In Pursuit of the Imagination
Nine Elusive Books
Viriconium contains Harrison’s marvelous short novel “In Viriconium” and several short stories set in the city or its environs. The novel follows the portrait painter Ashlyme’s disasterous attempts to rescue fellow painter Audsley King from the plague zone of the city. The plague is
...difficult to describe. It had begun some months before. It was not a plague in the ordinary sense of the word. It was a kind of thin-ness, a transparency. Within it people aged quickly, or succumbed to debilitating illness—pthisis, influenza, galloping consumption. The very buildings fell apart and began to look unkempt, ill-kept. Businesses failed. All projects dragged out indefinitely and in the end came to nothing.
The style of “In Viriconium” is elegant, the city itself as sophisticated as Paris, but twice as strange, ruled over intermittently by the Barley Brothers, two brawling siblings who may or may not be gods.
In his attempts to rescue King, Ashlyme becomes an intriguing mixture of honesty and amorality who finds himself confronted with ethical questions that he can never quite resolve to his own satisfaction.
Few imaginary cities in literature are as compelling and original as Viriconium, with the possible exception of Angela Carter’s South American city in The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman or Italo Calvino’s cities in Invisible Cities. But what really makes Viriconium an extraordinary book are the fascinating characters and plots that unfold with breathtaking effortlessness.
The Seven Who Fled (1937) by Frederic Prokosch
Some novels contain no overt element of the fantastic and, yet, in their sensibilities, the hallucinagenic surface of the prose, qualify as literature of the fantastic. The Seven Who Fled fits this most general of definitions. It tells the story of seven foreigners who, traveling near Kashgar, find that their path through China is blocked by intrigues:
There had recently been, all over Sinkiang, considerable disturbances. General Ma’s army had swept blood-thirstily through the desert; the Tungans were still waging a truculent guerilla warfare against the provincial government; the Soviet government had sent down its agents to Urumchi and Kashgar to support the Governor’s forces. The cities, the town, the tent-sprinkled plains, all rustled with distrust and detestation.
Thus, they abandon their caravan and split up, the bulk of the novel telling the story of each of the seven as they endeavor, by stealth and guile, to make the journey to Shanghai, and from there to safety.
The themes of The Seven Who Fled are much more existential than the question—who will survive and who will not?—that drives the narrative. There is a silence and a distance between the characters, within the characters, and between the characters and the forbidding landscapes that creates a corresponding space within the reader. Throughout the novel, the seven who have fled battle first and foremost their environment, and then, in their isolation, their own thoughts and repressed emotions. Some rediscover themselves and others, lost, destroy themselves.
Few books attempt to use the setting as a character, but The Seven Who Fled does so with brutal effectiveness–the reader feels this book in his or her bones; it is a gut-wrenching, fatiguing work of art. The place descriptions are among the most harshly beautiful in the English language:
