In Viriconium or The Floating Gods - Third book in the British author's Viriconium cycle, a short novel of great poetic power. But, beware, this is hardly a feel good adventure tale within the genres of either science fiction or fantasy. Nay, with In Viriconium we visit the city in the grip of plague, in many respects we might as well be back in medieval Europe during the Black Death, but with M. John Harrison's yarn there's some serious off-the-wall weirdness brewing.
Weirdness, as in the common people inhabiting the Lower City enshrouded in plague not in the usual sense but a kind of thin fog whereby they age quickly or fall victim to various debilitating illnesses. Meanwhile, the Upper City, although spared the fog's deadly infestation, sinks into decadence on all levels: material, spiritual, intellectual, artistic.
Weirdness, as in the twin princes of the city, the fat, meaty Barley brothers ("they weren't human, that's a fact") rumble and bumble, belch, fart and vomit while playing the part of mindless pranksters on stairways and bridges and garden patches, in streams and in the city's oddest corners. They even try to sell the rats they've cudgeled to shocked restauranteurs. Where did these two ominous slubberdegullions come from, really? Perhaps a new form of Reborn Men or outer space alien readers encountered in A Storm of Wings?
Weirdness, as in two heroes initially encountered in The Pastel City bent and transformed almost beyond recognition: Cellur the Brdmaker keeps to his room in an old tower, collects stuffed birds, apparently has lost his memory and admits he doesn't know how old he is. Tomb the dwarf now calls himself The Grand Cairo and heads the city as something of a counter to the Barley brothers. He even has his own police force. The Grand Cairo is a major player in the world of In Viriconium but you will have to look hard to detect any of the old noble fire so present in the first two novels in the cycle.
The tale is told in five chapters represented by five tarot cards, a tale revolving around Ashlyme the portrait painter attempting to rescue another artist, Audsley King, from her plight as a ravaged plague victim in the Lower City. Similar to A Storm of Wings, the language throughout is high baroque, an entire baroque cathedral made of words, thus the challenge for a reviewer to convey the inner spirit of the book since the story is all in the precise way it is told. With this in mind, I'll shift to a number of In Viriconium direct quotes relating to the city's arts and literature and link my comments with these:
"He hung the painting in different places to find the best light and stood in front of them for long periods, thrilled by the stacked planes of the landscapes, the disquieting eros of her inner world."
Ashlyme is viewing a series of Audsley King paintings. M. John Harrison doesn't describe the paintings in detail; rather, he delineates Ashlyme's reactions to them. In this way, we as readers are free to imagine the paintings for ourselves.
"He touched the mask with his fingers. It was the head of a trout, to which someone had added thick rubbery lips and a ludicrous crest of spines."
Ashlyme dons a grotesque mask as a disguise in his attempt to carry Audsley out of the Low City. The rubber fish mask covers his head completely and can be seen as a microcosm for the grotesqueness of the entire city.
"He was popular in the salons. The Marchioness "L" called on him, with a new novelist."
A snatch from a conversation Ashlyme has with decadent aristocrats from the Upper City. I would dearly love to read one of this novelist's novels! I would guess the story told is a cross between Boccaccio's The Decameron and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.
"In this case he had done the painting over a group portrait of the Baroness de B -- and her family which had never been collected from the studio. As the wet summer advanced and the new paint began to fade, the image of the Baroness was beginning to reemerge in the form of a very old woman holding a flower, slowly absorbing and distorting the figure of Audsley King."
Ashlyme reuses the same canvas to save on his resources. Such a vivid image of a city pulled down into decadence - the old Baroness emerging to engulf a great vital young artist.
"A self-portrait painted at about this time. "Kneeling with raised arms," shows him, his eyes squeezed closed, apparently crawling and groping his way about his own studio, a whitish empty space. He seems to have come up against some sort of invisible barrier, against which he is pressing one side of his face so that it is distorted and whitened into a mask of frustration and despair."
One of the many invisible barriers Ashlyme must break through if he is to be more of a positive force in the city he dearly loves.
"And the longer he stayed in his studio, biting his pen, listening to the rain dripping in the attic, trying to conjure up in his mind's eye a picture of the thin, intense provincial girl who had arrived in Viriconium twenty years ago to shock the artistic establishment of the day with the suppressed violence and frozen sexual somnambulism of her self-portraits."
One can only wonder how Audsley King captured her own "frozen sexual somnambulism" in her self-portrait, keeping in mind such a person engages in sexual acts while in non rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep.
"Out of the tarot cards on the floor came an intense coloured flare of light, as if they had been illuminated suddenly from behind. Ashlyme felt it flash across his face, green and yellow, scarlet and deep blue, like light from a melting stain-glass window."
The tarot cards are from the deck of fortune teller Fat Man Etteilla. This passage is an example of the rich, ornate visual impact on nearly every page.
After reading In Viriconium, Neil Gailman noted how he now sees all cities having a Lower City and an Upper City, and how, in a certain way, all cities are Viriconium. I've had this experience myself.
British author M. John Harrison, Born 1945
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