I wasn’t looking forward to reviewing this book. I’m going to apologise now for what’s probably going to be an incoherent, rambling blog post…and also make my defence. I started Viriconium on holiday – reading some of it on the plane and some on a verandah in 35 degree heat, in the brief rests between gambolling around in the sea. Not, I soon realised, the ideal setting in which to read such a complicated story.
Viriconium isn’t actually one story. In the Fantasy Masterworks edition there are ten – several short stories and at least three novellas – one of which by my reckoning would make a fantastic novel in its own right.
The opening tale, “Viriconium Nights” reminds me so much of other books – City of Saints & Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer, and Perdido Street Station by China Mieville really came back to me when reading it. In Viriconium Nights, a young man (a thug, a fighter, a gentleman?) is hounded through the city into a stranger’s house, only to stumble out some time later into a city that’s not quite the one he left.
I found Time to be a strong theme throughout each part of the book. Viriconium is a city some thousands of years in the future, when the “Afternoon Cultures” have fallen, leaving behind a ruined landscape but also fantastic machinery buried in the wastes. Some, like crystal airships and energy-swords, are still used but little understood. Others are hinted at, rediscovered by prospectors who try to discern their purpose, or put them to new uses – usually violent ones.
The stories jump back and forth in time, but the city doesn’t stay the same. Sometimes the characters are the same….but their histories and roles are different, almost as if that particular Viriconium is a parallel universe of the one we were reading about before. Sometimes the timeline is continuous – taking place just a generation after the last story. Sometimes the timeline seems continuous, but the city is called Uroconium, or Vriko, and the facts have shifted slightly.
This continuity/discontinuity between the stories is confusing and enlightening at the same time – taken as standalone tales, each story in this book is a gem in its own right. At first I kept trying to hold onto the characters and the names and the facts and the places, but if you let them go as each story ends the next one makes a lot more sense.
My favourite part of Viriconium is The Pastel City, the first novella-length tale in the book. In it, Lord tegeus-Cromis and his band of old Knights defend the city and its young queen from northern barbarians. It’s full of brilliant ideas – the crystal airships, the Name Stars (created by the Afternoon Cultures and spelling out a message no one living understands), and one of the most striking concepts in the book – the Reborn Men. These thousand-year-dead soldiers are discovered in the wasteland and resurrected, inheriting the broken culture they left behind. They know the secrets of the past, but in a later story (A Storm of Wings) they slowly go mad as they struggle to come to terms with a changed world.
What else is there? Viriconium hints at an eons-long forgotten past, an aeronaut attempting the impossible task of flying to the moon, a flooded city, a man who might not be a man (but can’t remember any more – this reminded me of Daneel Olivaw in the Foundation Series), and a reality that shifts even as you watch it. Viriconium is like a study in fantasy writing, as if M. John Harrison is practising his craft by breaking down and rebuilding his world time and time again.
It’s a difficult read, but rewarding. It helps that the ideas are so stunning. Each one could be distilled into another tale, and the only downside I found was that the stories weren’t longer. I could have read 500 pages of The Pastel City and probably wanted more.
I don’t know if the likes of City of Saints and Madmen were directly influenced by Viriconium, but they’re certainly connected in my mind. To say it’s now a “classic”, Viriconium would rank pretty high in my list of modern favourites. Find a quiet spot, a cup of tea, and enjoy this amazing book.
This is the first Discworld book I haven’t liked however, so all in all that’s pretty good going. 