A Storm of Wings

Viriconium #2

by M. John Harrison

IN THE WASTELANDS OF A FUTURE WORLD, THE PASTEL CITY STYRUGGLES IN THE GRIP OF THE SIGN OF THE LOCUST...

Viriconium: The Pastel City was the last bastion of the civilzed world where Queen Methvet Nian ruled supreme. Now she watched, helpless, as the Time of the Locust became a monstrous reality, turning the inhabitants into hiedous, mindless insects.

Cellur, the Bird Lord, emerged from his underground exile, the first to respond to the call. Soon he was joined by Tomb, the Iron Dwarf, and the first of the Reborn Men, Alstath Fulthor. They journeyed to the desolate plains of the North in search of the evil's sources, only to encounter a paralysing menace that threatened to destroy their very minds...

A STORM OF WINGS is the new novel in the 'Viriconium' sequence - a brilliant tour-de-force of fantasy fiction by one of hte most strikingly original talents on the contemporary scene.

Genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Fiction, Dying Earth, Post Apocalyptic, Science Fiction Fantasy, Adventure

189 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1980

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 5 out of 5]

One of the most memorable characters in A Storm of Wings is the fabled lunanaut Benedict Paucemanly, who, after one hundred years of imprisonment on the moon, can not only no longer retain his original form, but also has difficulty maintaining any particular shape. He expands and contracts automatically, helplessly, and occasionally disintegrates into little globules resembling scores of floating clouds. His speech, although suggestive and poetic, is difficult to decipher. Occasionally he comes to resemble something akin to his former self, and the poetry he utters may be briefly united to sense, but more often he resembles a dirigible or a wraith, not so much an explorer as a vessel, not so much a hero as a ghost. The only thing he longs for is his own dissolution, the closest thing to happiness he can imagine.

Paucemanly can be seen as an ironic metaphor for A Storm of Wings when it is evaluated by the standards of a traditional fantasy novel. If it be a quest, it is a quest gone awry. The novel sets off on its explorations, sure, but soon the description--evocative and precise though it may be--expands beyond acceptable limits, and the plot contracts into small, isolated spheres of events, only occasionally re-forming into anything resembling a traditional narrative. During much of the action, three of the five characters are not only mad but periodically raving, struggling, isolated; it is as if Shakespeare stretched the King Lear storm scene out to two acts and omitted Lear and Cordelia's reconciliation entirely. Indeed, it often seems not to be a novel at all, but more like a prose poem with incidental characters (Maldoror, The Book of Disquiet and Naked Lunch come to mind). Is it surprising, then, that the book seems to be so much about decline, that it--like Benedict Paucemanly--seems to long only for oblivion?

And yet . . . M. John Harrison is a master of prose and mood, and he holds this grim pageant together with a style that is close to magical. Much of the magic lies in the vivid picture he paints of the many Viriconiums that strive for predominance--the Afternoon Culture, the Evening Culture, the Insect Swarm, and (I suspect) many other present and future Virconiums as well--asserting themselves in a surprisingly malleable present. These many Virconiums conspire to amaze the reader with their marvels, captivate his intellect with their complexity and lift up his heart with the valor of their battles and the vivid glimpses of their dark beauties. A Storm of Wings is, among other things, a powerful meditation on the nature of great cities, how each contains within itself not only the many cities of the present struggling for preeminence, but also the cities of the past and the cities that are yet to come.

[Jack Tripper · Rating 5 out of 5]

The world is not as we perceive it.
Life is a blasphemy.
Procreation is a blasphemy, for it replicates and fosters the human view of the universe.

Such is the motto of the enigmatic, murderous cult known as The Sign of the Locust, whose emergence and growth in the Pastel City of Viriconium heralds an approaching apocalypse. The source of this apocalypse seemingly comes from the moon, in the form of a telepathic alien race of giant insectoid beings. And the covert invasion has already begun.

Taking place in a far future “dying Earth” setting where the remnants of ancient technologies are almost the equivalent of magic, the fabric of reality is breaking down, changing things, and people walk around in endless states of confusion and madness. Is the madness causing reality to lose its grip, or vice versa? Or is all this originating psychically from the invading moon horde (or perhaps it’s an infinite loop, like a Möbius strip)? A small band of adventurers — most of whom previously appeared in somewhat different form in The Pastel City, though it’s not really necessary to have read it before this one — must journey to discover the nature of this growing threat to humanity in the hopes of stopping it.

This was one of the most unique and imaginative novels I’ve read, sf/f or otherwise. The first couple dozen pages were a bit confusing for me, as Harrison’s prose is so dense with imagery, yet still somehow vague and cryptic, that it took me a while to get on the right wavelength. But once I did I found myself in a fascinating, ever-shifting nightmare world “desperately trying to remember itself,” thick with ominous, haunted atmosphere. The stakes still felt real and I remained thoroughly invested throughout its entirety despite the constant disorienting surreal weirdness and overall impressionistic, dream-like feel.

Other than a couple short stories, I’d never fully connected with Harrison’s work before this, though I’ve read quite a bit of it over the years. My hope is that, much like what happened with me and Ligotti’s oeuvre back in 2008 or thereabouts, when everything suddenly “clicked”, I’ve now unlocked the part of my brain that had previously been closed off to his style. Especially since I’ve just ordered a shit ton of his books based solely on my enjoyment of this.

Oh and if you ever wanted to read about a dwarf kicking ass in a mech suit, this is your chance.

All the stars.

[Glenn Russell]

A Storm of Wings is the second volume in the Viriconium four book cycle. Smash! Boom! Bang! - the sounds of British author M. John Harrison shattering expectations and boundaries surrounding the genres of fantasy and science fiction. As for the reader, novel as mindbender and bizarre mindmelter - all in a winged storm less than 150 pages. Remarkable.

We return to the lands and cities of Viriconium eighty years following events described in The Pastel City, that bygone era where Lord tegeus-Cromis, Tomb the Dwarf and the Reborn Men lead armies fighting under the banner of young Queen Jane in routing the barbarian Northmen. Now nearly everything has changed: the Reborn Men no longer dance in harmonies of grace and beauty, the landscape has been drained of its power and a pervasive hollowness reigns - this to say, the move from The Pastel City to A Storm of Wings is a shift from major to minor key, from tale of spirited high adventure to one of madness and chaos brought about in large measure by an alien abduction of psychic energies.

Pivotal to the tale is Alstath Fulthor, the very first of the Reborn Men to be resuscitated from his millennial entombment, brought to life once again in Viriconium, having last experienced individual identity during the years of those technologically advanced Afternoon Cultures very much like our own. Alas, poor Alstath – for decades a once respected lord in the Pastel City, he is currently sprinting across the surrounding foothills, propelled by a sudden madness.

After slowing his pace, Alstath Fulthor comes upon an old man who turns out to be none other than Cellur of Lendalfoot, former maker of birds, large warlike metal birds that played a critical part in The Pastel City. Both men decide to pay a visit to Methvet Nian, Queen Jane, Queen of Viriconium.

Meanwhile, Queen Jane hears the windows in her throne room calling out to her. What does it all mean? Perhaps such a calling is connected to the unsettling description of the Upper City's population: "Under a cold moon processions of men with insect faces went silently through the streets." Whoa. Are these men's faces contorted in grimaces that might remind one of insects or, as unbelievable as it might sound, do they, in fact, have the faces of insects? In keeping with the novel's overarching dense atmosphere, we are never given a clear indication.

On the same day, in the Lower City, in the Artists' Quarter, a large, burly man by the name of Galen Hornwrack enters the Bistro Californium, "that home of all errors and all who err." There is talk of a religion unlike any others invented in Viriconium - The Sign of the Locust, a religion maintaining a fundamental tenet: "the appearance of "reality" is quite false, a counterfeit or artifact of the human senses." Equally disturbing, a wave of murders sweeping the city has been linked to this religion where followers wear a steel MANTAS symbol around their necks and cover their bodies with tattoos of symbolical patterns.

The very air throughout all of Viriconium appears to be fetid, noxious, sickly even toxic during this dreaded times. Can anything be saved? Further along in the tale an unlikely band - Alstath Fulthor, Tomb the Dwarf, the mad Reborn Woman Fay Glass, Cellur of Lendalfoot and the above mentioned Galen Hornwrack, a lord without a domain who has spent his life as a hired assassin - ride north to determine what, if anything, can be done.

The further this band travels, the more bugged out and freakish their encounters - memory and sanity, their own and those around them, morph into dreaming and sheer madness. Among the weirdness confronted:

A tremendously fat former airboat pilot from another dimension, one Benedict Paucemanly, hangs in the sky above the adventurers and periodically conveys his version of disastrous happening throughout the realm. Benedict even waxes philosophic: "The material universe, it would appear, has little absolute substance. It hardly exists. It is a rag of matter, a wisp of gas, a memory of some former state. Each sentient species perceives the thin evidence of this state in a different way." Down to earth, practical Galen Hornwrack isn't overly impressed. What Galen desires is substantial help in defeating the forces destroying Viriconium.

A harbinger of future horrors, peering out from the port of Iron Chime, onlookers see a ship "its strange slattered metal sails, decorated with unfamiliar symbols, were melting as they fell. Captained by despair, it emerged from the mist like a vessel from Hell, its figurehead an insect-headed woman who had pierced her own belly with a sword." Some time thereafter, a captain living in the port city informs the travelers, "We're all mad here."

Further along in their travels, the party is suddenly surrounded by the walls of a maze causing the world to tumble sideways. Immediately thereafter, when Galen Hornwrack stumbles into a circular space, there's a giant mantis-fly insect crouching over Fay Glass. Curiously, such a desert maze echoes what we were told of the Reborn Men and Women, how many of them wondered off from cities to form communes or self-help groups (thanks, M. John - so 1970s) and how a number of Reborn colonies dedicated themselves to music or mathematics or "the carving of enormous mazes out of the sodden clinker and blowing sands of the waste." Was this grotesque maze constructed by the Reborn? Again, in keeping with the author's opaque aesthetic, nothing more definite is disclosed.

Neil Gaiman admits the difficulty in “explaining” M. John Harrison’s writing. As Neil expresses, Mike Harrison is a writer’s writer, an author who carefully chooses each and every word to convey the power of art and magic and how the nature of reality is continually shifting and changing, how there are cities hidden beneath cities and worlds within worlds. I entirely concur with Neil. For readers interested in more straightforward storytelling, my advice is to stick with The Pastel City. But for those who take delight in literary explosions, A Storm of Wings is your book. In many ways, I see M. John Harrison as the John Cage of speculative fiction. What a treat.


M. John Harrison, born 1945

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most disturbing and maddening of the Viriconium trilogy, but also the most eloquent and poignant.

A horde of intergalactic telepathic alien locusts, lost and aimless, descends on a broken, ailing world, mutating reality and in turn being remade by its disease and dysfunction. Viriconium is a thin, shifting dream of a world, with a long forgotten past, of which only echoes and ghosts remain...

"'The world,' whispered Benedict Paucemanly, 'is desperately trying to remember itself . . . blork . . . nomadacris Septemfasciata!. . . what a lovely bit of meat . . .'"

Despite the sublime, poetic prose and rich, febrile imagery this is not an easy read. It is in fact maddening, and quite possibly intended as such.

[Ruxandra Grrr · Rating 4 out of 5]

As for the rest of the Low City: the younger poets favour a Bistro gnosticism - the world, they say, has already ended, and we are living out hours for which no chronology allows.

Did I understand what the fuck happened in this? No idea.
Do I have a feeling for who the characters are? Not at all.
Was I maddeningly vexed and enchanted? Abso-fuckin-lutely.
Did I understand what this was about on a fundamental, deeper, visceral level? Hell yeah!

What a strange experience. I really loved the body horror of it all and the strange depersonalization of living in a deteriorating world where most anyone is a bit of a passive observer (something about the passivity of liberals giving rise to fascism and all that. Sound familiar? The obsession with a past that never existed, like the Reborn as images of what they used to be, etc etc)

I maintain that this feels like it could have influenced Tamsyn Muir's writing with its gorgeous, wordy prose - the insectes in this feel very Herald, for instance.

I don't know if I'd recommend this to anybody, not even Muir fans, but I loved reading it and I'm feeling motivated to read the rest of the series / weird experimental book.

[Szplug · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harrison had matured as a writer when he penned this sequel to The Pastel City - some nine years having passed in between - and it showed: he discarded or relegated to the background the weaker elements from the prior book and concentrated upon its, and his, strengths. Harrison has always excelled at painting atmospheric scapes and moods; at finding the sorrow and melancholy, the potentiality for loss and regret that is inherent in existence, in the passage of space through the straitening parameters of time, and wringing it forth onto the page - and doing so with crystalline prose. Thus the questing journeys and battle scenes that comprised the story arc of TPC have been mostly abandoned for the existential annals of a smattering of battered and wounded figures, shuffling through a tired and confused world - one bereft of purpose or hope, unable to read the past or divine the future - that suddenly finds itself challenged by an alien awareness. Harrison constructs A Storm of Wings in panels, dream sequences and buzz-bomb exchanges, where violence explodes off of the page and immediately subsides, where reality becomes progressively harder to distinguish from mirage - and all is tinged with the patina of listlessness that is Viriconium in the Evening. It's futuristic fantasy-science fiction with the arc-welding ambience of Neuromancer and the molting-matter creativity of The Street of Crocodiles blanketed by the dust of a creaking, rheumatic world à la Gene Wolfe.

In Storm Harrison brings back the strongest characters from the prior book - Tomb the Dwarf and Cellur the Birdlord - while replacing the brooding poet-warrior tegeus-Cromis with the more effective brooding dissolute aristocrat-assassin Galen Hornwrack; Queen Jane also remains, though she is a nominal figurehead, both politically and novelistically. He expands upon the apocryphal Methven aeronaut Benedict Paucemanly (last seen rocketing towards the Moon and now become very weird), and introduces a pair of characters from the Reborn Men, the Afternoon Culture personalities resurrected towards the end of The Pastel City to defeat the savage Northmen. The Reborn are a fascinating addition, humans trapped between the Afternoon and the Evening cultures, existing in a present day reality that is overlain with chimerical visions and hallucinations projected by the stirring, struggling memories of their pre-existing lives in a technologically rich, but morally decadent clime. Seemingly destined to overshadow the anemic denizens of the Eventide empire, the Reborn appear to be worryingly susceptible to mass insanity; meanwhile, a strange new religion - The Sign of the Locust - has arisen out of nowhere to infect the Viriconium citizenry with its alarming metaphysical doctrine. Into such troubled times comes a northern female Reborn bearing a man-sized insect head and incommunicable madness. The Pastel City powers come to suspect a disturbingly alar alien presence in the occluded northwestern wastes, one whose radically different ontology is seeking to surmount that of the Evening culture - and from this existential struggle the very fabric of reality is being torn asunder, awakening the demiurgical memories dormant in the earth's very bones. With these two irreconcilable verities assaulting each other, corporeal existence has begun to change - and the end result may well prove catastrophic for both native and invader.

This is a great book. I'm a fan of Harrison, especially the way he digs inside otherwise banal or routine situations and plucks out the peculiar, the touching, the sinister. His descriptive prowess is remarkable, and some of the set pieces - a metal-sailed vessel thrusting forth from a fogbound grey seaside, aflame and bloody and echoing with the crew's desperate shrieks, before the startled eyes of Hornwreck and company; a hallucinatory romp through a buzzing earthen maze; the honeycombed, amorphous twin of Viriconium shimmering amidst a barren continent - are fantastic. The bifurcation of the Reborn and their conflicting consciousnesses, the alien entities and their mosaic mindset, are deftly handled; and though at times the plot threatens to recede behind the rich and lustrous atmospheric prose, the one actually reinforces the other. A Storm of Wings is the case of the sequel bettering the original; and with its own followup, In Viriconium , this happy trend would continue.

[Jay Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been persevering with M. John Harrisons challenging Viriconium books. I have been listening to them via audio and backing this up by reading the physical books. These books need several reads. I use the word persevere in a non-negative light. Harrisons prose is dense, a single sentence is packed with imagery, metaphor and literary punch. A lazy reader can easily miss details that make Harrisons world rich, textured and evocative.

I really enjoyed 'A Storm of Wings', the sequel to 'The Pastel City' that develops the world of Viriconium and takes us on unexpected twists and turns. It took a while to get used to Harrisons style but after reading 'The Pastel City' I have settled into his detailed & painterly approach to story telling. Even if I have to re-read or rewind the audio track several times I have been progressing with these stories, which are definitely a reward.

I have grown fond of the characters; Kellur the enigmatic immortal bird Lord & link to the ancient history of the world Viriconium is set in. Tomb the Dwarf and his magnificent 11 foot tall metallic exoskeletal armour swinging his gigantic energy Axe. The reborn man Alstaff Fulthour & his doomed descent into madness.

With its science fiction elements & twists that take the story into unexpected places this book is definitely different from the straight forward war of the two queen's arch of 'The Pastel City'. We get to see more of Viriconium with its class based Low & High city dichotomy and the mysteriouse cult that is the sign of the locust that is spreading across its streets. The sign of the locust turns out to be a key plot point related to the central calamity in the story.

The book is permeated with an air of foreboding & despair. I loved the way the reborn men first introduced in the previous book turn out to be intrinsically damaged. Their decent into madness is related to their gestation and a hang over of the failings of the Afternoon cultures. Rather than heralding a new age of enlightenment they highlight the failure of the Afternoon and its ultimate collapse. The Afternoon deserves to be consigned to the annals of history as a dead civilisation better off forgotten.

The central antagonist in this story is truly bizarre and unexpected. Without spoiling it be prepared for a calamity that warps space & time & starts remaking the world in its own image.

Viriconium the enigmatic city stands like an antique vivid, elaborate & incomprehensible. A great city of great age; it's deeper mysteries condemned to the memoirs of a bygone age. The cities inhabitants live in the shadow of the High technologists of the Afternoon. They are pioneers who are learning from the past & are forging a new future. Harrisons colourful characters are the cities champions. Brought together seemingly by destiny to protect it & its queen.

I highly recommend M. John Harrisons Viriconium saga to anyone interested in fantastic fiction.

[Kat Hooper · Rating 3 out of 5]

ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.

A Storm of Wings is the second part of M. John Harrison’s VIRICONIUM sequence. Viriconium has been at peace for eighty years after the threat from the north was eliminated, but now there are new threats to the city. Something has detached from the moon and fallen to earth. A huge insect head has been discovered in one of the towns of the Reborn. The Reborn are starting to go mad. Also, a new rapidly growing cult is teaching that there is no objective reality. Are the strange events linked with the cult’s nihilistic philosophy? And what will this do to Viriconium’s peace? Tomb the dwarf and Cellur the Birdlord, whom we met in The Pastel City, set out to discover the truth.

A Storm of Wings was published in 1980 — nine years after The Pastel City — and M. John Harrison’s writing style has evolved. In some ways it’s better — characterization is deeper and the imagery is more evocative. This world feels fragile and moribund and the reader gets the sense that, as the cult proclaims, it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s just a warped perception. Or perhaps Viriconium is slipping from reality into a dream. Or into a different reality altogether. The story is strange, outlandish, and blurry.

I like weird tales, but I had trouble with A Storm of Wings because the pace was so sluggish. M. John Harrison spends so much of his effort building an eerie atmosphere and a dreamy mood and not enough time with real action. The atmosphere is successful but that wasn’t enough to completely satisfy me because very little actually happens in this story. I often wished that Harrison would quit with the mood and move onto the story.

However, I do love the city of Viriconium — a city whose palace, which is built to mathematical precision and carved with strange geometries, lies at the end of a road called the Proton Circuit. A city that must have been absorbed with the highest levels of math and science until it fell. A city that no longer remembers its former glory. I can’t wait to find out more about Viriconium in the next book.

I’m still listening to the audiobook version of the VIRICONIUM omnibus. Thanks to narrator Simon Vance, this is an excellent format for this epic.

[Antonis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Chaos, madness, insanity. These are words that feel apt to describe this second book of the Viriconium series by M. John Harrison. And how could it not be so, as half of the book's main characters are either mad or insane and its protagonist is more chaotic than a air-bubble under boil. As usual, I will avoid going into describing the synopsis of the book, you can read that up there ^. Instead, I will go straight into my review.

Characters
I've read in other reviews that this novel's characters are deep and intense but allow me to disagree. I felt as if the characters were really thin, only displaying one major personality aspect most of the time and nothing more. Maybe I've been pampered with Joe Abercrombie's multi-layered and ultra-realistic characters from his books that I've recently finished but Harrison's characters were rather one-dimensional, flat and rather boring for me.

Plot & Pacing
Now here is where things get really messed up with this book. Apparently there is a plot... somewhere! The problem is that it is buried under mountains of endless and rambling monologues that hardly make any sense or long and bewildering descriptions that often get so verbose and complicated that they become confusing. The pace is very fragmented, swinging from incredibly slug-like slow (where the might be dozen pages of just hardly comprehensible dialogue) to hectic fast when so many things might happen in a single page that it becomes hard to follow.

Thoughts & comments
Now, of course, I read that "Harrison is stylistically an Imagist and his early work relies heavily on the use of strange juxtapositions characteristic of absurdism" and in a way this shows clearly through his writing in his novel but I just don't buy it so simply. To me it feels more as if Harrison was on some kind of drugs while writing this and his vision was so high that it got clouded.
On another note, in the introduction of the omnibus Viriconium, Neil Gaiman, after comparing the tone of the first book to the likes of Michael Moorcock and Jack Vance (which I agree with in a way), then states:

A Storm of Wings takes a phrase from the first book as its title and is both a sequel to the first novel and a bridge to the stories and novel that follow and surround it. The voice of this book is, I suspect, less accessible than the first book, the prose rich and baroque. It reminds me at times of Mervyn Peake, but it also feels like it is the novel of someone who is stretching and testing what he can do with words, with sentences, with story.

First of all, I don't think reading the first book makes any difference at all since A Storm of Wings is so detached and separated from what happens in the first book that it doesn't really matter. Not to mention that it's too convoluted to make any sense anyway... (I've said that already, didn't I?).
Secondly, while I agree that it's obvious that Harrison is testing and experimenting with his wordcraft (and make no mistake, he's good!), I can in no way compare him nor find any similarities with Mervyn Peake!! I just so happen to be reading Peake's second book Gormenghast after being totally amazed and blown-out by his first and the similarities I spot are only superficial. Peake, while verbose and eloquent, writes with clarity and lucidity, with an obvious purpose and aim, with each word flowing effortlessly into sentences and then into paragraphs that reading his books is like magic. While with Harrison's wordcraft the reader feels (intentionally) alienated and uncomfortable, with Peake's in stark contrast the reader feels completely submerged and attached to any subject, even the most mundane.

Quoted Reviews
I would also like to quote a couple of paragraphs from a few reviews that I find I agree with very much.
Kat Hooper says this in her review:
I like weird tales, but I had trouble with A Storm of Wings because the pace was so sluggish. M. John Harrison spends so much of his effort building an eerie atmosphere and a dreamy mood and not enough time with real action. The atmosphere is successful but that wasn’t enough to completely satisfy me because very little actually happens in this story. I often wished that Harrison would quit with the mood and move onto the story.
Tim also adds this to his review:
Clever notions are introduced that demand slow and patient development, but are let down by hurried and garbled text. The prose becomes painfully overwritten: everything has to be "hideous" or "terrible" or "alien". The plot mirrors this. Abandoning the beauty of the half-explained, Harrison tries to shock with detailed visual imagery that just isn't that impressive.

Conclusion
So what is my conclusion? Well, it's novel that feels a bit abnormal and strange compared with today's releases and standards. Harrison is obviously a very skilled writer but I personally feel that he let his ambition (and drugs? haha) out of control and he fell out with this one. It is a very demanding and tiring text that I don't feel it's as rewarding as it should be. So, approach with caution as I can't really recommend it.

2.5 stars out of 5

[Edward Rathke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Devastating and disorienting. It's one of the most surreal novels I can remember, and it plays with memory and time and reality so carelessly that it throws you often into the effluvium of existence in a rotting world on a dying earth.

It's shockingly beautiful in this grotesque and horrifying way. Harrison writes almost exclusively perfect sounding sentences, but they never distract from the miasma that's called the narrative.

It's a novel populated by people and reality literally going insane. A wild book.

[Fantasy boy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Viriconium, is a city with erratic and inconsistent change when you read. The city itself could reflect disparate spectrum form sun ray that scintillates different hues like kaleidoscope. beneath the splendid Viriconim would be infected by the permeable atmosphere. The unstable essential of the towers, ragtag slums and streets, even the capacious palace where the queen dwelt in. Reading Viriconium books as if I was inside a crystal with multiple facets, watching when slanting Light come in the crystal, it would radiate rainbow like patterns. It's sublime but hard to dissect the significant of the variety of colors. Viriconium is a city just existed by M.John Harrison's delicate writing, too subtle to perceive the substantial of the city instead by the wordsmith portrayed the magnificent dream city.

A Storm of Wings is more inexplicit than previous book of Viriconium, The Pastel city, frequently I found out that I was ensnared by profuse descriptions, its complexities almost misled me into uncomprehension. I'm still not one hundred percent sure that I captured all the meanings in Viriconium but I was touched by the writing which can transfigure mutations into something entirely phenomeon. The writer, Harrison not only depicted fabulous city landscape also utilized words to portray characters's emotion as related to The story. Although, the writing is not easy to understand for readers, its elliptical style could befuddle readers's mind but it's definitely not pall and cliche to read. Those who appreciate beautiful writing would easily be engrossed in viriconium world. It is a masterpiece remained for readers who truly appreciate a fantasy world was crafted by a wordsmith.

[Nathan Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Viriconium is a series that was recommended to me a while back, for its similarities to Vance’s Dying Earth, and generally by those who have an affinity for stories like that of Dune, The Book of the New Sun, Hyperion, etc. Basically, the weirder, more esoteric side of science fiction that crosses the line between its own genre and that of fantasy. I read the first Viriconium story, The Pastel City, last year and really enjoyed Harrison’s prose and imagery, with the setting’s focus on acidic, trippy landscapes and its lesser-than-standard emphasis on world building.

A Storm of Wings is an odd one— as a followup to The Pastel City (published 8 years apart), it’s very clear that Harrison’s writing ability here is much more lofty and ambitious, without concern for acting like a “proper” sequel… instead making the reader really dive into the artful way in which it is written. Much like the first book, the plot is a bit on the sparse side, but it gets a lot headier here with its exploration of strange cults and a much darker, more occultic tone. Perhaps my only criticism is that it gets so ‘poetic’ that it borders on being aimless sometimes, a bit indulgent in its language and lack of adherence to ‘normal’ plot structure, but ultimately I really enjoyed what Harrison was going for in this one.

I think what I appreciate the most about this series so far is that Harrison fully commits to the idea of being an anti-Tolkien author. I have nothing against Tolkien myself, but how Viriconium feels like the antithesis of modern fantasy in that it cannot be easily rationalized, mapped out or have typical world building conventions applied to it, makes it an anomaly within SFF, and as such, makes it one of the most unique and underrated series out there.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

I will preface my opinion of this novel with this: I love dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction... but Harrison's writing is a bit too bleak for me.

I kept thinking of Westeros while reading this novel... but this one seems even more depopulated and terrible. In a world already so bloody and barren, how is there still so much time and opportunity for slaughter? Where are all of these people coming from, and how is the population and food supply being replenished?

My "suspend disbelief" button does not work very well, not even in sci-fi/fantasy - I know, it's terrible. Sorry 'bout that.

As with The Pastel City, I find Harrison's writing a bit stilted and awkward, too wordy, like a vocabulary challenge more than an actual story - this is tremendously distracting for me. I like learning new words, but when I constantly have to drop the book and reach for dictionary.com, I'm not exactly being absorbed in to the story.

The plot is a curious one, but, ultimately, it seems sort of inconsequential... a couple of main characters die, and a potential invasion (inadvertent and involuntary though it may have been) is averted. Now what???

I'm having difficulty becoming invested in this story - I can't conceive of where this is going, aside from mankind's eventual extinction. Caring about the characters, thus, is not easy.

Eh. It's a decent book - certainly no favorite, and stylistically frustrating... but decent.

[Charles Dee Mitchell · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't know what kind of mood you would have to be in to enjoy this book. And so many writers I admire, admire this book. Harrison's depiction of an exhausted far-future earth is dark and at times brilliant, but it's a chore. Some people have dreams of walking through fog or waist-deep sludge where each step is an doomed effort at making any progress. That was my experience with this second volume in the Viriconium series. After two stabs at it, I am calling it quits.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kind of forgot that fiction could do this, until I encountered Harrison for the first time last year. I read a review that called his prose style a 'leisured opacity' and I think that's great and I'll leave it at that.

[Andromeda M31 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read as part of the Viriconium Collection:

But really, what did I just read?

Where The Pastel City at least a basic architecture of a fantasy novel, A Storm of Wings is a baroque madhouse. Although short, I had a hard time getting through this, finding myself lost in prose descriptions several times and really just wanted to get to the end.

Set many years after the Pastel City, the Reborn Men have trouble distinguishing time lines, and are caught between the present and their past. A strange cult, the Sign of the Locust, haunts the Lower City, seemingly searching for innocents to sacrifice. Cellur the Birdman returns, having learned little of immortality, to tell Methvet Nian, Queen Jane of Viriconium, that there is a voice coming from the moon and something terrible on the way. Although Tomb the Dwarf re-appears, the main character is Galen Hornwrack, an unhappy assassin and fallen noble. Horwrack is dragged into the problems of Viriconium as an unwilling hero and sets off on a quest with Tomb, Alstath Fulthor, leader of the reborn men, and Fay Glass, a reborn woman incapable of actual communication, to discover the truth of a possible alien invasion. All the while they are haunted by an apparition of a fat airboatman, who farts and vomits and rolls above their heads.

And it is a nightmare alien invasion. Huge insect-like creatures have come to earth from the moon. Dying in the earths atmosphere, they bring with them a terrible white mist. There is something of being caught between dimensions, slipping through space, but the alien insects cannot terraform the earth to their liking. They are dying, and while the worshippers of the Sign of the Locust in the Lower City are slowly growing insect appendages, so too do the giant insects grow baby faces and human limbs.

There is substantial body horror in this, and madness. An over all unpleasant but gripping read that I was happy to reach the end of. I will continue with the Viriconium series after a break. I do find myself drawn to Harrison's work, but his words require more focus than normal for me and I think he's best appreciated in small doses.

[Zepp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Certainly wasn't expecting this after Pastel City. Kind of inspiring how this author pulls off a combination of weird high style, scenes of insane scale and movement, and an absolutely twisted and beautiful vision. rare dude.

[Kulchur Kat · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the great classics and wild visions of fantasy literature. A Storm of Wings is M. John Harrison’s second novel in the Viriconium sequence, published in 1980, nine years after The Pastel City; nine years in which he radically re-thought his relationship to writing within genre. Michael Moorcock stated that A Storm of Wings pushed the fantasy novel as far as it would go without breaking it. But personally I think Harrison broke it. He broke it good.

This is a very different novel to its precursor - although it recombines darkly mirrored facets of the first. The tortured Romanticism of tegeus-Cromis and his Byronic heroism is replaced here by his doppelgänger, the fallen Lord Galen Hornwrack, sullen with self-loathing and moral uncertainty. Fay Glass, the Reborn Woman, is the first example we see in Harrison’s fiction of the sick woman trope that we will see again and again in Harrison's work. It ushers in the main difference between this and the first novel, the central metaphor of entropy has been dropped, replaced by the metaphor of illness and dissolution. There is not just an entropic running down in these pages, but a complete breakdown and corruption of all systems at an epistemic level.

It is exquisitely written, the baroque sentences crackle with a poetic energy. The density of the prose is now part of the game, the reader is ravished by its literary sheen. Harrison is a master of nature writing and there is a keen evocation of landscape, the shifting light, its effect on character, mood and atmosphere. The lucent physicality of the nature writing is grounded in a sense of the real world, specifically evoking the wilds of Northern England:

“...preferring the old drove roads and greenways, out of sentimentality rather than any conscious desire to be alone. He remembered something about them from his youth. Although he was not quite sure what it might be, he sought it stubbornly in the aimless salients and gentle swells of the dissected limestone uplands which skirt the mountain proper, haunted by the liquid bubble of the curlew and the hiss of the wind in the blue moor grass.”

In A Storm of Wings not only are the flawed characters plagued with madness, but with language and signification breaking down, the epistemic nature of constructed reality itself is infected. “As you walk the streets create themselves around you. When you have passed everything immediately slips back into chaos again.” Has transformation, dissolution and decay been more wildly imagined and more beautifully written?

TS Eliot's The Waste Land and Viriconium

Viriconium’s ongoing dialogue with TS Eliot is no more pronounced than in A Storm of Wings. Eliotesque turns of phrase haunt the text’s tonal register; as in “like the wind in an empty house before rain” evoking Gerontion, and describing a tenement stairway "wound like a tedious argument" recalling Prufrock.

The novel opens with a tarot reading straight out of the The Waste Land. Viriconium’s resident Madam Sosostris, the fortune teller Fat Mam Etteilla twists Eliot’s familiar death by drowning prophesy into the auspicious “Fear death from the air!”

Harrison transfers Eliots’ own mental breakdown on Margate Sands, to that of Cellur, Lord of Birds, the infrequent narrator, who “can connect nothing with nothing.” Even the floating apparition of Benedict Paucemanly, interjects his cryptic ramblings with jarring found dialogue from our world, our reality, akin to The Waste Land’s working class street chatter. (“What a lovely piece of meat, my dear.”)

The novels mirroring of The Waste Land’s 'Unreal City' motif is riffed on repeatedly. Eliot’s litany of lost cities and fallen empires, “Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal”, here becomes “Vienna, Blackpool, Venice, drown in their own tears.” and “Blackpool and Chicago become as nothing.” The escapist fantasy bubble is truly burst with the conspicuous and jarring inclusion of the Northern seaside resort.

The mention of the Northern town even foreshadows the earthbound and quotidian impulse that concludes the Viriconium sequence as a whole, which will end up, purposefully anti-climactic, in the downstairs toilets of a cafe in Huddersfield!

These prominent allusions to Eliot set off intertextual resonances which enhance Viriconium’s themes of sickness and decay, and initiate interconnections of theme and mood, to further imbue the novel with The Waste Land’s world of exhaustion and collapse.

More Viriconium musings to be found at Kulchur Kat

[Jamil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book 2 in the Viriconium sequence. This is the volume where Harrison's influence & Mieville's, Vandermeer's debt is most clear. Both sequel and remix of The Pastel City, its many totems (swordsman, queen, dwarf, destruction) cast to different effect, its language baroque, even more world-weary, and strange.

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like it more than I did.

I understand the influence this book had on a lot of the writers usually classified as the New Weird. Parts of it really were great, but somehow reading it felt like a chore instead of, well, fun.

Just like the first book in the Viriconium series, I would have loved the book to spend more time in Viriconium itself.

[RatGrrrl · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most singularly strange and beautifully written books I've ever read. Somewhere between a fever dream and poetry, while remaining immensely readable science fantasy.

I genuinely wish the other Viriconium books were written in the same manner.

[Temucano · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tuve que releer trozos de "La ciudad pastel" para poder entrar en contexto, o al menos no perderme en el intento. Es que esta fantasía críptica de personajes desquiciados e imágenes delirantes es realmente única, parece surgir directa desde el inconsciente, con diálogos deshilvanados y saltos de realidad que no ayudan a esclarecer la trama, pero que logra mantener el interés porque realmente no sabes que delirio puede surgir en la siguiente página. Lo único que sí queda claro es que el caos se impone, es el fin de la Humanidad tal como la conocemos, definitivamente el fin de la razón.

Apocalipsis verde después de una roja guerra, bien escrito, sin contemplaciones con el lector, es una lectura que fácil prende pero que también fácil pierde, dando frutos muy individuales y subjetivos según cada uno.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a hard one to rate fairly. It's well written and interesting, but I don't think I was able to pay enough attention to really keep up with what was happening in what POV and what was dream or hallucination or what. Still, I liked what I did keep up with.

[Finnn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Almost impossible for my little brain to write about this book. But all I can say is that Harrison can fucking write.

[Oscar · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Tormenta de alas' es una novela más compleja que su predecesora, 'La Ciudad Pastel' (incluida en 'Caballeros de Viriconium'). La historia es más enrevesada, con una prosa barroca y recargada, por lo que hay que prestarle una atención completa a su lectura. Es como cuando se está montando un puzzle, que se comienza por las esquinas y el marco, encajando las piezas camino del centro y de su solución. Esta novela es así, se te van mostrando partes de la historia, que en un principio parecen no tener sentido, pero que según vas teniendo más y más, las vas encajando en tu cabeza hasta obtener una visión completa de lo que está sucediendo. Por ésto mismo, no es bueno contar demasiado e ir descubriendo poco a poco el fascinante mundo creado por M. John Harrison, dejarte empapar por él.

La historia transcurre ochenta años después de la Guerra de las Dos Reinas, con Viriconium viviendo bajo es Signo de la Langosta, una especie de culto cuyos miembros se ocultan tras máscaras de insectos para asesinar impunemente. Al mismo tiempo, una amenaza se cierne sobre los humanos, una invasión de pesadilla. La reina Methvet Nian tendrá que solicitar de nuevo la ayuda de Sepulcro del Enano y de los Renacidos, así como de Galen Hornwrack, un lord caído en desgracia y ahora asesino profesional, y de un extraño anciano...

'Tormenta de alas' resulta una lectura claustrofóbica y oscura. La decadencia de las ciudades y sus gentes está muy patente; pero vuelve a ser un placer recorrer junto a sus personajes este mundo de un futuro lejano, destruído, con sus páramos desérticos, de los que sobresalen los restos milenarios de las Culturas del Atardecer.

[Fletcher Price · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagine u wanted to be a bug really bad but your body said no ur a 500lb spaceman. What would you do¿

[Robbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Lunatics and Ghosts – all along they have had the right of it!’

Storm of Wings reads like literary pulp. I imagine the audience this works for is vanishingly small but I was very impressed. Although I possibly enjoyed reading the short story this grew out of (London Melancholy) a bit more.

A lot of fantasy fetishizes aspects of medieval era or myth, whether feudalism, swords, or knights and quests. Being a science fantasy / dying earth novel, Storm of Wings intentionally confuses aspects of time and place, evident in the location names: bistro californium, rue sepile, duirinish, proton circuit. But it's pre-enlightenment (or post-rationalist?) thinking that Harrison revels in here, reminiscent at times of the erratic dialogue in Aleksei German’s adaptation of Hard to be a God. 

All the characters are mad in some way. The minds of the Reborn, resurrected after a thousand years of stasis, are adrift between two vastly different times. Cellur has lived for so long he has lost most of his memory. Benedict Paucemanly travelled to the Moon and was trapped for a century and now appears as a floating, farting, phantom speaking mostly in non-sequiters. And Galen Hornwrack is a narcissist assassin unwilling to accept that he’s the hero of the story (Storm of Wings is satisfyingly metafictional without rubbing it in your face - except possibly for all the tarot references).

But the prose is the most distinctive thing about this book. I saw a review online to the effect of ‘fairly straightforward plot but hard to follow because of the prose style’ - this is spot on, but glosses over the fact that the prose is incredible, particularly in the first and last sections. 

Fantasy is the perfect opportunity to be indulgent and go wild with prose and imagery, mixing up the literal with the metaphor in a beautiful chaos - this is what Harrison does extremely well here.

Harrison’s narrative perspective is loose and playful. He shares Vance’s indulgence in rich vocabulary and writes so deliriously thick with imagery it reminded me of reading Woolf’s The Waves, but with swords, spaceships and alien bugs (both books do have characters sitting in cafes feeling sad tbf). And near the beginning, there’s a fight in the bistro californium which I thought was a rare example of a ‘literary action scene’. 

The atmosphere is so heavy and engrossing. Viriconium feels like a city you can get lost in, with a life of its own, rather than the cardboard cutout of The Pastel City. His descriptions of city life read like hallucinatory noir. Harrison does this, not through world-building per se, but by evoking a complex world through small glimpses, pieces of gossip, and smells, strange half-seen characters, which lends the sense that there is so much more to Viriconium than what you’ve been told. I much prefer this to having every aspect of a fictional world or city explained to me.

For all its literary merit, this is still undeniably genre writing in all the best playful ways. Harrison takes time to write about a cool climb he did in the Peak District, inserting Tomb the Dwarf instead of himself. He includes mad details of Viriconum and scraps of history like the creepy Gabelline Oracle. And everything about Benedict Paucemanly, his mask, the Sign of the Locust and the weird philosophy of the interfering umwelts.

However, Harrison is chiefly concerned with genre convention to the degree in which he can attempt to subvert it. And the constant confusion and eschewing of ‘Event’ in the plot occasionally made the story drag. The writing is often very painterly, describing static scenes and states of mind. And he doesn't even allow the bleak, miserable atmosphere to stand for long enough to become self-satisfying without a heavy dose of bathos, usually in the form of a fart or an exclamation of ‘Gorb!’ from Paucemanly after some heavy narrative build up.

This isn't a perfect book by any means. It feels like Harrison is still feeling out how he wants to write a novel here, and Storm of Wings does feel more like an expanded short story (specifically London Melancholy - shoehorned into Viriconium). I'm very excited to see how his writing developed further in his later books.

Lastly, I think there's an interesting comparison that can be made between Storm of Wings and Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. The books have an entirely different vibe (and also very different sentiments as authors), but more so than just the average science fantasy book, you could say that both are fantasy books, that are really science fiction books, but ultimately they're fantasy after all, because all literature is fantasy, when you think about it 😜.

Very cool that this is what Harrison followed the Pastel City with. Almost all the issues I had with that first Viriconium book have evaporated here. And in all the ways that matter, it is still a faithful sequel.

[Chris Gray · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF -- but refuse to give it less than three stars.

I think fans of fantasy, China Mieville, etc. definitely SHOULD check it out. Sometimes, the writing is excellent. The mood and environment are finely crafted, and the story lives in the carefully wrought cloud of its own broodiness.

That said: I didn't care to continue. Here are some selections of other reviews that I agree with:

* M. John Harrison spends so much of his effort building an eerie atmosphere and a dreamy mood and not enough time with real action. The atmosphere is successful but that wasn’t enough to completely satisfy me because very little actually happens in this story. I often wished that Harrison would quit with the mood and move onto the story

* Plot & Pacing: Now here is where things get really messed up with this book. Apparently there is a plot... somewhere! The problem is that it is buried under mountains of endless and rambling monologues that hardly make any sense or long and bewildering descriptions that often get so verbose and complicated that they become confusing. The pace is very fragmented, swinging from incredibly slug-like slow (where the might be dozen pages of just hardly comprehensible dialogue) to hectic fast when so many things might happen in a single page that it becomes hard to follow.

Anyway, if you want to live for a bit in a world of exquisite description where sometimes a few things might happen, this could be for you! It seems to bear some similarity with ancient tales, sagas, and religious texts (e.g. "And Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah... And Methuselah lived an hundred eighty and seven years, and begat Lamech..."): a lot of antecedent stage building, and then sometimes the action is over before you know it, and the bang for the buck was just a little on the slender side. A worthy effort that turned out not to be to my personal tastes.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best books I've ever read. Unfortunately, nothing I could write here will properly capture why I think that. I'll try, though.

A Storm of Wings is ostensibly a follow-up to The Pastel City, a fantasy and vaguely swords-and-sorcery series that fits into the Dying Earth subgenre. But it'd be better described as an escalation; it takes everything about the the first book in the Viriconium series and cranks it up 1000x.

The stakes are higher, the scenes are denser, the characters have sharper personalities with more interesting traits and motivations. It's even more fantastical, more poetic, and much, much weirder.

This strangeness has been off-putting to some judging by the other reviews. After all, there's nothing about The Pastel City that suggests the author was holding something back: it was weird and free and fearless.

But apparently M. John Harrison was holding back a lot, and you'd almost think Pastel City was some overbearing prison by the way he bursts forth here. If you were expecting a more traditional sequel (and of course you would be) then it's going to take some adjusting.

You'll often feel like you're drowning in his prose, but there's nothing extraneous about it. Every insane moment, every bonkers conversation or bizarre imagery serves a purpose, and by the end you'll be able to piece it together (though you'll sound like a madman if you explain it to someone else).

You're meant not to understand everything, especially in the beginning, as M. John Harrison really embraces what it means to be a fantasy (or sci-fi, if you prefer) story. But stick with it, because figuring it out is incredibly rewarding.

I recommend strongly reading the first book to get an idea of the prose and world and characters, then go into this one knowing full well that it's bonkers. I think that'll give you the proper expectations to accept and enjoy it.

It's something really special.