Stuart's Reviews > Viriconium

Viriconium: A baroque, decaying, phantasmagoric dream city
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
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.