Viriconium (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

First, I should say that this book - actually, three novels and a number of short stories - is an excellent read. Secondly, it isn't exactly what you might expect from the Amazon blurb - the text about the murderous nightly games in Viriconium. That comes from the start of the first story in the volume, "Viriconium (K)nights". It suggests that these are stories of of no-holds-barred rivalry between picturesque factions of killers - you know, intrigue, fights, twists of fate, betrayal, all seething beneath the surface of the city.

Actually, it's not like that, it's much better.

At the surface level, the world of Viriconium is apparently our world tens of thousands of years in the future. Industrial civilization has risen and fallen, leaving its name (which nobody can read) in the stars - and a poisoned and depleted world, where people survive as best they can, scavenging from the past and nursing bits of decaying technology. The geography is vague (no hand drawn maps!) and all identifiable landmarks have gone, apart from the names of some (real) places and features (Dunham Massey; Rannoch Moor; Lymm) and (especially) Viriconium street names: it's fun spotting the literary or geographical allusions).

The first two novels (`Pastel City' and `Storm of Wings') explore the consequences of this and develop the idea in a number of ways, some subtle, some gross. While haunting in their atmosphere and very inventive, they are fairly conventional. Perhaps significantly, much of the action takes place far from Viriconium.

The short stories apparently fit between the novels and take a more personal, close up look at the lives of characters in this extraordinary world. They are much stranger, and focussed mainly on Viriconium, as is the last novel (`In Viriconium') Don't try to work out exactly what order these stories go in because it's just not like that. The same characters appear in what can only, I think, be accounted for as alternate versions of the same worlds. Characters who are heroes in one story show up as decidedly shabby in another. Even the names shift (so, Uroconium rather than Viriconium).

And what's going on with the repeated scenes? Events in one book are echoed, in a different context, elsewhere. For example, the encounter with St Elmo Buffin and his experimental telescope in "Storm of Wings" and a similar scene with Emmet Buffo in "In Viriconium" - similar down to the unsatisfactory snack of fish given to the visitors. Or the descriptions of the Mosaic Lane baths in "Lord Cromis and the Lamia" and in "A Young man's Journey...". Then there is the repeated theme of folk ritual - often involving dancers dressed as animals or with animal heads.

I'm not sure exactly what is happening here, but for me, the way the various stories intersect, reinforce and contradict one another recalls a mythology, or a body of folk tales, rather than a single narrative. It's as if the whole thing has grown up rather than being written, or the stories have been reconstructed from earlier versions, from underlying texts.

At the end, a link emerges between Viriconium and our own time. Its nature is enigmatic, though, and as with much else, we are left to wonder exactly what it means.

As other reviewers have pointed out this is a bleak world, a chilly place, an Earth almost wound down. But it is far from depressing. The short stories in particular portray a world of intense cultural creativity - they mostly revolve around dancers, musicians, poets and artists. And the description of the city is captivating and real - convincing not so much because of what is said but because of what isn't. You would only leave out so much - or allow so much contradiction - if you were describing a real place, wouldn't you? It must be true, or it would look more perfect.

Really, really worth a go.

In the first two books of this series, Harrison was attempting to write commercial fantasy somewhat at odds with his own talents and interests, more or less, as someone says, in the Moorcock mode. By the time he came to write In Viriconium and Viriconium Nights he had learned effectively that there was no point in his trying to write commercial fantasy because the fantasy he wrote wasn't commercial. I knew him slightly in Manchester, when he was writing in the basement of Savoy Books, who were essentially his patrons and great enthusiasts, who gave him the time and money to write In Viriconium, which they originally intended to publish but went bankrupt before they could do so. By freeing Harrison from the commercial restraints of the genre, Savoy allowed him to come into his own and produce the second two books in this volume, which in a sense are best read first, because this is invented-world fantasy about as far as you can take it and still have it bear any resemblance to the genre (upon which it comments so successfully). Harrison is not an under-rated writer, he is an under-published writer, and it is wonderful to see his work at last getting the status, respect and admiration it deserves. Jack Connolly.

I have spent the last ten years desperately scouring second-hand bookstores for a copy of In Viriconium. While the first two novels in this volume initially seem to be little than above standard Moorcock, it is the third novel In Viriconium which completely and equivocably establishes Harrison's status as fantastist par excellence. A sublime and grotesque sensibility coupled with a deep and humane insight into matters of the heart. These themes are carried through in his later works like Climbers and Signs of Life. M. John Harrison is one of fantasy's supreme stylists, his language is elegaic and full of phrases that insinuate themselves in your mind like half-remembered dreams. He has achieved for fantasy in serious literature what J.G. Ballard achieved for science fiction: proof that writers of genuine merit and talent can begin in what seems like generic ghettos of fiction and create works whose depth and power is as important as any A.S. Byatt or Kazuo Ishiguro.