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There was a definite strand of 1970s ennui in my reading last year. Apart from Christopher Priest’s A Dream of Wessex, I read M. John Harrison’s Viriconium sequence, or most of it, and not, at first, in the order they were collected in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series. I came across In Viriconium first, in the Oxfam Bookshop on St Giles, that place which persuades one that buying books in the name of charity isn’t to be considered spending money. It was not light reading, but not as bleak an experience as China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, which I read a few years ago. The idea of a society whose dinner-party going elite have withdrawn from their responsibility to the commonwealth, instead blaming ‘gods’ for their misfortunes in whose random materialisations and street brawls they similarly take minimal interest, has continued resonance because as British politics in the 1970s – the name Viriconium expresses a particularly British alternative reality – was arguably characterised by the political elite retreating behind barricades in the face of strikes, inflation and sclerotic manufacturing industry, whereas today’s politicians propose managerial solutions to severe structural problems and appear to be even more afraid to challenge public opinion than their predecessors three decades ago. Appropriately, the two gods of Viriconium are time-travelling wizards who have arrived in Viriconium by mistake, and the death of one leads to the transformation of the other and his release from reflecting the chaos of the city.
An earlier Viriconium novel, this one read from the Gollancz collected volume, The Pastel City provides a context which one feels Harrison came to find less useful as he went on: Viriconium is the last city at the end of human civilization, which comes to equate to the end of time itself, hence perhaps the multiple realities through which some of his characters, particularly in the short stories, travel; the story placed last in the sequence explicitly presents Viriconium as a reflection of our distorted world, approached through a mirror in a restaurant toilet in Huddersfield. Meanwhile, in The Pastel City the brain-devouring geteit chemosit are a rogue device intended to perpetuate a past society, and instead are destroying the Viriconian present, hitherto in quiet decline. Once the people of the past are reborn – symbolically, from their brains – they have only confused memories of their earlier lives and no practical idea about what to do in their new ones, leading in A Storm of Wings to further social breakdown and the retreat of hope. Our heroes are compromised figures whose names suggest the weariness of fantasy trappings, the most obvious, but most memorable, being Tomb the Dwarf, who acquires various arcane items of and learning about technology which are either destructive, or which he is unable or unwilling to remember, or both. Another is the world-weary tegeus-Cromis, a once heroic knight gone into retirement because he can no longer see the point of defending the city against the dark. He is a leading figure in The Pastel City, and also appears, in a different version of ‘Uriconium’ in the short story The Lamia and Lord Cromis, which ends with him throwing his sword into the mere, and then his rings and other jewels of power and status, without gaining any satisfaction. The Viriconium saga concerns the limits of mythology and the human understanding of the universe in the face of vast natural forces; by its way, it’s a bridge between Middle Earth and the Discworld, but that way goes further in both directions. I think that the sequence would definitely repay a further visit (and I still need to read all the short stories) but I would need stamina.
Another author whose work I rediscovered through the Oxfam Bookshop is Keith Roberts. I read Pavane a long time ago, but wasn’t convinced by the premise of its alternative history. Perhaps I would reconsider now. The book I read this year was The Lordly Ones, a collection of short stories published in 1986. The title story and the later ‘The Comfort Station’ concern a lavatory attendant with learning difficulties and how he copes with a civil war, apparently involving youth violence. My favourite story, though, was ‘Ariadne Potts’, about a statue of a nymph in a landscape garden which is wished into life by a bank clerk, Henry Potts, and becomes his wife who transforms his life beyond a point for which Henry is prepared. The ending is as expected but still poignant and evokes much about how love affairs can go wrong.
Finally, I used my last day as the recipient of a discount with one particular publisher to buy some eighteenth-century books I haven’t read yet, including The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. I like Walpole as a correspondent, as a judge of character, as a political intriguer (he was a kind of spin-doctor in the 1750s and 1760s), and as an incorrigible gossip. I like the idea of his having sealed his correspondence in chests with instructions that his heir should open the chest fifty years after his death, generating expectations of riches, and instead revealing hundreds of letters. The first edition was published as a literary spoof, constructed by Walpole to pander to the prejudices of his contemporaries about the superstitious, uncivil, ‘Gothic’ middle ages. Otranto also displays a fascination with aristocratic genealogy that Walpole and I share; the plot, such as it is, revolves around the rightful line of succession to the principality of Otranto, and how the principal of heredity demands that the sins of the fathers are ultimately visited on the grandson, though they may be redeemed by the virtue of the granddaughter. Dynastic succession can help guarantee good order but it can also institutionalise crime: the need to perpetuate the dynasty causes Manfred, prince of Otranto, to put aside his wife once his son Conrad dies and stalk his ward Isabella, to whom Conrad was engaged, through the eponymous castle. Walpole throws element after element into the mix – a handsome youth or two, and a Catholic Father who turns out really to be someone’s father. The atmosphere of the opening chapters is very, very good but the story gets too involved and one feels that Walpole, like this reader, was in a hurry to finish by the end – the joke was played out. I should really read it again, and then, perhaps, turn to Mrs Radcliffe.
An earlier Viriconium novel, this one read from the Gollancz collected volume, The Pastel City provides a context which one feels Harrison came to find less useful as he went on: Viriconium is the last city at the end of human civilization, which comes to equate to the end of time itself, hence perhaps the multiple realities through which some of his characters, particularly in the short stories, travel; the story placed last in the sequence explicitly presents Viriconium as a reflection of our distorted world, approached through a mirror in a restaurant toilet in Huddersfield. Meanwhile, in The Pastel City the brain-devouring geteit chemosit are a rogue device intended to perpetuate a past society, and instead are destroying the Viriconian present, hitherto in quiet decline. Once the people of the past are reborn – symbolically, from their brains – they have only confused memories of their earlier lives and no practical idea about what to do in their new ones, leading in A Storm of Wings to further social breakdown and the retreat of hope. Our heroes are compromised figures whose names suggest the weariness of fantasy trappings, the most obvious, but most memorable, being Tomb the Dwarf, who acquires various arcane items of and learning about technology which are either destructive, or which he is unable or unwilling to remember, or both. Another is the world-weary tegeus-Cromis, a once heroic knight gone into retirement because he can no longer see the point of defending the city against the dark. He is a leading figure in The Pastel City, and also appears, in a different version of ‘Uriconium’ in the short story The Lamia and Lord Cromis, which ends with him throwing his sword into the mere, and then his rings and other jewels of power and status, without gaining any satisfaction. The Viriconium saga concerns the limits of mythology and the human understanding of the universe in the face of vast natural forces; by its way, it’s a bridge between Middle Earth and the Discworld, but that way goes further in both directions. I think that the sequence would definitely repay a further visit (and I still need to read all the short stories) but I would need stamina.
Another author whose work I rediscovered through the Oxfam Bookshop is Keith Roberts. I read Pavane a long time ago, but wasn’t convinced by the premise of its alternative history. Perhaps I would reconsider now. The book I read this year was The Lordly Ones, a collection of short stories published in 1986. The title story and the later ‘The Comfort Station’ concern a lavatory attendant with learning difficulties and how he copes with a civil war, apparently involving youth violence. My favourite story, though, was ‘Ariadne Potts’, about a statue of a nymph in a landscape garden which is wished into life by a bank clerk, Henry Potts, and becomes his wife who transforms his life beyond a point for which Henry is prepared. The ending is as expected but still poignant and evokes much about how love affairs can go wrong.
Finally, I used my last day as the recipient of a discount with one particular publisher to buy some eighteenth-century books I haven’t read yet, including The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. I like Walpole as a correspondent, as a judge of character, as a political intriguer (he was a kind of spin-doctor in the 1750s and 1760s), and as an incorrigible gossip. I like the idea of his having sealed his correspondence in chests with instructions that his heir should open the chest fifty years after his death, generating expectations of riches, and instead revealing hundreds of letters. The first edition was published as a literary spoof, constructed by Walpole to pander to the prejudices of his contemporaries about the superstitious, uncivil, ‘Gothic’ middle ages. Otranto also displays a fascination with aristocratic genealogy that Walpole and I share; the plot, such as it is, revolves around the rightful line of succession to the principality of Otranto, and how the principal of heredity demands that the sins of the fathers are ultimately visited on the grandson, though they may be redeemed by the virtue of the granddaughter. Dynastic succession can help guarantee good order but it can also institutionalise crime: the need to perpetuate the dynasty causes Manfred, prince of Otranto, to put aside his wife once his son Conrad dies and stalk his ward Isabella, to whom Conrad was engaged, through the eponymous castle. Walpole throws element after element into the mix – a handsome youth or two, and a Catholic Father who turns out really to be someone’s father. The atmosphere of the opening chapters is very, very good but the story gets too involved and one feels that Walpole, like this reader, was in a hurry to finish by the end – the joke was played out. I should really read it again, and then, perhaps, turn to Mrs Radcliffe.
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