The Floating Gods

Viriconium #3

by M. John Harrison

Third book in the Viriconium sequence. The city is beset by a mysterious plague that affects the artists quarter and drains their vitality and hope. As artist Audsley King slowly dies from the plague, her friend Ashlyme tries to save her, and the result is at turns comic, tragic, and absurd. Much less fantastic in tone, it could be set in an alternate London.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Science Fiction, Dying Earth, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Weird Fiction

159 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

aka Gabriel King (with Jane Johnson)

Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

M. John Harrison's prose is filled with a rich, idiosyncratic music, and the structure of his "Viriconium" novels is musical too.

If The Pastel City is a late symphony by Beethoven (a classical, conventionally constructed work, filled with individualistic energy, straining to break its bonds), and if A Storm of Wings is a symphony by Mahler (brooding beauties from an immense modern orchestra, fragmented in its structure, held together by unexpected key changes and passages of dark humor), then In Viriconium must be a piece of chamber music: at first deceptively simple, then darkening like a string quintet by Schubert--something he wrote after the spirochetes and a cosmic melancholy had come to call--it soon begins to teem with modernist effects, surprising atonalities and bleak burlesque, no longer Schubert but a "Weimar Republic" homage to Schubert, by Alban Berg or perhaps Kurt Weill.

Three very different kinds of music indeed, but they complement each other.

[Glenn Russell]

In Viriconium or The Floating Gods - Third book in the British author's Viriconium cycle, a short novel of great poetic power. But, beware, this is hardly a feel good adventure tale within the genres of either science fiction or fantasy. Nay, with In Viriconium we visit the city in the grip of plague, in many respects we might as well be back in medieval Europe during the Black Death, but with M. John Harrison's yarn there's some serious off-the-wall weirdness brewing.

Weirdness, as in the common people inhabiting the Lower City enshrouded in plague not in the usual sense but a kind of thin fog whereby they age quickly or fall victim to various debilitating illnesses. Meanwhile, the Upper City, although spared the fog's deadly infestation, sinks into decadence on all levels: material, spiritual, intellectual, artistic.

Weirdness, as in the twin princes of the city, the fat, meaty Barley brothers ("they weren't human, that's a fact") rumble and bumble, belch, fart and vomit while playing the part of mindless pranksters on stairways and bridges and garden patches, in streams and in the city's oddest corners. They even try to sell the rats they've cudgeled to shocked restauranteurs. Where did these two ominous slubberdegullions come from, really? Perhaps a new form of Reborn Men or outer space alien readers encountered in A Storm of Wings?

Weirdness, as in two heroes initially encountered in The Pastel City bent and transformed almost beyond recognition: Cellur the Brdmaker keeps to his room in an old tower, collects stuffed birds, apparently has lost his memory and admits he doesn't know how old he is. Tomb the dwarf now calls himself The Grand Cairo and heads the city as something of a counter to the Barley brothers. He even has his own police force. The Grand Cairo is a major player in the world of In Viriconium but you will have to look hard to detect any of the old noble fire so present in the first two novels in the cycle.

The tale is told in five chapters represented by five tarot cards, a tale revolving around Ashlyme the portrait painter attempting to rescue another artist, Audsley King, from her plight as a ravaged plague victim in the Lower City. Similar to A Storm of Wings, the language throughout is high baroque, an entire baroque cathedral made of words, thus the challenge for a reviewer to convey the inner spirit of the book since the story is all in the precise way it is told. With this in mind, I'll shift to a number of In Viriconium direct quotes relating to the city's arts and literature and link my comments with these:

"He hung the painting in different places to find the best light and stood in front of them for long periods, thrilled by the stacked planes of the landscapes, the disquieting eros of her inner world."

Ashlyme is viewing a series of Audsley King paintings. M. John Harrison doesn't describe the paintings in detail; rather, he delineates Ashlyme's reactions to them. In this way, we as readers are free to imagine the paintings for ourselves.

"He touched the mask with his fingers. It was the head of a trout, to which someone had added thick rubbery lips and a ludicrous crest of spines."

Ashlyme dons a grotesque mask as a disguise in his attempt to carry Audsley out of the Low City. The rubber fish mask covers his head completely and can be seen as a microcosm for the grotesqueness of the entire city.

"He was popular in the salons. The Marchioness "L" called on him, with a new novelist."

A snatch from a conversation Ashlyme has with decadent aristocrats from the Upper City. I would dearly love to read one of this novelist's novels! I would guess the story told is a cross between Boccaccio's The Decameron and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.

"In this case he had done the painting over a group portrait of the Baroness de B -- and her family which had never been collected from the studio. As the wet summer advanced and the new paint began to fade, the image of the Baroness was beginning to reemerge in the form of a very old woman holding a flower, slowly absorbing and distorting the figure of Audsley King."

Ashlyme reuses the same canvas to save on his resources. Such a vivid image of a city pulled down into decadence - the old Baroness emerging to engulf a great vital young artist.

"A self-portrait painted at about this time. "Kneeling with raised arms," shows him, his eyes squeezed closed, apparently crawling and groping his way about his own studio, a whitish empty space. He seems to have come up against some sort of invisible barrier, against which he is pressing one side of his face so that it is distorted and whitened into a mask of frustration and despair."

One of the many invisible barriers Ashlyme must break through if he is to be more of a positive force in the city he dearly loves.

"And the longer he stayed in his studio, biting his pen, listening to the rain dripping in the attic, trying to conjure up in his mind's eye a picture of the thin, intense provincial girl who had arrived in Viriconium twenty years ago to shock the artistic establishment of the day with the suppressed violence and frozen sexual somnambulism of her self-portraits."

One can only wonder how Audsley King captured her own "frozen sexual somnambulism" in her self-portrait, keeping in mind such a person engages in sexual acts while in non rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep.

"Out of the tarot cards on the floor came an intense coloured flare of light, as if they had been illuminated suddenly from behind. Ashlyme felt it flash across his face, green and yellow, scarlet and deep blue, like light from a melting stain-glass window."

The tarot cards are from the deck of fortune teller Fat Man Etteilla. This passage is an example of the rich, ornate visual impact on nearly every page.

After reading In Viriconium, Neil Gailman noted how he now sees all cities having a Lower City and an Upper City, and how, in a certain way, all cities are Viriconium. I've had this experience myself.


British author M. John Harrison, Born 1945

[Jack Tripper · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mysterious plague is sweeping through Viriconium’s artistic quarter in the Low City, and it’s a quarantine zone. The rich, stuffy types in the High City aren’t too concerned that their greatest living artist, Audsley King, is slowly wasting away. The whole lower district seems to be wasting away. Not just the people, but the buildings and streets as well. It’s changing. Foggy. Semi-famous portraitist Ashlyme means to rescue King before it’s too late for her. But it seems fate, and the very gods of Viriconium, manifested in human form as two insufferable drunken louts, are against him.

This third entry in the Viriconium sequence wasn’t quite as captivating for me as A Storm of Wings (which was probably my favorite read of the past few years), but that may have something to do with the fact that I was never entirely certain as to the exact nature of the growing plague. The symptoms are so vague, and people from the High City are seemingly allowed to come and go as they please with no fear of contamination, that it was a bit difficult to remain fully immersed. I’m sure this murkiness was intended by Harrison, but it still made it hard to picture everything.

Good thing this book is loaded with memorable characters, some of whom appeared before in the series, though they are different here, as the reality of Viriconium is forever unsteady and changing. Take Tomb the dwarf (from The Pastel City), formerly an honorable warrior, now a corrupt, possibly psychotic police chief going by the title “The Grand Cairo.” And who’s the wizened old man with his ever-growing collection of stuffed birds?

It’s also much lighter and more humorous than previous entries, which were mostly deadly serious, and that made it a much faster read. A couple moments even bordered on genuine slapstick. Just pure deranged lunacy. It’s every bit as inventive and strange as the others, though. And beautifully told as well.

It’s amazing to me how different each volume in this series has been so far, and while normally I’d always suggest that newcomers start at the beginning, here I don’t think it matters, as they are all uniquely their own thing. Lovers of fantasy and weird fiction should not sleep on Harrison. He’s the real deal. It just took some time for me to realize it.

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this mostly unsettling, though at turns humorous if not silly. Everything in Viriconium feels blurry around the edges, and mired in melancholy. Part of the mystique. If nothing else, the story leaves the impression of a scathing critique of the artist's plight. A plague afflicts the low city and its artists quarter, slowly sapping everyone and everything of vitality and encroaching on the high city with its well-to-do patrons and their increasingly banal tastes that are responsible for the destruction of the artistic impulse.

Atop this plague and the general pervasive damp, rot and decay (and the inexplicable and often overlapping construction) within the city we are presented with some enigmatic characters in the form of the founders and leaders of the city, the dwarf "The Grand Cairo" and his "masters", the Barley brothers. The dwarf is a frightful fellow. Highly capricious, mercurial and murderous. The brothers never overtly anything more than drunken, vile and mocking, yet through rumors and stories, many of dubious credulity, as well as the dwarf's own suspicions, they are ascribed ancient, godly origins and dubious intentions. The three are perhaps metaphors representing chaos or man's cruel and fickle nature.

Ashlyme, essentially the story's protagonist, is also an interesting character. A perpetual observer, ineffectual and seemingly paralyzed by indecision. He is a portrait artist who seems to peer too deeply into others souls, portraying aspects of his subjects that are unseemly, yet strangely admired by clients.

While reading this it helps to be in the mood for something atmospheric and vague. The plot, such as it is, takes a backseat to the setting. Not unlike, to a certain extent at least, something from from Jeff VanderMeer or China Miéville.

[Szplug · Rating 4 out of 5]

With In Viriconium, the novella that comprises the third part of Harrison's tetrad, we arrive fully into the twilit mystery of the great chromatic city and its cryptic story: gone are the neo-feudal battles and heroic swordplay from the first book, the baroque arcana and incongruous metaphysical dichotomy between chitin and flesh that thickened the second. From start to finish we are in a Viriconium that is both recognizable and alien, native and foreign, comfortable and disturbing. The street names are familiar, but tegeus-Cromis would gaze upon the denizens of the High City with an uncomprehending eye, a medieval warrior stranded amidst a metropolis concerned only with frills and frippery, with tired prurience and distraction, that recalls the decadent apathy of Baudelairean Paris. Harrison has elevated his art to a new level, depicting a decrepitude and decay - physical, mental, spiritual - that has infected not only the commoners of the Low City and the aristocrats of the High, but the very structures and thoroughfares themselves. Enervation has come to define the city, which remains a capital, but of an Empire that is neither seen nor sensed. For all we know, the world, the very universe ends at the city's edge - and lethargic Viriconium and its desperate, despairing citizenry are enacting the final act of a macabre, sepulchral play before Time, one in which the sole onlooker, though thoroughly weary and distracted, still manages to croak out a laugh every now and then.

The story is centered around Ashlyme, a portrait painter of the High City who captures his patrons with a cruel accuracy. He is enraptured by Audsley King - the foremost artist in Viriconium, who has bedazzled the city with her self-portraits and scapes of startling hues, veiled violence, and cobwebbed sexuality. Audsley has fallen victim to the plague, an enigmatic affliction that has been visited upon the Low City in the form of a thin, filmy fog; whatever has been touched by this mist becomes apathetic and rundown: roads crater, brickwork crumbles, humans stumble in a somnambulant daze - and tasks are left undone, meals uneaten, drawings half-finished. The arrival of the plague coincided with that of the Barley Brothers, apocryphal sky gods or sorcerous Reborn Men who have fallen from their former heavenly projected eminence into the bloated forms of a pair of raucous and smelly football hooligans who amuse a grateful citizenry with their drunken antics and rowdy horseplay. The Barleys are accompanied by a strange dwarf out of the north, a half-pint mixture of urbane vanity and acrobatic violence who has set himself - with the title of Grand Cairo - in opposition to what passes as rule by the loutish twins. In an aimless and hopeless time, these two governments are conducting senseless building programs, creating police forces, and enforcing a quarantine to try and stem the plague's advance; however, all they seem capable of is importing the native violence, surveillance, conspiracies, and paranoia of the grim, wind-swept barbarian north. Having risen from out of these wasted gutters, the Barleys and Grand Cairo would drag all back in.

Ashlyme is endeavoring, against pandemic procrastination, to spirit Audsley out of her studio in the Low City - which the plague has claimed - to the Higher reaches that have so far resisted the latter's steady, remorseless advance. He sees in Audsley the princess requiring rescue, the sole remaining exemplar of all that art should be in an age seeking only comfort and diversion from an enduring malaise. But with the allies he has been given (including an enthusiastic, but senescent, astronomer and the Grand Cairo himself); the sneering Barley's and their rat-hunting dogs; the haughty artistic elite and their ineffectual patrons; the crumbling, deceptive nature of the Low City warrens; and the advancing instability of Audsley herself, this won't prove an easy task to accomplish. It is fully possible that these listless dwellers of Viriconium, adrift in the Evening Culture's anemic current, have created the plague themselves - and if this is so, it will require more than the desperate efforts of Ashlyme to dispel its pernicious and deadly effects.

In Viriconium is just about perfect. Its themes are ones the Harrison has a powerful resonance with, and this melancholy and creaky decay is imbued with a wonderful comedic touch and a sinister menace in equal proportions. The Barleys and the Cairo are superb creations - especially the latter with his ridiculous mannerisms and shamanistic slyness. The tale is unfolded in five chapters that coincide with the pentad of Tarot cards that are played by the fortuneteller Fat Mam Eteilla (a carryover from Storm) in her divinations, and which are integral in the hazy nowhere notime that enshrouds this conurbation of variegated parts and periods and its ambiguous connections with the past and future. A unique work in the annals of fantasy, a smoky, darkling mirror image of our own world, one in which a weak science and pallid reason are vainly struggling against the pull of inertia and sleepy magic. The series reaches its apogee with this effort - but the short stories that makeup the final work, Viriconium Nights , would see Harrison attempting to climb ever higher.

[Kat Hooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.

In this third volume of the VIRICONIUM omnibus, we visit the old artists’ quarter of Viriconium — a lazy decaying place where gardens bloom and the smell of black currant gin exudes from the taverns where the increasingly lackadaisical citizens used to sit and talk about art and philosophy. This part of the city used to be vibrant and innovative, but it has been deteriorating as a psychological plague has been creeping in from the high city. The artists’ patrons, infected by this plague of mediocrity, have become dreamy and only want to purchase uninspired sentimental watercolor landscapes. And all they want to talk about is the debauched antics of the Barley Brothers, a couple of twins who act like buffoons but are rumored to be demi-gods.

Ashlyme is a renowned artist whose cruel portraits are known for their ability to capture and emphasize his subjects’ unflattering personality traits. He’s concerned about Audsley King, another famous painter who is succumbing to the plague. With the help of his scientifically minded friend and a cruel dwarf who calls himself the Grand Cairo, Ashlyme plans to transport Audsley to a part of the city where the plague has not yet reached, thinking that she may recover. Their plans go awry and end up like an episode of The Three Stooges.

The Floating Gods (aka In Viriconium) is funny, witty, and brilliantly written with sharp humorous insights into disagreeable human behavior. As the plague crept closer, I could feel the beloved city of Viriconium decaying — its fountains drying up and its gardens becoming unkempt and shabby. Like the previous book, A Storm of Wings, The Floating Gods is intensely atmospheric. This is a better book, though, because the atmosphere is balanced by humor and plot. This is my favorite VIRICONIUM book so far. Now I’m moving on to the last part, a collection of stories called Viriconium Nights.

I’m listening to the wonderful audiobook version of the entire VIRICONIUM saga which is produced by Neil Gaiman Presents and narrated by Simon Vance.

[Oscar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Algo está pasando en Viriconium. Una zona de la ciudad, la Ciudad Baja de Viriconium, está siendo afectada por una extraña plaga que afecta tanto a edificios como a personas por igual. Como se dice en la novela, "es difícil describir la plaga." La gente sucumbe a enfermedades, tales como la tisis o la gripe, y los edificios se deterioran y envejecen hasta caer en la decadencia. Existe una policía de la plaga que mantiene la zona en cuarentena, y así evitar filtraciones hacia y desde la Ciudad Alta, donde residen los aristócratas. Este es el oscuro escenario en el que vive Ashlyme, el protagonista, un retratista que reside en la Ciudad Alta y que intenta por todos los medios hacer que Audsley King, una pintora de renombre, abandone la zona infectada. Para conseguir su propósito, buscará la ayuda de su amigo Emmet, científico; pero también se cruzará en su camino unos personajes bastante singulares y peligrosos, como son el Gran Cairo y los hermanos Barley.

Con 'En Viriconium' (incluida en España dentro de 'Nocturnos de Viriconium'), M. John Harrison deja aparte la fantasía épica que caracterizaba las anteriores novelas de la serie, sumergiéndonos en cambio en una historia extraña y extraordinaria, con ciertos toques de humor negro, donde las imágenes sugeridas inundan tu imaginación.

"Viriconium es todas las ciudades que alguna vez ha habido.

[Nathan Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Viriconium sequence is one of those rare works in SFF that manages to be both celebrated/acclaimed and criminally under-the-radar simultaneously. Slightly off the beaten path when it comes to the realm of "classics", especially in the way of science-fantasy titans like Dune, The Dying Earth, Hyperion and The Book of the New Sun. I read The Pastel City a few years back, and its followup, A Storm of Wings perhaps a year later. I greatly enjoy the former being a pastiche of Sword & Sorcery/Moorcockian/Leiber-ish qualities, love the latter for its dazzling experimental trippiness, and the third novel in the sequence is also very much its own beast.

A stunningly brilliant novel that scratches those very particular itches when it comes to SFF-- a story rife with melancholy and grotesquery, but one that is understated and reveals a beauty of its own kind trough the use of its clear, but highly evocative prose. One that doesn't dive into heroics or violence as the driving source of conflict, but rather one that highlights the importance of art in an apathetic world. A perfect example of how fantasy doesn't need several hundreds of pages to craft a compelling narrative or give an adrenaline shot to the imagination of the reader.

Absolute perfection.

[Billie Tyrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed this much more than the 2nd book as it's a complete change of pace, almost feels like a totally different setting and that's kind of the beauty of Virconium in that it shifts and changes but the prior two books don't really take much advantage of this IMHO.

Still not the best thing I've ever read but weird enough to be memorable.

[Vlad]

surreal beauty and subtle horror, ineffable essence of a world that seems to sink into the mist on the edge of reality, deranged gods drift on the wind like clouds

[Edward Rathke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is definitely an interesting turn in the loose trilogy. It's so distant and distinct from the other two that it's hard to compare it to them. I enjoyed it, but I think my expectations colored my reading. Storm of Wings was so unbelievably amazing that I was hoping for another book like that. This is much more subdued, more about living in the Pastel City, while the others are epics about defending or curing it. There's a plague, but it never seems very ominous, regardless how widespread it is.

And the whole story is sort of shadowed by the previous two novels. There are echoes of them in here, which is very interesting, and, of course, it sort of subverts those novels and what they built.

A very solid book, and maybe deserving of five stars, but I can't bring myself to give that extra star here.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this short novel was fantastic, and made me want to dig much deeper into the Viriconium collection. The main threat in this novel is a supernatural plague which bleeds Viriconium and its inhabitants of their vibrancy and lifeforce, and allows Harrison shows off his talent for writing the most beautiful descriptions of ugly, diseased, corrupt things. There are also murderous dwarves, tarot cards and in-depth discussions on painting and art, but beneath it all is the consistent theme of Harrison's work: fantastic fiction cannot exist outside of the culture that produces it.

[Jay Kay · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bounced off this installment of the Viriconium Sequence strongly, I am really struggling to understand the glowing reviews I have read because this book just wasn't for me. There is no story here, banal purple prose about the decaying low city of Viriconium and the "plague" engulfing the artists quarter framed through the actions of an artist Ashlyme King and his love interest? Audsley King.

I kept asking myself what is the point of this? Who are the barley brothers and why do they roll around the city provoking mayhem and generally acting like a pair of neuro divergent orphans in desperate need of a home and a family? Why does any of this matter and how can these events be described as a story? Did I simply fail to understand this book?

I was bored to tears! Harrison has a dense, poetic and literary style so I was holding out for something to happen. Unfortunately nothing really happens and I just didn't care about any of the characters. Yes the omnipresent, omniversal city is here(the only thing I liked about this story); Viriconium in its ageing fragmented splendour, back streets and pavilions. However the story revolves around a cast of about 5 or 6 characters and the stakes are low, almost non-existent which makes the story feel small and which is at odds with the grand setting that the ancient metropolis Viriconium is .

The "plague" is abstract and amorphous no explanation is given for it's origin or purpose, it's a narrative device that seems completely useless on inspection. I ask why bother to write about a plague spreading across a city where there is no sense of urgency or panic about it's impact on the present or the future?

I am baffled about "In Viriconium" I am struggling to review it because I don't understand it at all, I really don't like books that waste my time and I am unhappy that the time lost reading this will never be recouped.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Liked this one better than the second book. Storm of Wings had some really cool stuff in it, but it was often kinda hard to read what with all the confusing shifts in perspective and such. This one was a little different in overall story and perspective, but the ideas were...less outlandish. Definitely an interesting read, though.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this in one go with Viriconium Nights, and basically I can copy paste the review from that book here verbatim:

What I said about A Storm of Wings: 'I wanted to like it more than I did.' also goes for this book, but I did like it better.

There was more focus on the actual city, which has a weird vibe which I did like. The sometimes meandering or even lagging plot of the stories was a bit off putting sometimes, this certainly was no page turner.

As an influence on writers as Jeff Vandermeer and K.J. Bishop the importance can not be overstated, but I'd recommend this mostly to people wanting to dive into the roots of the New Weird genre.

[Benjamin Manglos · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as "In Viriconium" in the Viriconium collection so I don't know if there are any differences, but I really enjoyed this short novel. It reminded me a lot of Dostoyevski's works and had a lot of the same appeal. It really is barely a fantasy novel and much more a work of literature. I can honestly say I've never read another both quite like it.

[Dmadden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Man into fish; fish into man! Get over it. Excellent.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably my all-time favourite novel. I've read it dozens of times and still adore it. 'You may have any of these things. They are all very lucky.' 'A traditional wedding gift in the Mingulay Peninsula'. 'They finished the wine and even the pilchards.' A library as an astronomer's 'exterior brain.' The Barley Brothers, 'ousted out of Birmingham and Wolverhampton.' 'It entitled him to wear a sword. He had one somewhere, in a cupboard.' Exquisite, profoundly sad, and fascinatingly allusive/elusive/illusive at the same time. I often feel I'm living in Endingall Street chanting 'man into fish fish into man' as I rock to and fro in my dilapidated armchair. How can I get a ticket for 'Die Traumunden Knaben'?

[Evan]

Feels like a grand ending to Viriconium. It is more Viriconium-y than anything in the series up until this point, it is also less straight-forward narratively.
Feels as though it is really constructed through images and language - it is all unstable and ephemeral. It feels like it was constructed line-by-line, each sentence and paragraph is made to be read and re-read. It is a book that knows it exists on the page.

I will re-read this series at some point, I think that is the only way to really do it justice.

[C · Rating 2 out of 5]

At first, the relative clarity of the narrative compared to A Storm of Wings was a welcome change. However, I found most of the early part of the book dull, apart from one scene. This story is mostly devoid of the adventure of the Pastel City or even A Storm of Wings. Late in the book, more (potentially) exciting events start to happen again, but what is really going on is murky and weird like A Storm of Wings, but without the sense of foreboding that kept that book somewhat interesting.

[C · Rating 2 out of 5]

At first, the relative clarity of the narrative compared to A Storm of Wings was a welcome change. However, I found most of the early part of the book dull, apart from one scene. This story is mostly devoid of the adventure of the Pastel City or even A Storm of Wings. Late in the book, more (potentially) exciting events start to happen again, but what is really going on is murky and weird like A Storm of Wings, but without the sense of foreboding that kept that book somewhat interesting.

[Wan · Rating 1 out of 5]

That's gonna be a no from me, dawg. Harrison has lost the thread here. This isn't even about Viriconium. It's about Bohemian artists living in a slum. A lot of moping about and navel-gazing to reach an ending from a bad 80's movie.

[Eleazar Herrera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cada vez entiendo más lo que dicen de Harrison, el escritor para los escritores. El gran protagonista de su obra (no de este libro) es un caballero que prefiere llamarse poeta, y Harrison es un escritor que prefiere llamarse poeta.

[Javier · Rating 3 out of 5]

Viriconium... o como algunos dicen, Uriconium...

[James DiGiovanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Umm...huh.

[A L]

Like a kitchen sink realism movie about petty-bourgeois artists except in a fantastic setting.

[Yared · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hooting, hollering, etc.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It was the voice of someone who wakes in a bare room in an unknown city; stares dully at the washstand and the disordered bed; and having pulled open every empty drawer turns at last to the window and the empty streets below, only to discover she has lived here all her life"

[Brother · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
Strange , Kafkaesque and a bit funny tale of a city gone mad.

[Roddy Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘In Viriconium’ follows the satirist and diarist Ashlyme, a man who, much like Goya, is commissioned by jaded society figures and paints them unflatteringly, exposing their inner natures.
A plague is spreading across the city and when the boundaries of its infection expand to cover the home and studio of fellow artist Audsley King, Ashlyme resolves to remove her from the plague-zone by whatever means.
Thus begins a complex and haunting narrative in which Ashlyme becomes willingly or unwillingly involved with other residents of Viriconium. There is the Fat Mam, Audsley’s companion and fortune-teller. Cellur, the ancient alien creator of the metal birds from ‘The Pastel City’ makes an appearance, separated from his stored memories and unable to remember his previous life or indeed, how old he really is.
Reality is beginning to break down within the city. Another dwarf, The Great Cairo, appears to be sharing his control over the City with the Barley Brothers, a couple of Gods or at least elemental forces who have taken on human form only to revel in the excesses of human stupidity and intoxication.
Attempts to rescue Audsley, who resists the notion that she needs to be saved, end in various failures. The Great Cairo, who involves himself in the scheme for his own self-aggrandisement, kills one of the women who impede them from smuggling a drugged Audsley away from the plague zone. He then pins the murder on his accomplices and blackmails Ashlyme into assisting him with various schemes of his own, including the wooing of the Fat Mam, for whom the Great Cairo has developed a passion.
Throughout, the City itself broods in the background, sinking under the weight of its detritus.