John Harrison - Viriconium

[ravenus]

I just browsed through a bit of it, and it seemed mildly interesting but I'm unsure.
Can anyone who has read this give me a gist of what it's about. I don't normally like swords-and-sorcery fiction (I couldn't bear to read past FoTR, to give you an indication), so I would like to know if this book is different from the usual.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

Ravenus, if you have seen the fantasy masterworks compendium of Viriconium, go thou and buy it! It is a series of tales set around the imaginary city of Viriconium. They vary from fare that would not be out of place in an Italo Calvino book to sequences that follow the usual quest format, but in a far more imaginative and non-generic way than usual. The writing is elegant and masterful, and I believe this is one of my personal high-water marks of the genre.


Viriconium is the last living city on a dead earth, and each tale of Viriconium presents a different version of this - the stories are not linearly linked or even factually consistent. All in all, it's a pathetic, flamboyant dance in the ruins, totally reversing the usual positive trend of fantasy storylines.

Of course it is not evenly brilliant, and some of it may just seem childish or back to generic tropes but I'd say the overall body of work is truly classic, occasional clumsy plotting and alck of real depth in characterisation notwithstanding. Based on your take on Hodgson, and what I've inferred of his work, you ought to enjoy this, and perhaps find the prose a real treat.

 

[ravenus]

Thanks a lot. I'll give it a more thorough browse.

The reason I was curious enough is I once got a graphic novel supposed to be based on the viriconium work. Some artist had collaborated with John Harrison. I loved it. It was a really dark fantasy thing with spectacular even spooky illustrations.

Will I see any of that in the prose?

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

I believe you will.


Do you still have that graphic novel? Might be just the reason I need to haul my carcass up for that long delayed visit to Mumbai...

 

[ravenus]

That thing was called Uriconium Nights

 

[ravenus]

yeah. I preserve it carefully.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

Awesome. If it is the one by Dieter Jüdt, it is fiendishly rare and supposedly very good. It's based on Viriconium Nights, the first tale in the collected edition. I shall probably have to slaughter you for the comic. Or at least scan the whole thing.

 

[GOLLUM]

Well I was only introduced to this series this year by members of this forum and am very glad that I was.

Like Knivesout suggests the prose is brilliant in parts and whilst not as consistently great or original IMHO as Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities it's knocking very loudly on the door of my top 5 fantasy series of all time.

Highly recommended.

 

[Brys]

I think knivesout's pretty much said it all. One thing to add - Harrison is IMO the best living prose writer, very nearly as good as Peake and Calvino. The advantage it has over Invisible Cities is that it's focused on the city of Viriconium, so you get a much better picture of the place (though the central theme is that it isn't constant) but you also get a plot and interesting characters. It may start off "traditional", ie Moorcock style swords and sorcery, but this is only so it can be completely deconstructed later on. My favourite is still that first short story, Viriconium Knights.
There are times where Harrison isn't quite at his best in the sequence, but it's still on a completely different level to most authors. On a similar note, I wouldn't recommend one of his other books, the Centauri Device, with the same enthusiasm - Viriconium was extremely good, but the Centauri Device was just a little better than average (Harrison readily claims that the Centauri Device is his worst novel though).

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Having now read all of the Viriconium stories, I do think that the series (if you can call it that) started out better than it finished.

Astonished to find Brys and myself in agreement for once, I have to say that "Viriconium Knights" is my favorite, too. Somehow, Harrison seems to pack more atmosphere and interest in the first few pages of that one than he does in whole chapters of the longer stories. Or maybe he just hits more notes that resonate for me personally. There are amazing things in the other stories too, of course.

One thing I can't figure out, because it's done without any acknowledgement or explanation, is the (slight in the case of "VK" and considerably more substantial in the case of "The Lamia & Lord Cromis") variations between versions of at least two of the stories as they appear in the new omnibus from Bantam and versions that were published in some old anthologies I have.

Since nothing is said, there is no way of telling for certain which are the earliest versions, but I think it's possible to make some fairly safe guesses.