Viriconium

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.

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--i

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