Viriconium {complete}

This book started out slow. It was hard to get into. Once I realized it was different stories and short stories then I really started to enjoy it. I ended up really liking this book and the strange and interesting world of Viriconium. ( )

An absolutely intriguing entry in the Fantasy Masterworks series. Complex and subtle, Harrison's narrative has the same shifting layers as his fictional city of Viriconium. The prose is elegant, almost ethereal, but as the subject is basically the decomposing corpse that is the city, there's a pervasive sense of decline and even degradation. In some senses, the narrative style reminds me of Moorcock, but Harrison is much more interested in the dirty underbelly of things; perhaps Mervyn Peake is a better comparison? At any rate, this wasn't an easy or pleasant read, but ultimately it was a very rewarding one. ( )

Despite winning multiple awards in a variety of genres and receiving lavish praise from critics and fellow authors, M. John Harrison is an author who divides opinion in a way few others do. While it may well be an exaggeration to say that a majority of fantasy readers are hostile towards him - in truth, the overwhelming majority of fantasy readers have probably never heard of him, let alone read anything by him - it is certainly true for a vocal minority, many of whom treat him with the same derision that is usually reserved for authors of gory epic-fantasy-with-a-message like Terry Goodkind and Robert Newcomb.

It was with this background in mind that I approached Viriconium, an omnibus edition of all his novels and many of his short stories in the fantasy sequence about the mythical city of the same name. Though 'about' is, thinking about it, precisely the wrong word to use. While the second of the three novels (A Storm Of Wings) is a more-or-less direct sequel to the first (The Pastel City), the final novel and all of the short stories are not so much unrelated to the events described in the previous two works as they are directly contradictory of them.

From story to story, the names of characters, places and even the city itself mutate wildly; characters die and are reborn with new personalities; events that took place hundreds of years apart in one work occur side by side in another. There is, simply, no attempt to describe a consistent place that the stories can be said to be 'about'. As Harrison himself puts it in his own essay "What It Might Be Like To Live In Viriconium": 'Viriconium is never the same place twice. That is because—like Middle-Earth—it is not a place ... Like all books, Viriconium is just some words. There is no place, no society, no dependable furniture to “make real.” You can’t read it for that stuff, so you have to read it for everything else.'.

While I can't claim to have understood even close to all of the 'everything else' that's on display here, I'm certainly very glad to have read the collection. The Pastel City is a rather rougher work than the two later novels (reading at times more like a parody or pastiche of a '30s pulp fantasy story than the 'unashamed postmodern fiction of the heart' Harrison describes the sequence as it that same essay), and a couple of the short stories are basically forgettable, yet the bulk of the omnibus is extremely well written. Despite the fact that much of it went over my head (though I did, at least, pick up on the more obvious references to T. S. Eliot's epic poem 'The Waste Land') I definitely had the sense that there was something there to discover, and I'd be interested in reading it all again in a few years and perhaps making more of an effort to get to grips with that.

Would I recommend this work to anybody else? Well, two simple tests suggest themselves: first, if you read the essay I link to above and were more intrigued than irritated by it, you might want to try the omnibus to see how well Harrison manages to execute the ideas he describes in that. Second, if you've read and appreciated any of the 'New Weird' authors - particularly China Mieville, K. J. Bishop and Steph Swainston - and wondered what earlier work inspired them, you're unlikely to find better places to look than this. In A Storm Of Wings especially I noticed many elements I recalled from Swainston's debut The Year Of Our War, while the final novel In Viriconium reminded me strongly of the second half of Bishop's The Etched City.

But if you're still wondering what anybody could possibly find objectionable about the work of Robert Newcomb, this might not be the book for you.

Viriconium is an omnibus edition of the three short novels and most of the short stories set in Harrison's Viriconium universe. This is a far future universe, in which mankind has done great things and gone to the stars, only to see civilization collapse and knowledge lost. What is left of mankind lives a low tech life on the one remaining continent not so polluted so as to kill you immediately, digging up "magical" items left behind by the earlier civilizations. In concept, it has a fair amount in common with Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, but the execution is totally different. These stories are actually much more along the lines of China Mieville, with a healthy dose of Mervyn Peake and perhaps a hint of Dostoevsky. In fact, I'd highly recommend the Viriconium stories to Mieville fans, and I know we have quite a few of them here.

Harrison is an impressive word-smith. I repeatedly found myself re-reading paragraphs two or three times, partly to enjoy the mesmerizing use of language, and partly to try to figure out what the hell is going on. I can't remember the last time I read an author who used so convincingly used so many words I didn't know (you might want to have a dictionary handy when you tackle these). So despite the short page count, don't expect these stories to be quick reads.

The stories are generally much more about mood and character and emotion than about plot. I suppose that's why they are short; Harrison certainly could have easily drawn the novels out to three hundred pages of story if that had been the kind of book he wanted to write. They are full of ambiguity and symbolism and irony. Many of them are about quests that fail. Characterization is effective but unconventional--frequently we learn about our protagonists through their fears and failures and unfulfilled desires. In the world of Viriconium characters are more than individuals; they represent archetypes that appear again and again, sometimes as heroes, other times as villains (and rarely with a happy ending). Indeed there is a strong suggestion that these are not all tales from a single history, but rather a series of alternate future realities. ( )

A collection of three novellas and seven short stories revolving around the city of Viriconium. Man's culture has already peaked and is in decline; Afternoon has given way to Twilight. Harrison's lyrical style gives the write sort of feel to this dying world and its various artists and bravos trying to hang on to what they can. The stories connect and contradict in surprising ways, calling attention to their own status as myths of a dead city; later stories seem to dispense with plot altogether, perhaps echoing the city's lack of a future. Fascinating collection. ( )