I Read Books: Viriconium

 

Viriconium

A collection of M John Harrison’s Viriconium stories, consisting of three novels and several shorter works. In The Pastel City, the city of Viriconium is located in Earth’s future, living medieval lives amongst the remnants of the high technology and strange society of the Afternoon Cultures. A war breaks out with the Northmen, led by the cousin of the Queen of Viriconium. A group of heroes led by Lord tegeus-Cromis, who fancies himself a better poet than swordsman, come out of retirement to defend her. Cromis uses a sword, but there are also power-weapons (swords that cut through anything) airships, some power cannon, all capable of being used and – in extremis by his companion the dwarf Tomb – repaired and rebuilt, but not constructed.

But things go wrong, the army is defeated. Tegeus-Cromis was warned by a mechanical vulture that he ignored, but now with no other choice he and his companions follow it. The Northmen have resurrected weapons from the Afternoon Cultures, but those Cultures fell for a reason; by bringing back the weapons they have brought back the war. Flirting with science-fantasy, heroic fantasy and dying earth sub-genres, using all and becoming it’s own thing.

In A Storm Of Wings, eighty years later, Viriconium has exhausted itself despite the fresh influx of Resurrected Men at the end of The Pastel City. The Evening Culture seems to have fallen before it ever got started. This may not be entirely the fault of Viriconium, as strange things are going on in the North. The Sign Of The Locust, a cult, is not merely the attempt to come to terms with their own dissolution, but a reflection of an alien insectile race in the north.

An alien race has a different way of seeing the world, and this makes the world different, and in return changes the humans. None of the characters understand the problem, all of them are bound up in their own ideas, their own pasts, their own points of view. If the first book was an attempt to invigorate and make strange a heroic fantasy novel, this turns it around and asks questions a heroic fantasy cannot answer.

In Viriconium is set entirely in the city. A mysterious plague has struck the city (which may not, at this time be called Viriconium*). Artist Audsley King is dying, slowly, perhaps of the plague. Her friend Ashlynne, another artist, attempts to save her, but things go farcically wrong. He finds himself entwined with the plots of The Grand Cairo, another of the dwarfs of the setting, here the chief of the secret police charged with enforcing the plague laws – a quarantine that seems remarkably permeable. The Grand Cairo is more interested in a fortune teller who is the occasional companion of Audsley King than his actual job, and the Barley Brothers, two stereotypical yobs from out of twentieth century England, who may be part of the plague.

This mixes and matches ideas, the city divided between high and low, with poets, artists, ballet dancers as well as duellists fortune tellers and so forth. Each section has a fictional card as it’s opening. There’s some pre-Raphaelite ideas, mixed with enough strangeness in the pictures to be our future, dying, or maybe tired Earth. And like the pre-Raphaelites it’s interested in myth, perhaps Arthurian.

The stories sort themselves between these three poles, adventures, subverted adventures, anti-adventures of life in the city. And one more, A Young Man’s Guide To Virconium** about attempts to learn about people visiting Virconium from our world, which may just be fantasy and imagination.

Read This: A tour de force of fantasy, shifting modes and styles yet continuing to create a fascinating city at the end of time
Don’t Read This: You’re not interested in a fantasy city and you’d prefer it if it had a consistent history or at least name

* Harrison had turned against world-building and consistency as virtues

** Also published as A Young Man’s Guide To London, positing the real city of London as a mythical place unattainable to people living in the north of England.