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!

Between The City and The Conveyancing

This week I have mostly been reading “The City and The City” by China Mieville and it has been a messed-up, paranoia-inducing experience. The book is mostly a detective story, with an added is-this-a-fantasy-novel-or-not guessing game attached. Imagine that Aurelio Zen (link) got seconded into a Kafka story; that would be close to this...

Inspector Tyador Borlu works in the Extreme Crime Squad in the city state of Beszel which, as far as I can tell is somewhere in the Balkans. Like East and West Berlin, Beszel is a divided city; half of it is another city state called Ul Qoma and relations between the two are decidedly frosty. Unlike East and West Berlin, there is not a clear dividing line between Beszel and Ul Qoma: the land has been parcelled out street by street or even building by building with some shared areas known as “crosshatching”. So you might live in Beszel, and your next door neighbour might live in Ul Qoma and if you wanted to pop round and borrow a cup of sugar, it would be completely illegal just to nip round there. You would have to apply for a visa and if you got it, you'd have to cross over at the official boarder, Cupola House, in the centre of both cities. Not only is it illegal to step across the imaginary line from one city to another, if you are in the crosshatched zones you are not even allowed to acknowledge people from the other city, you have to “unsee” and “unhear” them. This makes driving round Beszel/Ul Quma very difficult as you have to avoid the foreign vehicles without officially seeing them. If this description of Beszel/Ul Quma sounds stupid or contrived, consider that cities are full of imaginary lines, zones where one type of person or another can't go and people you have to unsee. All of this bizarre behaviour is enforced by Breach. Citizens of both cities live in fear of Breach which they believe is constantly observing them. Breach is judge, jury and executioner for anyone who fails to keep to the rules. I spent most of the book trying to work out exactly what Breach is: Is it an imaginary bogey man to make the citizens police themselves? A Big Brother style secret police force? Is it even human at all?

At the beginning of the book, Borlu is called out to a poverty-stricken housing estate, to find the body of a young woman who has been murdered and dumped there. Pretty soon he discovers that she was a Canadian archaeology student called Mahalia Ghery who has been working in a dig in Ul Quma. Mahalia was researching Orciny – the fabled city which exists between Beszel and Ul Quma controls both. At first, Borlu cannot believe her research had anything to do with her murder – Orciny was a story Besz parents would tell their children at night before the Disneyfication of their country. But if Orciny doesn't exist why was Mahalia killed? And who is behind the official interference in the investigation? Inspector Borlu follows the trail all the way to Ul Quma, but eventually he cannot track the killer an stay within the law, and Breach comes for him...

I'm not sure what it is about this book that causes the paranoia. Perhaps it is the fact that I don't know anything for sure: I don't even know what kind of book I'm reading. Is it the kind of book that has magic in it, or a fairly straight detective story? Is it something in the language itself that feeds the uncertainty? If I knew what that magic ingredient was, I'd add it to all of my work emails in a quest to make my boss soil himself. The author's photo at the back of the book certainly doesn't help: with his bald head, piercings and muscles, China Mieville looks like the kind of surfer you really wouldn't want to drop in on. Maybe it has nothing to do with the book at all – maybe it is the other thing I've been reading this week, the enormous pile of documents from the solicitors handling my conveyancing which has caused my paranoid imaginings...