Fantastic Metropolis

Simultaneously, he was busy writing criticism and collaborating with Moorcock on the scripts for the Jerry Cornelius cartoon strips. He became a keen climber and much of his fine eye for landscape can be traced to his love of the hardy outdoor life. Other ventures, such as taking over the editorship of New Worlds and writing a post-holocaust SF novel, helped to delay further development of his fantasy stories. This novel, The Committed Men (1971) is the impressive tale of a ravaged Britain, set among the crumbling motorways of a fractured rural land. It is a quest story, peopled with bizarre characters and focusing quite relentlessly on the instant business of survival in a hostile and contingent environment. Harrison is at his best when depicting individuals struggling to preserve their identities in the face of abstract uncertainties.

After The Committed Men, Harrison was finally free to return to what would eventually emerge as his magnum opus—the Viriconium tales. The first novel in the sequence, The Pastel City (1971) is also the most accessible, bordering on straight sword-and-sorcery, with some of the technological trappings of science-fiction thrown in. As such, it is highly reminiscent of Jack Vance’s ‘Dying Earth’ series, though far bleaker (and yet, paradoxically, less cynical). The Pastel City tells the story of tegus-Cromis, a swordsman turned poet, whose fear of action is symptomatic of this far-future Earth. A cast of highly colourful rogues join him on his mission to destroy a race of alien automata who threaten to obliterate Viriconium entire—which is both city and land and the last of the ‘Evening’ cultures.

The world of The Pastel City is decadent and weary; the action is often completely ludicrous. Cromis is both reclusive and regressive, though he brings a greater sensitivity to fantasy writing than most other ‘heroes’ who populate the genre. Harrison’s mixing of philosophy, pseudo-science and black comedy works here because of the strength of the language with which he tells his tale. This language was to be honed to an even greater edge in the sequel, A Storm of Wings (1980).

Before this, however, he was to attempt another purely SF work. His weakest novel by far, The Centauri Device (1974), nevertheless has some high points. This book perhaps owes something to Alfred Bester in its manic delivery and space-operatic theme. A space-tramp, John Truck, is variously sought by interested parties across the galaxy—as the last Centauran, his genetic-code alone is able to detonate the awesome weapon of the title. Needless to say, and in direct contrast to Bester’s optimism in his own similar works, the device is duly detonated and the galaxy is destroyed. The mysterious Dr. Grishkin, first encountered in “Lamia Mutable”, here returns as the leader of a strange cult whose members are a strange hybrid of anarchist and aesthete.

The second Viriconium novel, A Storm of Wings, found Harrison back on more comfortable territory. But right from the beginning of this novel it was obvious that he had largely abandoned the simple theatrics of The Pastel City. In this fantasy there is no escapism: there is absurdity aplenty, but it is a claustrophobic sort of madness, akin to that of the real world. This was the direction that Harrison’s work was to increasingly follow; at one point, it seemed that Viriconium was going to transmute into a kind of ‘kitchen-sink’ fantasy, in which the problems of the imagined world were at the very least identical to our own. A Storm of Wings is wondrously written—Harrison’s skill with words has turned a ridiculous tale of invading sentient insects into a poignant parable reflecting the human condition in the eternal present of all possible worlds. A civilisation on the verge of collapse has rarely been presented with so much metaphysical pertinence.

The Viriconium stories that followed were even bolder in pushing the fantasy genre up uncharted and precipitous paths. Replete with quasi-Celtic overtones and Sartrian undercurrents, In Viriconium (1982) rejects all grand plotting to concentrate on the realities of two main characters, Audsley King and Ashlyme, both artists who dwell (and then swell) in the City during the time of a plague. Audsley is dying of the disease and Ashlyme misguidedly attempts to save her—all his actions and subsequent ‘adventures’ come to nothing. It is a drab and depressing conclusion, but one enlivened by the (albeit dampened) bohemian ambience of the setting, the Artist’s Quarter.

After In Viriconium came a collection of stories, Viriconium Nights (1984), many of which are more like intense prose-poems than real tales. Harrison’s very best writing can be found here—a sly eye may perceive less despair in the tales than might be at first expected. While it is true that the characters are not well-defined, the dynamic of each piece, subtle and strange, permits of no other treatment than that which Harrison has given it. They are perfect works, never classically pure, but closely-woven and memorable. Harrison might have done well in the company of Camus and Bataille save that he has no philosophical axe to grind—unless it be the ice-axe of unsentimental Humanism.