Viriconium
M. John Harrison’s Pastel City

Viriconium is the eponymous city M. John Harrison’s 1971 novel, The Pastel City. It subsequently featured in the sequel A Storm of Wings and – increasingly distorted and surreal – in In Viriconium and Viriconium Nights.

The Pastel City started the sequence in an epic yet seemingly formulaic way…

For millennia, the Pastel City had been the sole centre of civilisation on an Earth despoiled and ruined by its own inhabitants: but now the coloured towers were charred and tottering, as two queens fought for supremacy, armed with relics of a culture that had already destroyed the world once…

tegius-Cromis, the moody, introvert Lord of the Methven, left his seashore retreat to fight for the Young Queen against the barbaric hordes of the Old. He travelled and fought among the wasted deserts and dreaming marshes of Viriconium, onlt to find that the War of the Two Queens was merely a prelude to a vaster and more dangerous conflict…

Would the Empire fall? Who would halt the invincible automata of an ancient science, resurrected by the Old Queen to tear down the Pastel Towers? Could a poet, a braggart and a heroic dwarf halt the irresistible flow of Time and save the Empire from a destiny worse than barbarism… ?

… but you can see in it the beginnings of Harrison’s more genre-subversive agenda.

Viriconium lies in a dying Earth littered with the detritus of the millennia, but —

… the city is not a physical place insomuch as it is a framework for Dream, an archetypal milieu that is different in every literary visit, yet also the same. Viriconium is like a dream city we return to, night after night, playing out the psychic conflict of our lives. The cast and setting remain basically the same, but are also informed and mutated by the content of the tale that makes up the Dream. — Strange Worlds

Harrison himself says —

Viriconium is never the same place twice. … “Viriconium” is a theory about the power-structures culture is designed to hide; an allegory of language, how it can only fail; the statement of a philosophical (not to say ethological) despair. At the same time it is an unashamed postmodern fiction of the heart, out of which all the values we yearn for most have been swept precisely so that we will try to put them back again (and, in that attempt, look at them afresh). — Fantastic Metropolis

The Viriconium cycle tends to split readers: they either love it or hate it; few are indifferent. Those looking for a robust science fantasy will be disappointed; those willing to delve further may well be rewarded.

The first Viriconium novel concerns the defence of the eponymous city against northern “barbarians” – and the lethal geteit chemosit they have awakened from the Afternoon – by the melancholy Lord tegeus-Cromis – who considered himself a better poet than swordsman – and his fellow Methven (the elite knights of the old king): Tomb the Dwarf, Birkin Grif, and Theomeris Glyn.

The plot is lean and spare but his characterizations are strong. While Viriconium itself is only briefly sketched – much of the action takes place in the wastes and wildernesses outside the city – Harrison captures well the mood of his imagined world with striking and superbly wought prose ―

In the water-thickets, the path wound tortuously between umber iron-bogs, albescent quicksands of aluminum and magnesium oxides, and sumps of cuprous blue or permanganate mauve fed by slow, gelid streams and fringed by silver reeds and tall black grasses.

(I once had sheets covered in extracts as examples to emulate in my own writing!)

While this is a more “accessible” novel than the later ones, it does prefigure the cycle’s development —

Cromis… was more possessed by the essential qualities of things rather than their names; concerned with the reality of Reality, rather than with the names men give it.

This replays much the same story after a gap of eight decades, with the assassin Galen Hornwrack thrust unwillingly into the role of tegeus-Cromis. This time the attackers are insect-like aliens from the Moon.

The story weaves different points of view and perceptions: the “normal” humans’; those of the Reborn Men, who are plagued with waking dreams of the Afternoon; and the aliens’ “mosaic universe”.

In the end, the world itself is reshaped by these different “realities”, but the ambiguous perception of reality is explicit from early on —

For as much as a century (or as little as a decade: estimates vary) before it made its appearance on the streets, a small group or cabal somewhere in the City had propagated its fundamental tenet—that the appearance of “reality” is quite false, a counterfeit or artifact of the human senses.

… echoing Albert Einstein’s observation, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

This is a much more complex book. The plot is more psychological than dramatic – the action punctuates elegiac descriptions of the city and its denizens – and the mood more pessimistic. Viriconium has both a more hard-edged verisimilitude and a greater surrealism.

This is possibly the best book in the sequence: it was nominated for the Guardian Fiction Prize.

Viriconium – the people and the City alike – is sick with a strange plague of apathy and desuetude. In the Artists’ Quarter, Audsley King is dying of a phthisis brought on by the plague; fellow artist Ashlyme’s attempts to save her prove to be misguided.

Harrison plays willfully with the back story. There are oblique references to events from the first two novels, but within a much more elastic history. The “floating gods” of the U.S. title are the Barley brothers, Gog and Matey, two disreputable oafs, “lager louts” really, equivocal lords of the City. There are strong hints that these are Reborn Men of A Storm of Wings.

Characters here, too, are reminiscent of earlier ones. Emmet Buffo, the astronomer, and St. Elmo Buffin. The Grand Cairo, a Mingulay dwarf like Tomb, with romantic notions of his past as a warrior. The unnamed taxidermist and costumier whose shop displays a sign on which only SELLER can be discerned, who is excited by his discovery of a feather made of metal, and Cellur, maker of “living” metal birds. In this the book is reminiscent of Michael Moorcock’s The Condition of Muzak in which many “real” people are revealed as the models for characters in the earlier Jerry Cornelius books.

Harrison’s story parodies Arthurian motifs – in particular the episode of the Fisher King afflicted by an agonizing wound that directly correlates to the desolation of his domain – and deconstructs the whole series to show that Viriconium is just a fiction: King realizes this and at last can paint the real world, which is our own.

‘I have heard the café philosophers say, “The world is so old that the substance of reality no longer knows what it ought to be”.’
— Ansel Verdigris, Some Remarks to my Dog

The short fiction in takes deeper into curiously distorted versions of the city: it is never the same place twice, even the name changes (Uroconium, Vyrko, …), with only a tenuous thread of vaguely familiar place names, characters, and events linking it to the Viriconium of the earlier books. The U.S. edition includes a novella, In Viriconium, that is a condensed and imperfect retelling of the third novel. Finally, in “A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium”, Viriconium has become little more than a dream.

Omnibus editions

Viriconium: the Pastel City was the last bastion of the civilized world, where Queen Methvet Nian ruled supreme.

In Viriconium, the young men whistle to one another all night long as they go about their deadly games. If you wake suddenly, you might hear footsteps running, or an urgent sigh. After a minute or two, the whistles move away in the direction of the Tinmarket or the Margarethestrasse. The next day, some lordling is discovered in the gutter with his throat cut. Who can tell fantasy from reality, magic from illusion, hero from villain, man from monster… in Viriconium?

The publisher claims that this omnibus presents the Viriconium stories in the author’s preferred order for the first time… but Harrison says it was just the order he chose on the day and any order is fine as long as it begins or ends with “A Young Man’s Journey…”

Graphic novels

Harrison collaborated with the artist Ian Miller on a graphic novel, The Luck in the Head (1991), retelling the tale of the anguished and gullible poet Chrome from the 1984 novelette. (Recall that tegeus-Cromis considered himself a better poet than swordsman…)

Dieter Jüdt illustrated a graphic novel Viriconium based on In Viriconium. His breath-taking graphics combine fine draughtsmanship and graduated coloring to capture the volatile atmosphere between art and decay.