades--we have already a different form of book, one grown geometrically in many ways. The Pastel City, though almost poetic in tone, seems grounded in a readily discernible reality. In A Storm of Wings, we retain a connection to that particular far-future science-fictional reality, but an aura of surrealism has set in; as one character insightfully relates, "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 . . ." This Viriconium is well along the way to being what it will become in the later books. It is different in many ways. It is still the shell of the seat of a once-great empire of the Afternoon Cultures, but it has ceased to be some Flash-Gordon art-deco abstraction; it has gone from particularity to specificity, from a city to City, a curious amalgam of all the cities of humankind. It is a mythic Jerusalem, or Rome: The Eternal City. Its anchors to a definite place and time, clear enough in the first book, have stretched and weakened and curved. Now it is not really in any definite place in reality. Its problems have changed in like kind. The dangers of The Pastel City were tangible, comprehensible, things against which one takes arms. Now, the shadow descending on Viriconium is not a thing of any sort, it is an attitude, a feeling, a sensation--intangible, indefinite, yet terribly real. The tone, the atmosphere, is the stuffy, oppressive feeling that comes of a summer night when a thunderstorm is due and overdue, and the drenching downpour and thunder and lightning would be better than the miserable humid waiting. Perhaps the worst of it is that the danger is not external, outside and threatening to break in: it walks the streets of the City as the very citizens thereof. It is the Time of the Locust--and sanity itself is slowly and insidiously rotting away. Against this barely perceived threat, some few of the City must act, and they do. This--unlike The Pastel City--is not a tale in which much "happens" in the sense of dramatic action, despite the occasional clashes of swords (and the rare energy weapons). It is a tale of mind--of experiences, of perceptions, thoughts, philosophies; it is claustrophobia-inducing, grim, nihilistic. It is the next step in Harrison's evolution of Viriconium the concept. It is a rich book. Harrison now truly flexes his powers of prose-making; the book is well worth reading sheerly for the pleasures of the writing. But the book is not just an ecstasy of prose poetry. It has plot, plot far more subtle, complex, and original than the acceptable but pedestrian plot of the first book. Moreover, Harrison's portrayal of both setting and character, already impressive in that first book, here--like his prose--comes to a yet fuller flowering. And, needless to say, the book is also one of ideas--ideas that we, the readers, need to color in with our own experiences and understandings of life, for Harrison does not hand us thoughts, but rather provokes thought. In the end, there are revelations sufficient to transform the events of the book into a sequence to which one can assign tangible enough "explanations" that the reader who insists on missing the thrust of the tale and instead asking "But what was really happening?" can be satisfied; but this is the last time in the sequence that Harrison will so pander. The "reality" of the events in the tales, like their meaning, will henceforth be indeterminate, things for their readers to color in as may accord with their tastes and sensibilities. The sequence of change and growth in scope and power in the series proceeds geometrically. As A Storm of Wings was to The Pastel City, so The Floating Gods is to Storm. The Floating Gods is the story of Ashlyme the poet, if the confused and erratic events described can be called a "story." (Mind, they are confused and erratic by careful design, not by any failing, and in that they of course mimic life and the poor wretches who live it.) The Viriconium of The Floating Gods has no longer even the faint connection of its series predecessors to any time or place recognizable to us. The titular floating gods are a mystery, the place is become a curiously melted-down-and-run-together puddle of all cities and all times; the folk who populate the City are weak, ineffectual, like children playing at adult life without knowing the rules. All in all, by atmosphere, parallels, significances, allusions, and even a direct reference, we now cannot escape the sense of a close relation between this book at least--and most likely the very idea of Viriconium--and the poetry of T. S. Eliot, notably "The Hollow Men", which, not inappropriately for consideration of Viriconium the idea, famously concludes-- This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. Possibly even more germane is Eliot's masterpiece The Waste Land. Viriconium: Viriconium, of the Evening Cultures . . . . What can these hollow people make of their dry, dusty lives? That is what Harrison asks, and answers. But what his answer may be requires us, his readers, to color in his sketch for it to be complete. Harrison is not a facile moralist with mind-numbing homilies to offer; he offers life in raw, sometimes bleeding chunks, and you and I must digest it as we can. Although the "Viriconium" series is usually called "science fiction," that label clearly derives from the first two books. No one reading The Floating Gods can mistake it for anything but fantasy (a curious and perhaps unique mid-series transformation). Not that it matters: the point of speculative fiction--once called fantastic fiction--is to allow the author to throw light on the human condition in ways not easily accomplished in mainstream fiction. As Eliot's Waste Land drew its inspiration directly from Jesse Weston's interpretations of Arthurian legend, so in turn does The Floating Gods depend, in at least one crucial way, on an aspect of the Arthur cycle, the episode of the Fisher King (a source of inspiration to many fantasy writers, such as C. S. Lewis). To say much more would be a spoiler, but Harrison has interpreted the crux of that business in a simple yet profoundly insightful way that turns the entire tale, seemingly desultory till that revelation, near the end, into a tightly wound spring that then explosively powers its significance into the reader's consciousness. With the short stories that make up Viriconium Nights, Harrison takes us yet further into that curiously distorted and distorting version of the place that he described in the prefatory note to the previous volume; he repeats that note in this book, with small but perhaps significant changes. In these tales we see Viriconium as never the same place twice, even the name of the place changing, the very streets shifting from story to story, only a whisper of continuity--place names which seem familiar; characters we seem to have heard of before; the imperfect repetition of this or that significant event. These tales are those imperfect repetitions, sometimes of one another, sometimes of events in the previous books of the cycle. (The longest of these tales, the title-giving "In Viriconium," is a condensed and strangely variant replay of virtually the whole of The Floating Gods.) The significances of the specific and the particular repetitions we must each glean for ourselves. And that sums Harrison: we must glean, from his crystalline prose, such meanings as we each uniquely find.
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
the dreams of a madman,
By
This review is from: Viriconium (Paperback)
M. John Harrison is surely one of the lost masters of the fantasy genre, and this compendium will help bring his works to the fans who may not be aware of his important influence on the field. This book collects the three Viriconium mini-novels of the 1970s and 80s, plus a selection of short stories, all of which are interconnected and explore the wonders of the titular city. Harrison's true influential breakthrough was his dark surrealism and incredibly well-constructed backgrounds and settings, and anyone who has read today's masters of dark fantasy and baroque speculation, especially China Mieville, will notice the influence of Harrison immediately. Harrison also has remarkable skills with the English language, with surreal and moving prose that is a joy to read in itself. He obviously puts the utmost care into every sentence for maximum visceral effect and reader appreciation. As just two examples among thousands - "as the sun bled to death," or how the haunted city in the distance appeared as "a black dot on the vast featureless map of the end of the world."
Harrison's works are especially difficult to wrap one's mind around, but this may not always be the fault of the reader. While you are continually amazed by the depth and richness of the prose, the stories and characters seem remote and detached. The only installment that is truly accessible is the first Viriconium novel, "The Pastel City," which is deeper and more compelling than the standard fantasy quest that it appears to be on the surface. Unfortunately, the plots and characters fade into abstraction in the oppressively non-linear "A Storm of Wings" and the distractingly talky "In Viriconium." Meanwhile, the short stories are exploratory narratives that weave in and out of the storylines of the novels, and this is an impressive literary construction by Harrison, but with the downside of repetitiveness and discontinuity. In any case, adventurous and knowledgeable readers will truly appreciate Harrison's mastery of the fantasy form and his deep influence. But first and foremost he's a writer's writer. [~doomsdayer520~]
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