Viriconium by M John Harrison

This is not the best thing to try to read at 3am while feeding a baby! It is full of long words, rather overwrought descriptions and sections where nothing much seems to happen, making it hard going for the sleep deprived.

Viriconium is the patchwork city at the end of the world. A crumbling ruin left by a long vanished civilisation. Death, decay and dissolutiom are everywhere. If you like Gormenghast or The Book of the New Sun but find them a bit too cheerful, this is for you!

The book I have (from the Fantasy Masterworks series) is a collection of novels and short stories. My favourites are The Pastel City (which deals with a civil war - The War of The Two Queens - in which one side finds and reanimates hideous brain-stealing golems left behind by some previous civilisation) and The Shadow of Wings in which the world is invaded by giant locusts from outer space. Strangely, this seems a lot less stupid when you're actually reading it. Both these novels feature my favourite character, Tomb the Iron Dwarf. In a novel where every character spends a good deal of their time making epigrams on the nature of being, Tomb who says, "I'm a dwarf, not a philosopher." And hits things with his axe is a welcome relief.

If my review makes this book sound like standard, cliched fantasy of the Trudy Canavan style, that is a failing on my part. In fact I suspect that most of the problems I have with it are because it's just too bloody clever for me.

One of the things that confuses me are the inconsistencies between the different stories. For example in The Shadow of wings, the fortune teller Fat Mam Etieller is killed near the end. The she reappears in In Viriconium despite the fact that (I think!) this is set later. It is very hard to work out a timeline and pin down the order of events. Is this an intentional trick? Or were the stories never intended to be read together?

Another example is that both The Pastel City and Cromis and Lamia feature the warrior-poet teugus-Cromis. But the character seems totally different. The cromis who hunts the Lamia is a much more unpleasant person. Is this just a less developed version of the character for a short story who later changes?

The city of Viriconium itself appears inconsistent to me. At times it seems to be 19th century Paris, at others it is mediaeval, at others it is like a city state in rennaisance Italy. I can't work out how much is intentional, nor can I discount the possiblity that it all fits together, but I'm too tired and stupid to realise how at the moment. I think it would help me to know the order in which these stories were writen, and where they fit on a timeline of Viriconium.

I am going to reserve judgement on M John Harrison; there is another of his books, "Light" on my shelf and I will give that a go when baby is a bit older and my brain might have recovered!