Viriconium - M. John Harrison

[handslive]

I picked this book just on spec because I really liked Light and because the back of the book made it sound like this had all been groundbreaking stuff.  Always makes me nervous when I read that kind of thing, but it seemed like a safe bet here.  Honestly, I feel like I'm going to have to go back and read Light again because I had no idea he was capable of this level of writing.

This volume collects together three novels:

• The Pastel City
• A Storm of Wings
• In Viriconium

and a bunch of short stories.  The first novel is a fantasy quest that put me in mind of some Michael Moorcock I've read.  After that, the stories just get stranger.  The same characters appear with different names or the same names appear as different characters.  Everything happens around the same city in different times or maybe it's only different aspects of the same era.  Weirdly, I felt like the more he wrote about Viriconium the more it affected what I remembered from the earlier writing.

I love the storytelling that goes on here, but more than that his use of language never falters.  I'm not sure I'd have been able to read this stuff 10 years ago.  I'm glad to have read it now.