A Storm of Wings is the second volume in the Viriconium four book cycle. Smash! Boom! Bang! - the sounds of British author M. John Harrison shattering expectations and boundaries surrounding the genres of fantasy and science fiction. As for the reader, novel as mindbender and bizarre mindmelter - all in a winged storm less than 150 pages. Remarkable.
We return to the lands and cities of Viriconium eighty years following events described in The Pastel City, that bygone era where Lord tegeus-Cromis, Tomb the Dwarf and the Reborn Men lead armies fighting under the banner of young Queen Jane in routing the barbarian Northmen. Now nearly everything has changed: the Reborn Men no longer dance in harmonies of grace and beauty, the landscape has been drained of its power and a pervasive hollowness reigns - this to say, the move from The Pastel City to A Storm of Wings is a shift from major to minor key, from tale of spirited high adventure to one of madness and chaos brought about in large measure by an alien abduction of psychic energies.
Pivotal to the tale is Alstath Fulthor, the very first of the Reborn Men to be resuscitated from his millennial entombment, brought to life once again in Viriconium, having last experienced individual identity during the years of those technologically advanced Afternoon Cultures very much like our own. Alas, poor Alstath – for decades a once respected lord in the Pastel City, he is currently sprinting across the surrounding foothills, propelled by a sudden madness.
After slowing his pace, Alstath Fulthor comes upon an old man who turns out to be none other than Cellur of Lendalfoot, former maker of birds, large warlike metal birds that played a critical part in The Pastel City. Both men decide to pay a visit to Methvet Nian, Queen Jane, Queen of Viriconium.
Meanwhile, Queen Jane hears the windows in her throne room calling out to her. What does it all mean? Perhaps such a calling is connected to the unsettling description of the Upper City's population: "Under a cold moon processions of men with insect faces went silently through the streets." Whoa. Are these men's faces contorted in grimaces that might remind one of insects or, as unbelievable as it might sound, do they, in fact, have the faces of insects? In keeping with the novel's overarching dense atmosphere, we are never given a clear indication.
On the same day, in the Lower City, in the Artists' Quarter, a large, burly man by the name of Galen Hornwrack enters the Bistro Californium, "that home of all errors and all who err." There is talk of a religion unlike any others invented in Viriconium - The Sign of the Locust, a religion maintaining a fundamental tenet: "the appearance of "reality" is quite false, a counterfeit or artifact of the human senses." Equally disturbing, a wave of murders sweeping the city has been linked to this religion where followers wear a steel MANTAS symbol around their necks and cover their bodies with tattoos of symbolical patterns.
The very air throughout all of Viriconium appears to be fetid, noxious, sickly even toxic during this dreaded times. Can anything be saved? Further along in the tale an unlikely band - Alstath Fulthor, Tomb the Dwarf, the mad Reborn Woman Fay Glass, Cellur of Lendalfoot and the above mentioned Galen Hornwrack, a lord without a domain who has spent his life as a hired assassin - ride north to determine what, if anything, can be done.
The further this band travels, the more bugged out and freakish their encounters - memory and sanity, their own and those around them, morph into dreaming and sheer madness. Among the weirdness confronted:
A tremendously fat former airboat pilot from another dimension, one Benedict Paucemanly, hangs in the sky above the adventurers and periodically conveys his version of disastrous happening throughout the realm. Benedict even waxes philosophic: "The material universe, it would appear, has little absolute substance. It hardly exists. It is a rag of matter, a wisp of gas, a memory of some former state. Each sentient species perceives the thin evidence of this state in a different way." Down to earth, practical Galen Hornwrack isn't overly impressed. What Galen desires is substantial help in defeating the forces destroying Viriconium.
A harbinger of future horrors, peering out from the port of Iron Chime, onlookers see a ship "its strange slattered metal sails, decorated with unfamiliar symbols, were melting as they fell. Captained by despair, it emerged from the mist like a vessel from Hell, its figurehead an insect-headed woman who had pierced her own belly with a sword." Some time thereafter, a captain living in the port city informs the travelers, "We're all mad here."
Further along in their travels, the party is suddenly surrounded by the walls of a maze causing the world to tumble sideways. Immediately thereafter, when Galen Hornwrack stumbles into a circular space, there's a giant mantis-fly insect crouching over Fay Glass. Curiously, such a desert maze echoes what we were told of the Reborn Men and Women, how many of them wondered off from cities to form communes or self-help groups (thanks, M. John - so 1970s) and how a number of Reborn colonies dedicated themselves to music or mathematics or "the carving of enormous mazes out of the sodden clinker and blowing sands of the waste." Was this grotesque maze constructed by the Reborn? Again, in keeping with the author's opaque aesthetic, nothing more definite is disclosed.
Neil Gaiman admits the difficulty in “explaining” M. John Harrison’s writing. As Neil expresses, Mike Harrison is a writer’s writer, an author who carefully chooses each and every word to convey the power of art and magic and how the nature of reality is continually shifting and changing, how there are cities hidden beneath cities and worlds within worlds. I entirely concur with Neil. For readers interested in more straightforward storytelling, my advice is to stick with The Pastel City. But for those who take delight in literary explosions, A Storm of Wings is your book. In many ways, I see M. John Harrison as the John Cage of speculative fiction. What a treat.
M. John Harrison, born 1945
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