M. John Harrison - 'Viriconium' (1971-1985)

"Time is erosion: an icy wind blew constant abrasive streams of dust over the bare rock of the ridge: it had been blowing for a thousand years."

"'Viriconium', remarks Ansel Verdigris in his last ironic essay Allies, 'is a world trying to remember itself. The dumb stones perform an unending act of recall.'"

"Where the city is at its emptiest we find ourselves full."

"Viriconium is all the cities that have ever been."

Recently I was walking down Charing Cross Road with my father. I had studied in London for a year in 2011, but my father had grown up there in the 60s and 70s. As we walked down the road from bookshop to bookshop, he told me about the places he used to visit as a child and young man, and how much the city had changed. I realised in that moment how different my London and my father's London was. Cities, especially those with a rich history, are hyper-real, a conglomeration of history, legend, and different people's experiences and interpretations of them, all superimposed over the physical buildings and streets. M. John Harrison understands this, and this is what he explores vividly and evocatively in his Viriconium stories. Viriconium, as Audsley King  notes in 'In Viriconium', "is all the cities that have ever been", glorious, crumbling and decadent, situated in the vast decaying wastelands in the last days of the Earth. M. John Harrison wrote three novels about Viriconium, 'The Pastel City' (1971), 'A Storm Of Wings' (1980) and 'In Viriconium' (1982), plus a series of short stories collected in 'Viriconium Nights' (1985). Each of these is lyrical and powerful, though quite different. Taken together they make up a singular, haunting piece of work. Viriconium is so vividly realised it is almost a character itself. Like a real city, it is mutable, living and breathing. In defiance of Fantasy tradition, Harrison intentionally disrupts the continuity between stories. The very name of the city changes, characters and events in one story are reimagined as myths or legends in another. Viriconium is a palimpsest, constantly rewritten by the different perspectives, hopes, dreams and fears of its citizens. The differing interpretations and versions of the city serve to make it more lifelike, and make it all the harder to leave behind. I think it has become my new favourite book.
   I was originally intending to talk about each of the installments of the series individually, but seeing as so much of the power and effect is generated by the cross-talk of characters and themes between stories, I don't think that's an appropriate approach to talking about Viriconium. The edition I read is the 2000 Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks version - this is important as the sequence and even contents of the various Viriconium omnibuses has changed between versions. The Fantasy Masterworks edition is thoughtfully sequenced, with the three novels presented in sequence with the 'Viriconium Nights' stories interspersed throughout. It opens with 'Viriconium Knights', which previews the events of 'The Pastel City' as a legend and the hope of a better Viriconium for the people who live there. With its outlandish, almost grotesque characters with bizarre names and its vivid crumbling edifices, the Viriconium stories from the start bring to mind Mervin Peake's Gormenghast books, and its last days of Earth setting owes much to Jack Vance's Dying Earth series. It anticipates Gene Wolfe's 'The Book Of The New Sun' and Simon Ings' 'City Of The Iron Fish' both in its setting and the way it subverts traditional Fantasy tropes. And in its setting of a shifting, magical city beset by calamity it superficially resembles Samuel R. Delany's 'Dhalgren', another great favourite of mine. But really these comparisons do little more than hint at Viriconium's unique flavour; it simply isn't much like anything else, which is always of great value.
   'The Pastel City' and 'A Storm Of Wings' are both more plot-driven than the other Viriconium stories, and both feature the city under threat of invasion. In 'The Pastel City' the threat is an ancient weapon, merciless golems that steal people's brains, and in 'A Storm Of Wings' it is giant alien psychic wasps. In these stories it is most easy to see the influence of the more imaginative sword and sorcery stories that influenced it. However from the out they go against Fantasy convention. 'The Pastel City' is violent enough to stand next to anything Joe Abercrombie wrote. Its protagonist, tegeus-Cromis, likes to think of himself as a poet rather than a warrior, yet it is clear that the reason he is chosen for these tasks is because he is a supremely efficient killer. Over the course of the book he becomes more and more disillusioned with his role as a tool for violence, and in fact winds up missing out on the big climax. tegeus-Cromis' character arc finishes before the siege of the city and the confrontation with the rival Queen, so we don't get to see it, an incredibly bold narrative move that it's still difficult to imagine coming across in a Fantasy novel to this day. The world-weariness of the protagonist reflects the bruised and battered Earth, now a toxic wasteland largely uninhabitable thanks to the destructiveness and greed of humanity.

 The relationship of 'A Storm Of Wings' to 'The Pastel City' is interesting. It is more of a direct sequel than the other Viriconium stories, yet in some ways it is a retelling, recapitulating the themes and events of the original. Tomb the dwarf and Cellur the Lord of the Birds return from the previous book, but in an unusual move tegeus-Cromis has died in the intervening years, so he is replaced by Galen Hornwrack. Hornwrack is an assassin, dispossessed by the War of Two Queens from the previous book, and his selfishness and pissiness contrast directly with tegeus-Cromis' honour and dignity, yet he is required by Queen Methvet Nian and by the narrative to fulfill the role of tegeus-Cromis in the story. This he does but ultimately on his own terms. The alien invasion is used to explore the central theme of all the Viriconium stories, that the places we inhabit are a combination of the different perspectives of the people who live there. The perspective of the alien insects and of the humans is so radically different their two realities prove to be incompatible, with disastrous results for both. Outside of the city of Viriconium, travelling in the wasteland, stripped of the consensus reality provided by the perspective of their fellow humans, the characters start to forget who they are and to become archetypes. In this way the book explores the use of archetypes in Fantasy, something the genre strongly relies on but outside of, say, Michael Moorcock, generally doesn't comment on. The fate of airman Benedict Paucemanly anticipates that of several characters in Harrison's 'Empty Space'.

  In between 'The Pastel City' and 'A Storm Of Wings' the Fantasy Masterworks edition gives us the 'Viriconium Nights' short stories 'Lords Of Misrule' and 'Strange Great Sins'. The former cynically recontextualises tegeus-Cromis' role as a hero and Viriconium's role as an empire. The latter is the first appearance of the horse's skull, an image that would become a recurring motif throughout the Viriconium stories and again crop up in the shape of the Shrander in 'Light'. These recurring images provide a  thread that connects Viriconium to M. John Harrison's SF work. As in the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, the Viriconium stories are built around strong and incisive character work, as well as our relationship with our past. If the characters in the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy are haunted by their past, the whole setting of Viriconium is haunted by the mistakes humanity made before it.
   Most of the rest of the 'Viriconium Nights' stories are placed between 'A Storm Of Wings' and 'In Viriconium'. 'The Dancer From The Dance' expands the story of the ballerina from 'Strange Great Sins' and reimagines 'A Storm Of Wings' as a local legend, or perhaps a suppressed psychic memory. Insects become another recurring Viriconium motif. 'The Luck In The Head', in which a woman wearing an insect mask convinces the protagonist to launch an assassination attempt on Mammy Vooley using what may be tegeus-Cromis' laser sword, works as a metaphor for the events of 'A Storm Of Wings' or converts the events of that story into a metaphor for it. Mammy Vooley, a fragile old woman whose delicate physical appearance is in direct opposition to her despotic power, appears as the Queen in the 'Viriconium Nights' stories, a fictionalisation of Margaret Thatcher and a direct opposite to the beautiful Methvet Nian, the Queen in 'The Pastel City' and 'A Storm Of Wings'. 'The Lamia & Lord Cromis' again reimagines tegeus-Cromis as distinctly less than heroic whilst providing him with a mythic foe. The overall effect of these shifting and contradictory interpretations of events and characters subverts SF and Fantasy's traditional overwhelming hunger for background details, world building and context whilst demonstrating how unnecessary they truly are. Viriconium gains vividness and power from all these shifting perspectives rather than losing them.

   'In Viriconium' is the last of the Viriconium novels, and more abstract than its predecessors. Based around the images of an imaginary tarot, the novel looks at the lives of the painters, artists and down-and-outs of the city as Viriconium is struck by an existential plague, brought about by the incarnation of its gods. In a brutal subversion of the Christ myth, the Barley brothers incarnate experience humanity by being humans at their absolute worst, a pair of drunken hooligans vomiting on the street and beating helpless victims. As the city collapses around him, the painter Ashlyme tries to save Audsley King from dying of the plague. He comes up against the Kafka-esque bureaucracy of the plague police, and has to deal with The Grand Cairo, the Barley brothers' dwarf. The Grand Cairo, who, like the dwarf in 'The Dancer From The Dance' was forced to become a dwarf by his parents keeping him in a restrictive box in order that he might have a lucrative circus career, mirrors the repression and resentment of Audsley King, who has become famous for the sublimated sexuality and violence of her paintings. The events of 'A Storm Of Wings' turn up again, this time as one of The Grand Cairo's ludicrous paranoid fantasies, and the aristocratic thugs of 'Viriconium Knights' reappear as struggling artists. The themes and images from the previous stories appear, perhaps at their most powerful here where the focus is more on the characters and setting rather than the plot, allowing the work as a whole more room to breathe. Like tegeus-Cromis back in 'The Pastel City', Ashlyme very much sees himself as an artist, but his major contribution to the plot is one of violence, a necessary act that frees Viriconium of its invaders whilst his attempt at rescue ends in farce, perhaps achieved with Galen Hornwrack's blade from 'A Storm Of Wings'.
   The collection ends with 'A Young Man's Journey To Viriconium'. Harrison has said that the series can be read in any order as long as the reader finishes with this one, and I can't imagine a more effective ending for the Viriconium stories. It is set in our world, and the protagonist discovers that two people from our world have travelled to Viriconium by entering a mirror in the bathroom of the Merrie England Cafe on New Street in Huddersfield. Though of course this gateway won't work for him. This final story explores why we need Fantasy, why we need Viriconium, whilst warning against exactly that. Viriconium, with all its manifest squalour, decadence and horrors, with its dream-like, shifting realities, the crumbling ancient beauty of the High City and the ramshackle slums of the Low City, is almost more vivid than the real world. Yet for its citizens caught within it and those in our reality haunted by glimpses of it, we are both forced to confront the reality that faces us. It is an appropriately haunting note to end on, and makes it all the harder for us to leave.
 

Simon Ings - City Of The Iron Fish (1994)

"In the beginning, my father once explained to me, the inventive powers of the Ceremonies were so great that the whole City was changed. Even before the scraps of poetry escaped between the ribs of the fish - even, indeed, before the sun had set on the Ceremonies themselves - the streets of the City would begin to shift. The usual hills were laid flat, revealing great, half-recognized vistas; elsewhere, great ironstone crags and grassy banks appeared from nowhere, with rivulets coursing down them, and at their foot ran waterways which gave onto canals which gave onto ponds, and with them all sorts of bridges and sluices and tatty terraced houses with overgrown bank gardens; staircases and slip-ways would slide in and out go view do the celebrants as they left the Circus; sometimes the Circus itself would disappear only to repeat itself further down the road. You might never find the expected streets, but sometimes one of them would appear of a sudden behind you as you walked.
   "People in those early days tried flagging their houses before the Ceremonies so that afterwards they might find their way home again. Whether the flags worked is not recorded, but the habit of making and planting them stuck, even when, centuries later, the City had grown too complex and well-realized for a single Ceremony to much alter its geography." 

"Fantasies aren't 'hopeful', they're an admission of failure - mere masturbation." Blythe Maravell

In 'City Of The Iron Fish', Simon Ings uses Fantasy to explore an ambivalence towards Fantasy and our relationship towards art as a whole; is art's role to provide an escape from the harsh, unforgiving nature of reality, or is its job to force us to confront the truth, however uncomfortable and bleak that may be? Ings achieves this by forcing his characters to confront the fact that they may be fictional creations living in an artificial world.
   The eponymous City, with its seafaring traditions and plentiful supplies of water, sprawls across two opposing hills linked by bridges. Yet it is situated in the middle of a vast desert, and the river running between the hills is one of tarmac. The City is maintained by powerful magic, which is governed by a complex and seemingly meaningless series of rituals. The people who live there have ideas and old stories about other times, other places and ways of life, but no one has ever found anything outside the City but desert. Every twenty years, the Ceremony of the Iron Fish renews the magic supporting the City, but in recent times the power of the ritual has faded, and people are starting to lose faith.   While most people are happy not to question their situation, Thomas Kemp, fallen scholar and narrator, just can't help picking at the threads of weirdness surrounding him. Who put the seafaring City in the middle of the desert? Is there a wider world out there, and why is the City cut off from it? Of course there's an easy answer for those of us reading the book: because this is how the author wrote it. Compelling Fantasy or SF settings don't necessarily need to make a whole lot of ontological sense, but the works in question rarely deal with what effect living in such a transparently artificial environment would have on those who live there. There's a tendency to cordon off kitschy Fantasy art from surrealism, but in a way being trapped inside a Roger Dean painting would be as disturbing as finding yourself on the beach in 'The Persistence Of Memory'; neither parse as real. As Thomas Kemp describes his early life with his parents, going away to university, his sexual awakening, Kemp as a character is rounded and believable but the setting, intentionally, never quite convinces. There is something dreamlike about the City, with its ancient formalised meaningless rituals and its grotesque caricatures of characters recalling Gormenghast, down to the bizarre names. With its mutable geography, unexplained isolation and deserted, crumbling alleyways - 'the sort of landscape you might imagine someone concocting who had never seen a city, and had no idea what it was for' - the City resembles Bellona from Samuel R. Delany's masterpiece 'Dhalgren', another book in which the characters begin to suspect they and their situation are fictional. And so, logically enough, when Thomas and his friend the artist Blythe Maravell go on a journey outside the City to find out what is there, they come to a place marking the boundaries of their artificial existence, outside which they simply cannot exist. 
   None of this would be effective if what had gone before didn't give the illusion of reality, and while the City itself and the more grotesque supporting characters frequently signpost their impossible nature, Thomas and Blythe are wonderfully convincing and well rounded characters, and the everyday lives of the people they encounter throughout the City and living on the fringes of the desert ring true. Because of this, we are able to feel Thomas' and Blythe's existential horror as they reach their hands past a certain point and see them reduced from flesh to articulated plastic to stick drawings. 
   The book goes on to explore the effect this revelation has on both characters, and also on the City as a whole, as others make the same journey and a cult of despair and nihilism spreads. Thomas becomes an artist and seeks solace in Fantastical art, that which seeks to imagine a future everyone is beginning to realise is impossible for the City, before becoming depressed and burying himself in debauchery. Blythe, on the other hand, uses her art to confront the bleakness and hopelessness she sees all around her. The two characters struggle with the balance between hope and despair whilst the City crumbles around them into chaos. Whilst Tom eventually finds escape into Fantasy hollow and meaningless, he declares near the end of the book, 'One problem with despair... it makes you stupid!' And in many ways his despair leads him as poorly as his earlier optimism did, and Ings' depiction of a society where despair has curdled into violence and hatred is truly chilling. Ultimately, the characters band together to make a last stand performing the Ceremony of the Iron Fish in order to restore the City before it is destroyed by the nihilists. Fittingly, this has no bearing on the outcome, the real founding ceremony having been carried out by Thomas as a child in the beginning of the book and corrected later with Blythe's help, but it allows the characters to regain some semblance of agency, and the result is even the more grotesque characters get a chance to shine, to show us what they are made of. 
   'City Of The Iron Fish' ends with the whole idea of the City being scrunched up and tossed aside by its creator. However this isn't as bleak an ending as it may seem. With the Ceremony of the Iron Fish, the book explores the idea of art as an act of creation or reification, giving reality and meaning not just to a fictional world we imagine but the world we perceive around us. However with the second half of the book's slide into despair and bleakness, it also explores writing as an act of destruction, the act of creating people restricted by artificial boundaries as cruel, the author as a capricious god doling out cruelty upon cruelty to their creations. With the apparent destruction of the manuscript of the book, the characters are finally free from this external influence. All the characters get to interact again with those who died over the course of the narrative, giving them a chance at closure the story wasn't going to allow them. And meanwhile, the City starts to take on a new and different form, as the unseen writer prepares to write again, but not before they provide Thomas and Blythe with a way out of the narrative.