A review by paracyclops
Viriconium by M. John Harrison

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This omnibus edition of M. John Harrison's Viriconium stories (three short novels and a bunch of short stories) was my first reading of something that's been on my radar for about forty years! I'd have read this stuff sooner if I'd known what it was like. Which is, roughly, Michael Moorcock meets Mervyn Peake round Jack Vance's house. I'd ordinarily hesitate to summarise a book so glibly in terms of other writers, but on this occasion it really fits for me, despite the fact (and this is an enormous caveat) that Harrison is an utterly original and brilliant writer. In the longer stories, setting and narrative progressively dismantle themselves, and Harrison's background in the New Wave is extremely apparent. The shorter pieces are more like exercises in worldbuilding, but it's always very clear that, for Harrison, a world is a tenuous and contingent thing. Taken at face value, Viriconium (the city in which these stories are set, or around which they revolve) is a wonderfully imagined setting. It exists near the end of history, like Vance's Dying Earth, and many of its characters have a dissipated, decadent disregard similar to those in Vance. It is also a tottering, heaped up accumulation of historic happenstance, groaning under the weight of its own traditions, like Peake's Gormenghast. Also like Peake, most of the characters are grotesques. In earlier stories we have a Moorcock-esque tragic hero, a fey swordsman afflicted with melancholy, who prefers writing poetry to adventuring, and there is a whole resurrected race of pale, elegant ancients, equipped with strange, fell weapons and armour, but as things go on the stories are more likely to concern struggling artists and their venal patrons than warriors or adventurers. All of this is rendered in the most wonderful, stylised prose, form and content in perfect lockstep, its Gothic aesthetics deployed in the service of a fundamentally Modernist formalism. Harrison seems to be one of those writers (like Moorcock) whose affection for pulpy genres makes it easy for literary elitists to overlook him, but this book contains some of the very best writing I've ever encountered, in any genre.