the constant imago
by uzwi
This Christmas, why not give Viriconium, city of sex, syphillis & consubstantiation ? “When he first fell in love with Vera Ghillera, my uncle had the walls of his room painted a heavy sealing-wax red; at the window there were thick velvet curtains the same colour, pulled shut. Pictures of the ballerina were everywhere–on the walls, the tables, the mantelpiece–posing in costumes she had worn for La chatte, The fire last Wednesday at Lowth, and The little hump-backed horse. The woman herself, or her effigy made in a kind of yellow wax, lay on a catafalque in the centre of the room, her strange, compact dancer’s body naked, the legs parted in invitation, the arms raised imploringly, her head replaced by the stripped and polished brown skull of a horse.”
the m john harrison blog 
The request implies that one knows people who might plausibly appreciate the work who do not already possess the work. I should be so lucky . . . .
I recently came across the following review of your work in Bruce Sterling’s old fanzine CHEAP TRUTH (issue #1):
“THE FLOATING GODS by M. John Harrison. Timescape, $2.50.
This book is called IN VIRICONIUM in Britain, but was stupidly retitled for American release, presumably because Timescape believes we are boneheads. It’s the third book in a sword-and-sorcery trilogy that includes THE PASTEL CITY and A STORM OF WINGS.
It’s clear that a different but allied form of decadence has struck
Across the Water. Its trademark is not perversion, but exhaustion. PASTEL
CITY rejoiced in such sprightly characters as Tomb, “the nastiest dwarf that
ever hacked the hands off a priest,” whose rotten malevolence was a welcome
relief from Harrison’s sometimes stifling meditations on spiritual decline.
FLOATING GODS has no such characters. It is set in a city smothered
under a nebulous Plague Zone. Possibly Harrison has spent too much time in
Brixton. Despair seems to have been printed across his eyeballs in letters
of fire. THE FLOATING GODS is a relentless exercise in total, stifling
futility; it is one long, gray, debilitating dream.
Harrison’s extraordinary talent merely crams the reader’s head more
firmly into the bucket. It is impossible to read this book without
considering suicide. It is painful to read; painful even to think about.
Let’s hope to God something happens soon to cheer him up.”
Well, did it?
Hi Ray P. I think BS might just have missed some of the English sense of humour there. But I was grateful that he pointed out the feebleness of Timescape’s retitle; & the image of the reader’s head crammed “firmly into the bucket” was manna to me. (Thirty years later I see it as a missing episode of the novel, drawn by R Crumb.) As to whether anything’s cheered me up since: it’s vital, if you aren’t to feel the bucket go over your head, to avoid confusing the author with what the author decides to show you. At the time, I thought parts of In Viriconium were some of the funniest things I’d ever written.
I can’t say I share Mr. Sterling’s feeling for the work, then or now. I’ve just been re-reading it (having dug my 1984 Unwin paperback out of storage) and find it quite amusing as you say. I do have a small question concerning the Barley brothers. Would it be correct to assume they speak with a Wolverhampton & Dudley accent? Or fluent Brummie? I ask because I spent some years in the vicinity of those places. Also Soubridge sounds a little like Stourbridge, another West Midlands locale I had the misfortune to visit on several occasions because a friend lived there (well, truthfully, he lived in Halesowen but I passed through the other place often enough).
We are the Barley Brothers.
Ousted out of Birmingham & Wolverhampton,
Lords of the Left Hand Brain,
The shadows of odd doings follows us through the night.
–In Viriconium
My family lived in Stafford when I was three years old. I don’t remember much of that, but I was always promised a visit to Dudley Zoo & still dream of a landscape I suspect to be the grounds of Dudley Castle. From 1950 we lived in Rugby. So I had a blanket exposure to the accents of that whole area. I don’t remember where Soubridge came from, but many of the placenames in the later stories originate slightly further north in Shropshire. I haven’t been back to Rugby more than two or three times in thirty years, & I’ve deliberately avoided the Dudley & Stafford locations because I’m hoping that whatever’s down there in the unthought known is still affecting what I write. I wouldn’t want to make that connection too direct. The same goes for Shropshire, which I’ve always regarded as a mystery, a kind of liminal zone between the Midlands & Wales. Various sublimes are involved here & while I’d never let them in, I’d at least like to leave them untainted by the anti-sublime.
I often thought, ‘Meteor Shower’ – http://www.tfaoi.com/mn/mib/mib53.jpg – related to ‘The Wanderer’ – http://www.jamiewyeth.com/images/wanderer.jpg – by Jamie Wyeth