Customer Reviews

Viriconium

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!

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.

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~]

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 The Lord of the Rings 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.

Based upon the descriptions and reviews of Harrison's 'Viriconium' stories, I bought this book and eagerly anticipated reading it. But after reading the first long story, 'The Pastel City,' which was quite good, my appreciation for the book began to take a nose dive as I ploughed into 'A Storm of Wings.' Skipping further ahead to the short stories didn't help much, either. 'Viriconium Knights', for example, was perhaps the most pointless story I have ever come across in over 40 years of reading fantasy and sci-fi.

The man without doubt has the ability to write, and considerable talent with language, but his dreary, pointless, and non-linear scribblings just ended up boring the life out of me. I was never so glad to put a book down.

That's my personal opinion, for what it's worth. Needless to say, I respect the opinions of those who love these works, but evidently don't share their tastes.

Because this volume includes multiple novellas and short stories, I am including several individual reviews as opposed to considering this to be one `work.'

`The Pastel City'
An interesting take on the feudal-future genre, where our destructive tendencies seem to have rolled back the clock on technological advancements to the point where a sword, a horse, and some honor are the key assets for any legitimate future hero. The story is very short and some of the characters are poorly drawn (Grif is angry, the Queen is beautiful, but neither are anything else). It seems more like an experiment wrapped around a single adventure, as if it was part of a serialized work rather than a stand-alone piece. However, you have to consider this book in the context of its writing - 1971. Considering competing Sci-Fi works at the time, this novella is absolutely ground-breaking in many respects.

For starters, the prose is absolutely beautiful. You can't call something `stylized' if it establishes a new style, but suffice it to say China Mieville seems much less original after reading this. The lines are almost lyrical, dredging up words for the perfect moment.

I love the beginning and the end. The beginning reads almost like the intro to Star Wars - an efficient capture of a broad sweep of an imagined history. It is if you are squeezing the focus on an iPhone to a very specific portion (the story) and sweeping out again to see the whole thing for what it is. Both the beginning and the end give you a sense of the futility of single events...


`Storm of Wings'
In a rare example of clear Viriconium chronology, this story involves some of the same characters in a very sequential pattern to `Pastel City.' Again, we see some of Harrison's ideas (people with insect heads and others with forced masks) find their way into Mieville's work, especially Perdido Street Station. Harrison's ability to capture a defeatist mood is unbelievable - it is as if you do not care if humanity is destroyed because it seems inevitable, and these are the same feelings as the characters must have. Combined with the general sentiment of the prior novella (futility of single events), we see a theme emerging - everything is drawing to a close and there is very little you can do about it.

Once again, the prose outweighs the story. In this instance, the lucid recollections of Cellur serve as a better narrative device than the narrative itself (similar to the beginning and end of Pastel City).

The end is a cop-out. The metaphysical ramifications are dubious at best (competing realities manifesting themselves in physical mutations in a single reality) and ridiculous at worst. The idea that the world-destroying competition will stop because the invaders are dying, and that their progeny can be destroyed by flying a blimp into a fat man is almost insulting. I liked this idea better the first time I read it...in 1898's War of the Worlds.

`In Viriconium'
Extraordinarily boring. I am not sure Viriconium is the best setting for an unrequited love story. When Harrison sets this type of story in his favorite city, it is a little like the Coach playing his son at Quarterback - not disastrous, but not the best use of resources either.

The Short Stories
These feel like a writing lab more than anything cohesive or interesting. I enjoyed the self-reflective destiny in `The Lamia & Lord Cromis' but that is about it.

'Introduction'
By far the worst piece in the entire book - Neil Gaiman should have his writing privileges revoked after this travesty! Harrison's prose is literally and consistently so good that the intro serves to cheapen it without any level of exposition. It smacks of pretention - ars gratis ars. Gaiman doesn't explain why the work is so good, only that it is good and implies if you don't get it then you are unreachable. Awful.

For the most part, I very greatly enjoyed reading Viriconium. On its surface, it is a collection of short stories that all take place in and around the same setting. Really, though, I think it is a single story, which needs to be told from a variety of vantage points in order to be told at all. The concept is great. The first story is one of the best short sf/fantasy stories I have ever read. From there, the book gets progressively stranger. Normally, this is something I like, but in a few places it seems to ramble. Some of the middle stories end without anything particularly interesting happening.

However, Harrison's skill as a writer kept things going for me. It is a pure joy to read the words he writes, even in the cases where the story they are conveying isn't as interesting as I would like. Don't get me wrong... most of the book is not like that, but even where it is, it is quite readable.

I loved this book, even though it disturbed the hell out of me. The world Harrison's created is the nasty hangover from an incomprehensibly advanced civilization that destroyed itself long ago, and subsists on the indecipherable (but still working) bits of technology that remain. It's the saddest portrait of a world I've ever read. And as one reads further and further through these stories, a profound sense of unreality begins to take hold: not only does the world continue to decay, but the very fabric of reality seems to unravel and, in some ways, rearrange itself. Granted, it's not the most exciting book in the traditional action/adventure sense -- no raygun-toting spacemen rescuing hot alien chicks here -- but the prose is truly elegant and the point of view something unique.

The phrase 'a writer's writer' is often trite and overused. But this is the only accurate and concise description that can be applied to M. John Harrison and his work. You're here trying to decide if this book is worth your time and money, and so you'll read a mixture of reviews to make that determination.

Be warned that readers either hate "Viriconium" or love it.

You'll be reminded by several other reviewers that the ones who hate it seem to suffer from a number of misspellings in their posts, and you'll discover that the ones who love it write passionately, carefully, thoughtfully, and correctly.

If you love Harry Potter, don't buy this book. (I read one Potter book and that was enough.) If you love David Eddings or Terry Brooks or loved the Lord of the Rings movies but couldn't stand reading the actual trilogy, don't buy this book. If you are dissatisfied with ambiguity, put off by anything other than a linear sentence or story line, or dislike passages you have to slowly digest to appreciate, don't buy this book.

If you love (or even know the work of) Mervyn Peake and his Gormenghast trilogy, this is the book for you. It will make you cry, in fact, because the second novella, "A Storm of Wings," rings with the same sort of rich language, baroque details, and intensely dreamy and slow-moving quality that characterizes Peake's writer's voice in "Titus Groan" and "Gormenghast." It's almost as if Peake himself penned the passages, and I can't think of another novelist past or present who even comes close to this accomplishment.

The book is deceiving. "The Pastel City," the first novel, is good, but I wasn't deeply moved. This is the book most accepted by the broader general audience. The second novel, "A Storm of Wings," will either break your heart or leave you cold. It is lyrical, brilliant, intense, and probably too dense for over 90% of today's readers. If you love language and are a writer yourself, you will understand and appreciate the greatness demonstrated within its pages.

The novel that truly cracks open the perfect literary egg that is Viriconium is "In Viriconium." Read the other reviews to find out the synopsis of this and the other novels. But rest assured that this is the one that will make you fall in love with the city if you haven't already. "In Viriconium" gives the reader a sense of place and firmly establishes the haunting beauty of this city at the end of time.

This book brings to mind a cup of tea I had earlier today - a new offering I sampled at my neighborhood coffee shop, produced by Kusmi Tea. It was called Samovar and it was smoky and intense, much like drinking woodsmoke and fire deep in a damp forest. Not everyone's cup of tea, but I was glad of the experience - the break from the ordinary. Like the tea, Viriconium is far from ordinary. But if you have a taste for its darkness and depth, you'll enjoy every single step of this journey into a strange and brave new world.

Other than an ancient copy of The Pastel City my library lacks any of M. John Harrison's works. Not out of any question of like or dislike, but out of the simple fact that he is not a prolific writer, and gets little exposure on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. Recently I purchased a copy of Light for future reading, and pickup up this collection of the tales and stories of Viriconium in an effort to 'catch up.'

The contents are the three longer Viriconium stories (The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, and In Viriconium) plus the range of shorter tales that surround these, often providing a peculiar form of continuity, where a story is the introduction to its predecessor. Time, for Viriconium, perched somehow at the far end of a degenerating world, is worn so thin that characters seem to wander from stage to stage almost as if they were themes rather than personalities. The flow of events is something of Gordian knot, inviting the reader to remain focused on the moment or only read the works a slice at a time.

At the tale of Viriconium progresses you will find a number of haunting similarities to the New Crobuzon of Mieville's Perdido Street Station, which was clearly influenced byHarrison's work. In addition there are dashes of Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance, and even Mary Gentle. The city is set at the end of civilization, where the elements of technology are mostly forgotten only to make appearances with unnerving effect.

Whether a queen defends her city against a false claimant, or hordes of insectoid creatures descend from the moon, or a plague threatens to make art extinct, Harrison writess with a sharp and detailed pen. He has a knack for detailed description, humorous names, and grotesque situations, with plenty of sarcasm and irony mixed in. He is a writer's writer, very sensitive to language choices and less committed to the action of a plot. Certainly worthwhile reading for a fantasy buff, and this inexpensive volume is a great way to find out what he is about.