Fantastic Metropolis

The individual stories in Viriconium Nights actually stand up well by themselves—“The Luck In The Head” and “Strange Great Sins” are both particularly noteworthy. The former has echoes of Samuel Beckett’s novel MURPHY, as the lead character, Ardwick Crome the poet, straps himself into bed every morning in order to write verses—the feeling of unfair confinement liberates his mind. The names of some of the odd people who inhabit this world (Barzelletta Angst) and the watering-holes of these failed romantics (the Bistro Californium) show exactly where Harrison is coming from. Existentialism is apparently not dead: it thrives in high places, whether dizzy crags or artist’s garrets, and still intoxicates its adherents with the absinthe of abandonment.

Between In Viriconium and Viriconium Nights, two of the strangest and most remarkable experiences in fantasy writing, Harrison published a second collection of short-stories. The Ice Monkey (1983) is somewhat superior to his earlier volume of shorter fiction and contains pieces of obsidian coldness and beauty. Many of the stories are openly about rock climbing (or ice climbing in the case of the title-story.) Harrison has shuffled off the coils of allegory for the more intense and sensual purpose of direct confrontation between characters. One of the stories, the utterly impressive and powerful “Running Down”, first published in New Worlds in 1975, is the quintessential Harrison tale. This is an unambiguous exploration of the psychological relevance of the concept of entropy—a more convincing treatment of this metaphor has yet to be written. The character Lyall, who is a literal human source of chaos and destruction, meets his death in a sombre apocalypse that relies on heath and black tarn, heat-lighting and crumbling cliffs for its theatrics but really emphasises human disorder in the teeth of reality.

Another story directly concerned with climbing, “The Ice Monkey” is a more depressing affair—the main character, Jones, is as seedy as Lyall but lacks his absurd sense of auto-hubris. More disturbing are “The New Rays” and “The Incalling”, both concerned with unethical and grisly methods of medical treatment. Best of all, “Egnaro” is a sad tale of yearning, and a suitable warning to the escapist.

Harrison’s best novel, Climbers (1989), takes all its action and impulse from real-life. This is the truest of all his novels; the characters are nearly always interesting, despite their ponderous wit and assured status as failures. Journeying from crag to crag around the country, honing their abilities as climbers, they chance upon a good deal of urban mythology and a fair amount of introspection. The peaks of their own minds are there to be scaled; they are generally wary of exploring them too vigorously—perhaps the sutures of their skulls are crevasses too hazardous to cross. But they are still tormented souls, paying a heavy price for their partial realisation of escape. Climbers won the Boardman Tasker Prize for ‘Mountain Literature,’ the first work of fiction to do so.

His following book, The Course of the Heart (1992), on the other hand, balances worlds of reality and fantasy with a sure, almost glib, ease. Amplifying many of the thematic concerns explored in the stories of The Ice Monkey, Harrison presents the story of three friends (his characters, as always, elicit both empathy and irritability from the reader—none more so than Pam Stuyvesant in this book) who foolishly dabble with occult forces. At periodic intervals through history, the mysterious land known as the ‘Coeur’ shimmers into focus between the unsteady borders of a troubled Europe. Together with a ‘lost’ journal, the autobiography of thaumaturgical explorer Michael Ashman, there are elements aplenty for a half-baked adventure-fantasy. Instead, Harrison forces home his message with a skill and tact every bit as effective as the savagery of Climbers. To escape from our bruised reality, we must pay greater attention to that reality. It is necessary to understand the nature of what we wish to escape.

More recently, Harrison has made some bad choices about his subject matter and its treatment. But he has nonetheless earned himself a name as a great SF and fantasy innovator, who has taken many of the techniques learned in the genre into the mainstream. Short stories such as “Running Down” and “Egnaro” and the Viriconium novels speak for themselves: in the excellence of their prose and integrity of method, Harrison will always be above the snow-line on the fantasy mountain. While others make their way to the top by means of well-trod paths, or even mountain-railway, Harrison will be ascending a new face solo. It may always be cold and remote up there, but no better view of the whole picture is to be had.

This profile was first published in The Zone magazine (Issue #4, Summer 1996).