2.7—gaiman, n.(2005)—on viriconium

8/11/2019 2.7Gaiman, N.(2005)on Viriconium

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On Viriconium: some Notes Toward an Introduction.

People are always pupating their own disillusion, decay, age. How is it

they never suspect what they are going to become, when their facesalready contain the faces they will have twenty years from now?

A Young Man's Journey Towards Viriconium

And I look at the Viriconium cycle of M. John Harrison and wonder

whether The Pastel Cityknew it was pupating In Viriconiumor the

heartbreak of A Young Mans Journey Towards Viriconium inside its

pages, whether it knew what it was going to become.

Some weeks ago and half-way around the world, I found myself in the

centre of Bologna, that sunset-coloured medieval towered city whichwaits in the centre of a modern Italian city of the same name, in a

small used bookshop, where I was given a copy of the the Codex

Seraphinianusto inspect. The book, created by the artist Luigi

Serafini, is, in all probability, an art object: there is text, but the

alphabet resembles an alien code, and the illustrations (which cover

such aspects of life as gardening, anatomy, mathematics, and

geometry, card games, flying contraptions, and labyrinths) bear only

a passing resemblance to those we know in this world at this time: in

one picture a couple making love becomes a crocodile, which crawlsaway; while the animals, plants and ideas are strange enough that one

can fancy the book something that has come to us from a long time

from now, or from an extremely long way away. It is, lacking another

explanation, art. And leaving that small shop, walking out into the

colonnaded shaded streets of Bologna, holding my book of

impossibilities, I fancied myself in Viriconium. And this was odd, only

because until then I had explicitly equated Viriconium with England.

Viriconium, M. John Harrisons creation, the Pastel City in the

Afternoon of the world; two cities in one, in which nothing isconsistent, tale to tale, save a scattering of place-names, although I

am never certain that the names describe the same place from story to

story. Is the Bistro Californium a constant? Is Henrietta Street?

M. John Harrison, who is Mike to his friends, is a puckish person of

medium height, given to enthusiasms and intensity. He is, at first

glance, slightly built, although a second glance suggests he has been

constructed from whips and springs and good, tough leather, and it

comes as no surprise to find that Mike is a rock climber, for one can

without difficulty imagine him clinging to a rock face on a cold, wet


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day, finding purchase in almost invisible nooks and pulling himself

continually up, man against stone. I have known Mike for over twenty

years: in the time I have known him his hair has lightened to a

magisterial silver, and he seems to have grown somehow continually

younger. I have always liked him, just as I have always been more thanjust a little intimidated by his writing. When he talks about writing he

moves from puckish to possessed: I remember Mike in conversation

at the Institute for Contemporary Art trying to explain the nature of

fantastic fiction to an audience: he described someone standing in a

windy lane, looking at the reflection of the world in the window of a

shop, and seeing, sudden and unexplained, a shower of sparks in the

glass. It is an image that raised the hairs on the back of my neck, that

has remained with me, and which I would find impossible to explain. It

would be like trying to explain Harrison's fiction, something I am

attempting to do in this introduction, and, in all probability, failing.

There are writers writers, of course, and M. John Harrison is one of

those. He moves elegantly, passionately, from genre to genre, his

prose lucent and wise, his stories published as sf or as fantasy, as

horror or as mainstream fiction. In each playing field, he wins awards,

and makes it look so easy. His prose is deceptively simple, each word

considered and placed where it can sink deepest and do the most

damage.

The Viriconium stories, which inherit a set of names and a sense of

unease from a long-forgotten English Roman City English antiquaries

have preferred Uriconium, foreign scholars Viroconium or Viriconium,

and Vriconium has also been suggested. The evidence of our ancient

sources is somewhat confused, a historical website informs us are

fantasies, three novels and a handful of stories which examine the

nature of art and magic, language and power.

There is, as I have already mentioned, and as you will discover, no

consistency to Viriconium. Each time we return to it, it has changed, orwe have. The nature of reality shifts and changes. The Viriconium

stories are palimpsests, and other stories and other cities can be seen

beneath the surface. Stories adumbrate other stories. Themes and

characters reappear, like Tarot cards being shuffled and redealt.

The Pastel Citystates Harrisons themes simply, in comparison to the

tales that follow, like a complex musical theme first heard played by a

marching brass band: its far future SF at the point where SF

transmutes into fantasy, and the tale reads like the script of a

magnificent movie, complete with betrayals and battles, all the pulp


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ingredients carefully deployed. (It reminds me on rereading a little of

Michael Moorcock and, in its end of time ambience and weariness, of

Jack Vance and Cordwainer Smith.) Lord tegeus-Cromis (who fancied

himself a better poet than swordsman) reassembles what remains of

the legendary Methven to protect Viriconium and its girl-queen frominvaders to the North. Here we have a dwarf and a hero, a princess, an

inventor and a city under threat. Still, there is a bitter-sweetness to the

story that one would not normally expect from such a novel.

A Storm of Wings takes a phrase from the first book as its title and is

both a sequel to the first novel and a bridge to the stories and novel

that follow and surround it: the voice of this book is, I suspect, less

accessible than the first book, the prose rich and baroque. It reminds

me at times of Mervyn Peake, but it also feels like it is the novel of

someone who is stretching and testing what he can do with words,with sentences, with story.

And then, no longer baroque, M. John Harrisons prose became

transparent, but it was a treacherous transparency. Like its

predecessors,In Viriconium is a novel about a hero attempting to

rescue his princess, a tale of a dwarf, an inventor and a threatened

city, but now the huge canvas of the first book has become a small

and personal tale of heartbreak and of secrets and of memory. The

gods of the novel are loutish and unknowable, our hero barelyunderstands the nature of the story he finds himself in. It feels like it

has come closer to home than the previous stories the disillusion

and decay that was pupating in the earlier stories has now emerged in

full, like a butterfly, or a metal bird, freed from its chrysalis.

The short stories which weave around the three novels are stories

about escapes, normally failed escapes. They are about power and

politics, about language and the underlying structure of reality, and

they are about art. They are as hard to hold as water, as evanescent as

a shower of sparks, as permanent and as natural as rock formations.

The Viriconium stories and novels cover such aspects of life as

gardening, anatomy, mathematics, and geometry, card games, flying

contraptions, and labyrinths. Also, they talk about art.

Harrison has gone on to create several masterpieces since leaving

Viriconium, in and out of genre: Climbers, his amazing novel of rock

climbers and escapism takes the themes of A Young Mans Journey to

Viriconium into mainstream fiction; The Course of the Hearttakes

them into fantasy, perhaps even horror;Light, his transcendent


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twining SF novel, is another novel about failed escapes from

ourselves, from our worlds, from our limitations.

For me, the first experience of reading Viriconium Nights and In

Viriconium was a revelation. I was a young man when I firstencountered them, half a lifetime ago, and I remember the first

experience of Harrisons prose, as clear as mountain-water and as

cold. The stories tangle in my head with the time that I first read them

the Thatcher Years in England seem already to be retreating into

myth. They were larger-than-life times when we were living them, and

there's more than a tang of the London I remember informing the city

in these tales, and something of the decaying brassiness of Thatcher

herself in the rotting malevolence of Mammy Vooley (indeed, when

Harrison retold the story of The Luck in the Head in graphic novel

form, illustrated by Ian Miller, Mammy Vooley was explicitly drawn asan avatar of Margaret Thatcher).

Now, on rereading, I find the clarity of Harrisons prose just as

admirable, but find myself appreciating his people more than ever I

did before flawed and hurt and always searching for ways to connect

with each other, continually betrayed by language and tradition and

themselves. And it seems to me that each city I visit now is an aspect

of Viriconium, that there is an upper and a lower city in Tokyo and in

Melbourne, in Manila and in Singapore, in Glasgow and in London, andthat the Bistro Californium is where you find it, or where you need it,

or simply what you need.

M. John Harrison, in his writing, clings to sheer rock faces, and finds

invisible handholds and purchases that should not be there; he pulls

you up with him through the story, pulls you through to the other side

of the mirror, where the world looks almost the same, except for the

shower of sparks...

Neil GaimanNarita Airport, July 25, 2005

2.7—gaiman, n.(2005)—on viriconium

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