In Viriconium (1982)

Holy bejeezus. In the early 70s, M John Harrison invented Steampunk and everything else. This book is all the more brilliant for no one's knowing what on earth it is. If you like China Miéville, Jeff Noon, etc. Harrison did it 30 years ago. ( )

This book was curiously hard to engage with. The main characters, ranging from merely eccentric to seriously dysfunctional, are a collection of ageing artists and their patrons and masters. The privileged watch, with barely sustained interest, from the upper city as the lower quarters succumb to some sort of plague. This is manifested as a kind of enervation or decay, but it affects the surroundings as much as the inhabitants, who, but for the key characters, are scarcely glimpsed during the novel. The cityscape is never really described (a reviewer quoted on the cover perceptively says that it appears as though viewed through a crystal ball); it exists only as a vague impression of streets, steps, and decrepit buildings. The upper city is such a threadbare place that the supposed plague almost seems to have overwhelmed it already. (Perhaps that is part of the author's intention.) The interaction of the characters feels as though it is supposed to carry some sort of metaphorical significance, but it never seems to be clearly enough set out to be interpretable. The main thread of the plot is the attempted rescue of a consumptive lower-city artist by the central character, but it is not entirely clear why he and his accomplices should don grotesque masks for this venture. There are one or two other striking scenes, such as that of the dead madman in his ruined observatory, but on the whole I found the book rather baffling. It reads rather as though a novel by Philip K. Dick or Stanislaw Lem has been edited to remove all the science fiction elements.

MB 2-xi-2009 ( )

A copy signed "for Martyn" by MJH. Presumably Martyn grew out of his enthusiasms for SF later in life.