Author: David Hebblethwaite

Sunday Story Society: “Two Ways of Leaving” by Alois Hotschnig

16th September 2012 / / 8 Comments

Today we have our first story in translation: “Two Ways of Leaving” by Alois Hotschnig (translated from the Austrian German by Tess Lewis). You can read the story here at Untitled Books; you’ll also find it in Hotschnig’s Peirene Press collection Maybe This Time.

First, I’ll link to some reviews of Maybe This Time (not of all of which touch on this particular story): 1streading; Chasing Bawa; Olivia Heal; Andrew Blackman; Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat; The Worm Hole; The Arts Fuse. I’ll also point out this interview with the translator, Tess Lewis, at Love German Books.

Now, something different. I’m going to post some questions as ‘conversation starters’; feel free to answer them or not (I want them to act as jumping-off points, not to strictly define the discussion), or ask questions of your own. Here we go:

Conversation Starters

There’s no small amount of ambiguity in “Two Ways of Leaving”, so I’d be interested to know how you interpret the relationship between the ‘he’ and ‘she’ of the story.

My abiding thought when I finished Maybe This Time was that Hotschnig’s protagonists were caught up in other people’s stories. Would you agree with that in relation to “Two Ways of Leaving”?

Though it relates to a different piece in Maybe This Time, I was struck by 1streading‘s comment that “Hotschnig is playing with the use of the pronoun ‘he’ as a ‘character’”. What does the author do with the pronoun ‘he’ in this story?

Next time: On 30 Sept, we’ll be talking about the story “Drifting House” by Krys Lee.

For now, though, it’s over to you. What did you make of “Two Ways of Leaving”?

BBC International Short Story Award shortlist

15th September 2012 / / 4 Comments

For the past couple of years, I’ve been following the BBC National Short Story Award (see my reviews of the 2010 and 2011 shortlists). This year, it’s the BBC International Short Story Award, and the shortlist has been doubled in size to ten stories. The nominees were announced last night; with descriptions taken from the press release, they are:

Lucy Caldwell – ‘Escape Routes’

Set in Belfast in the 1990s, ‘Escape Routes’ is told from the point of view of a child, whose friend and babysitter mysteriously goes missing. Delivered with the touching innocence of a child oblivious but not unaffected by the ideological and political strife plaguing Northern Ireland, the story is an oblique examination of a besieged Belfast.

Julian Gough – ‘The iHole’

‘The iHole’ playfully depicts the launch of the latest must-have gadget: a portable black hole. The media hype, the marketing, the industry competition and the consumer mania are laid bare in this satirical take on technology and consumerism in the 21st century.

M J Hyland – ‘Even Pretty Eyes Commit Crimes’

The adult narrator, who many years down the line still sees his father as somehow culpable for his mother’s departure, and tires of his father’s dependence on him, is forced to reassess his relationships, as it becomes apparent that his wife is leaving him too.

Krys Lee – ‘The Goose Father’

In a tale of loneliness, ambition and desire, a man sends his wife and children to America for a better life, while he stays behind in South Korea making a living as an accountant. Concerned with respectability and success, the man’s life is set awry when he takes in an endearing young tenant – along with his pet goose.

Deborah Levy – ‘Black Vodka’

In ‘Black Vodka’ a hunchbacked man goes on a date with the girl of his dreams. A subtle battle between shame and prurience ensues, as the man is crippled by thoughts of his own repugnance, and the girl is only intrigued by his appearance.

Miroslav Penkov – ‘East of the West’

Set in Bulgaria during and after the Cold War, ‘East of the West’ explores the difficulties of love, relationships and identity in a region ridden with conflict and sectarian violence. The narrator takes us from his childhood through to present day, ruminating on the loves and losses which both constrain and define his life.

Henrietta Rose-Innes – ‘Sanctuary’

This subtle but powerful story traces a nostalgic trip back to a childhood haunt in the South African bush. The narrator’s encounter with another family explores the experience of domestic violence and its consequences.

Adam Ross – ‘In the Basement’

Two couples meet for dinner and wind up discussing an old friend called Lisa. But their disparaging attitude towards Lisa’s lifestyle, choice of husband and treatment of their pet dog, unconsciously reveals more about their own relationships, insecurities, envy and brutality, than it does about Lisa.

Carrie Tiffany – ‘Before he Left the Family’

‘Before he Left the Family’ examines the jagged relationship of two brothers and their parents following a painfully wrought divorce; while one brother’s loyalty lies with the jilted mother, the narrator finds affinity with his father. Yet, in the maelstrom of resentment, sexual confusion and self-blame, Tiffany finds pathos and redemption.

Chris Womersley – ‘A Lovely and Terrible Thing’

A man encounters a stranger on the road when his car breaks down. Invited to the stranger’s house, he is further enticed by the promise of being let in on the family’s secret – a daughter with a miraculous ability. It’s an offer the man, who struggles to cope with his own daughter’s disability, can’t refuse.

The ten stories will be broadcast daily at 3.30pm (UK time) on BBC Radio 4, starting this Monday; they’ll then be available to download as podcasts. An anthology of the stories will be published by Comma Press on Monday.

The winner will be announced on Tues 2 October – and I’ve left a space in the Sunday Story Society schedule to discuss the winning story on 9 December.

Zadie Smith, NW (2012)

14th September 2012 / / 8 Comments

Zadie Smith’s new novel takes its title from the main postcode area of north-west London, and it’s at least as much about the place as the characters. Smith portrays her setting as a place where past and present, different classes and cultures, coexist in adjoining and overlapping spaces. In a brilliant piece of contrast, a bland list of directions in one chapter is followed by a dense, impressionistic passage covering the actual journey:

Everybody loves sandals. Everybody. Birdsong! Low-down dirty shopping arcade to mansion flats to an Englishman’s home is his castle. Open-top, soft-top, drive-by, hip.hop. Watch the money pile up. Holla! (p. 34)

The characters of NW embody that same complex web of coexistence. The event anchoring the novel is lottery-fund worker Leah Hanwell’s being scammed on her doorstep by Shar, a woman who went to the same school. When first we meet Leah, just before this, she’s clearly feeling somewhat insecure about her life. She is repeating to herself a line she hears on the radio: ‘I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me’ (a line which has no small amount of irony in a novel concerned to show how other people can affect individuals’ lives).

She’s pregnant at thirty-five, having undergone two previous abortions, and still uncomfortable with the idea of motherhood. She’s a white woman of Irish descent married to a French-Algerian, Michel; not everyone she knows is happy about this: ‘no offence’, Leah’s Afro-Caribbean work colleagues say, ‘but when we see one of our lot with someone like you it’s a real issue (p. 29).’ Leah looks at her best friend Natalie – a black girl from Caldwell, the same estate, who became a lawyer, and now seemingly has the perfect middle-class family life, including kids – and now feels left behind: ‘While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became (p. 58). Her search for Shar and the stolen money is therefore driven by the desire for at least one small victory in life.

Towards the end of the opening section, Leah overhears a news report of a local murder. The second partof NW focuses on the victim of that killing: Felix Cooper, a former drug-dealer with no stable family life, who also grew up on the Caldwell estate at the same time as Leah and Natalie. The encounters Felix has during this section illustrate the overlapping spaces I referred to earlier: for example, he buys a car from a posh young man who’s clearly out of his depth talking to Felix; and though Felix’s on-off girlfriend (and ex-customer) Annie comes from a wealthy background, she seems almost relieved to have left behind the world of privilege for her current life. Though Felix is ostensibly rather less well-off than Leah Hanwell, he is actually in his element in the city in a way that Leah, arguably, could never be. As Annie puts it, he ‘finds life easy’ – not that he has everything on a plate, but that he has the right temperament and outlook to deal with what life throws at him. However, even that is no defence against chance, as Felix ultimately discovers.

The novel’s third section focuses on Natalie Blake – or Keisha, as she was known before adopting her new name at university. 185 short chapters chronicle her life from childhood to the present day, in particular her relationships with her family, Leah, and her husband Frank. An interesting effect is created by this section’s starting so early in time. The scenes of Keisha/Natalie’s and Leah’s younger days have an expansive optimism about them, the sense that both girls feel they’re heading for greater things as they leave the estate for university. But there’s a certain dramatic irony here, because we know that the thirtysomething Leah and Natalie won’t find life such plain sailing. It also becomes clear in this part that Frank’s and Natalie’s home life is not as rosy as Leah assumes. The structure of this section – with its short, snappy chapters – gives a driving sense of moving forward through time, which in turn creates a heightened feeling of urgency.

The momentum persists in the next part of NW, though here the sense is of movement through space, as Natalie walks around her local area. She runs into Nathan Bogle, another of her childhood contemporaries; their conversations highlight how far Natalie has moved from her roots, as do some of her other encounters (Smith writes at one point: ‘Natalie Blake had completely forgotten what it was like to be poor. It was a language she’d stopped being able to speak, or even to understand’ [p. 243]).

Towards the end of the novel, Leah remarks to Natalie, ‘I just don’t understand why [we] have this life.’ Her friend replies: ‘Because we worked harder…We were smarter and we knew we didn’t want to end up begging on people’s doorsteps. We wanted to get out…This is one of the things you learn in a courtroom: people generally get what they deserve’ (pp. 292-3).

Given the rest of NW, there’s a certain amount of truth to this as applied to Natalie’s and Leah’s lives. But there is also a sense that Natalie is willing it to be so by saying it: after all, the characters’ lives (including Natalie’s own) have been shaped by much more than their own efforts; just look at what happens to Felix. The ending of Smith’s novel could be read as an attempt by Leah and Natalie to exercise control over something that will help them move forward – but what they do will in turn affect someone else.  So the connections continue beyond the final page of an incisive portrait of life’s complexities.

Elsewhere
Read an extract from NW on the Guardian website.
John Self interviews Zadie Smith.
Some other blogs on NW: Words of Mercury; Muse at Highway Speeds; Valerie O’Riordan for Bookmunch; Just William’s Luck.

Sunday Story Society reminder: “Two Ways of Leaving”

13th September 2012 / / 0 Comments

From this Sunday, you’re invited to join me on the blog to talk about Alois Hotschnig’s story “Two Ways of Leaving” (translated from the Austrian German by Tess Lewis). The story is taken from Hotschnig’s fine collection Maybe This Time, published by Peirene Press. It was one of my favourite pieces in the book, so I’m looking forward to the discussion.

You can read “Two Ways of Leaving” online here at Untitled Books; then come back here on Sunday when I’ll have a discussion post up.

BBAW: What book blogging means to me

12th September 2012 / / 2 Comments

This week is the fifth Book Blogger Appreciation Week. I’m joining in with today’s daily blogging topic: ‘What does book blogging mean to you?’ I’ve picked out three things for which I value book blogging:

Discovery – of course, book blogs are a great way to find out about unfamiliar books (Mike Thomas’s Pocket Notebook is just one example of a great book I became interested in after reading about it on blogs). Some will even be books you wouldn’t hear about any other way. But I’ve also found myself reading more widely as a result of book blogging; I hear more about books, so I’m more inclined generally to take chances. I picked up Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal on a whim and loved it; I don’t whether I’d have tried it if I hadn’t been blogging.

Engagement – I think book blogging has made me a better reader. Certainly it’s made me a more thoughtful one, because writing about books regularly has predisposed me to take a reflective approach to reading. I also feel closer to the book world as a result of blogging (it helps me keep up with new books and events). It’s easier to find people who like reading as much as I do – which leads me to…

Community – The book blogging world is a big place, and it’s not possible to keep up with all of it. But I do think that, whatever your reading interests, there’s a part of the community out there for you. There are like-minded readers; similar-but-differently-minded readers; perhaps even readers of different tastes altogether whom you might nevertheless find it interesting to engage with.

All in all, I find that book blogging adds an extra dimension to reading. It turns reading into something larger than just you and the book, and I’ve found that very enriching.

Man Booker and SI Leeds Literary Prize shortlists

11th September 2012 / / 2 Comments

The Booker shortlist was announced this morning:

  • Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon)
  • Deborah Levy, Swimming Home (And Other Stories)
  • Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies (Fourth Estate)
  • Alison Moore, The Lighthouse (Salt)
  • Will Self, Umbrella (Bloomsbury)
  • Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis (Faber and Faber)

I can’t really judge the quality of that shortlist, because I’ve read only two of them. I very much enjoyed The Lighthouse, so I’m pleased to see it on there (my review is linked above). I read Swimming Home last year and, though I didn’t warm to it personally, enough people have praised the book since that I feel inclined to revisit it at some point.

More generally, this shortlist is an enormous vote of confidence in British independent publishers – all three of the small presses on the longlist (Myrmidon, And Other Stories, and Salt) have made it through to the final six. I think that’s great news. This also seems a shortlist that’s in favour of unconventional approaches, which is interesting.

Which novel might win? The Mantel will probably be the favourite, but it looks to me like something of an odd one out on this list. I think the Self is a more likely front-runner – though actually I wouldn’t be surprised if the Levy or Moore books took the Prize. We’ll find out when the winner is announced on Tues 16 October.

***

I want to mention another literary award shortlist, which was announced yesterday. The SI Leeds Literary Prize is for unpublished fiction by Black and Asian women. Its six shortlisted titles are:

  • Katy Massey, The Book of Ghosts
  • Emily Midorikawa, A Tiny Speck of Black and Then Nothing
  • Karen Onojaife, Borrowed Light
  • Minoli Salgado, A Little Dust on the Eyes
  • Anita Sivakumaran, The Weekend for Sex, and other stories
  • Jane Steele, Storybank: The Milkfarm Years

The winner will be revealed on Weds 3 Oct at Ilkley Playhouse, as part of Ilkley Literature Festival.

Round Table: State of Wonder, Part 2

10th September 2012 / / 1 Comment

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This is the second half of an email discussion I held on Ann Patchett’s novel State of Wonder. The first part was posted yesterday. Note that we go into some detail about the book; you may prefer not to read the discussion if you’re not already familiar with State of Wonder.

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Alison Bacon: I’d be interested to know how you people think Marina plans to move on after delivering Anders home. First time of reading I assumed she would go back to the jungle – second time I was less sure. Pregnancy by Anders is an obvious possibility. Can we assume her relationship with Jim Fox at an end? Just interested to see if an ‘open’ ending has produced the same or different responses, or are we to look no farther than Marina’s ‘mission accomplished’?

David Hebblethwaite: I got a strong sense of finality from the ending, with Marina back on her home turf, and Anders reunited with his family. The tone of the prose definitely suggested to me that she was drawing a line under it and moving on.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I think the key is ‘home turf’; there is a line on p.50 in my paperback, where Marina, with reference to Minnesota, is described as having the ‘finely honed sense of a native’ when it comes to judging the weather, not surprisingly, having lived there all her life. But set that against her desire as a child, on p.35, ‘longing [for] an entre country where, that place where no one would turn around and look at her unless it was to admire her good posture’, by comparison with Minnesota, where no one believes she’s from around there (or else think she’s Native American; I’m tickled that the gas station attendant would go so far as to ask ‘Lakota?’). And also the convincing herself that ‘she practically was from Indian’. The unspoken irony of course is that her paleness would be much admired by Indians, many of whom persist in seeing pale skin as preferable to dark skn (colonial influence, subsequent heavy marketing of skin whitening products) but would also mark her out as from not there. I’m not sure Patchett digs at that as well as she might.

Anyway, there is a clear sense that Marina is trying to find a place for herself, but having sampled various kinds of Indianness and indigeneity, I think the ending obliges her to recognise that she is a Minnesotan first. (And actually, I can’t help thinking, given her extraordinary reticence throughout, she is a living embodiment of Minnesota Nice).

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Round Table: State of Wonder, Part 1

9th September 2012 / / 2 Comments

Here’s something new to this blog, which I’m thinking of turning into a semi-regular feature. I was inspired by the round-table discussions that Niall Harrison used to do at Torque Control to try the same thing – to discuss a book over email with a few people, and blog the results.

The book we have on the table is State of Wonder by Ann Patchett. To quote the blurb:

Among the tangled waterways and giant anacondas of the Brazilian Rio Negro, an enigmatic scientist is developing a drug that could alter the lives of women for ever. Dr Annick Swenson’s work is shrouded in mystery; she refuses to report on her progress, especially to her investors, whose patience is fast running out. Anders Eckman, a mild-mannered lab researcher, is sent to investigate. A curt letter reporting his untimely death is all that returns.

Now Marina Singh, Anders’ colleague and once a student of the mighty Dr Swenson, is their last hope. Compelled by the pleas of Anders’s wife, who refuses to accept that her husband is not coming home, Marina leaves the snowy plains of Minnesota and retraces her friend’s steps into the heart of the South American darkness, determined to track down Dr. Swenson and uncover the secrets being jealously guarded among the remotest tribes of the rainforest.

What Marina does not yet know is that, in this ancient corner of the jungle, where the muddy waters and susurrating grasses hide countless unknown perils and temptations, she will face challenges beyond her wildest imagination.

Marina is no longer the student, but only time will tell if she has learnt enough.

Joining me in the conversation were Alison Bacon, Annoné Butler, Yvonne Johnston, and Maureen Kincaid Speller. Please note that we go into some detail about the book, including the ending; you may not want to read the discussion if you haven’t yet read State of Wonder. This is the first half; I’ll post the rest tomorrow [EDIT 10/9: and now here it is].

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David Hebblethwaite: What are your thoughts on the role of science in State of Wonder? I guess in a sense it’s at the heart of the book – the main characters are scientists, and the context of the story is a scientific study; but, even at the beginning, there’s a note of ambivalence, when Marina contemplates the blank space at the foot of the letter announcing Anders’ death: “How much could have been said in those remaining inches, how much explained, was beyond scientific measure”. How do you see science in the novel?

Annoné Butler: Ostensibly, Dr Swenson is with the Lakashi in order to discover the secret of their continued fertility. This is what will make Vogel rich, by providing a means for women of the first world to bear children unlimited by age. And it is certainly the primary aim of what the scientific team are doing. Dr Swenson has even tested the bark on herself and knows it works but, in the process, has realised that it is a mistaken and dangerous development. In the process of her own – ultimately catastrophic – pregnancy and birth she reaches the conclusion that such an aim is wholly misconceived – opportunities for birth should be limited as nature intended. This seems to chime with her original view that she is not there to involve herself with the medical problems of the Lakashi, on the basis that their natural state should not be interfered with.

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Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, Vol. 5 (2012)

6th September 2012 / / 2 Comments

Now in its fifth year, the Bristol Short Story Prize is establishing itself as a significant award with an eye for good stories. The tales on this year’s shortlist (anthologised in this volume) are no exception.

Top honours in this year’s Bristol Prize (announced on 14th July at ShortStoryVille) went to a fiction debut: ‘Naked as Eve’ by John Arnold. At first, this appears to be a gently humorous piece; the inhabitants of a small Australian town are putting on an act for a party of tourists, entertaining them with lurid tales of a cursed pool. But then we meet the narrator Olivia’s mother, who has dementia, and we realise that Olivia has been putting on a different sort of act as well. It’s this elegant mirroring, and Arnold’s deft shift to a darker mood, that make ‘Naked as Eve’ such a good story.

The runner-up was Alys Conran’s ‘Lobster’, which focuses on a father and son in a drowning future Wales where food is scarce. Conran evokes the boy’s innocence well through his narrative voice; and the ending – with an ambiguity that doesn’t allow for a positive interpretation – carries such an impact. Third place went to ‘Going Grapefruit’ by Ian Richards, whose protagonist speaks in nonsense after a car crash (‘You want to know about the grass my custard changed?’). What makes this work is that there’s an underlying consistency to the language, and enough context for us to understand roughly what the narrator means – which makes it all the more poignant to see other characters failing to do so.

Richards’ protagonist is not the only character in the anthology seeking to be heard and understood. Christopher Parvin’s ‘Ghost in the Machine’ tells of a future where robots (‘people of the Cog’) live alongside humans, but struggle to gain acceptance. There’s dry humour in the way Parvin reflects real-world discrimination, but I also find effective the story’s mosaic construction as a collection of blog entries and emails. The protagonist of ‘Beekiller’ by Ethel Rohan is fast losing patience with her husband over his obsession with beekeeping; she resorts to desperate measures in an ending that balances absurdity with an emotional believability.

Other stories carry a sharp sting in their tails. ‘Yoki and the Toy Surprise’ by Angela Readman is a spin on the classic ‘be careful what you wish for’ tale that shifts from an amusing beginning to a melancholy end. Avril Joy’s protagonist in ‘Meat’ knows where she’s going when she says goodbye to her neighbour at the start, but it’s almost certainly nowhere that readers may have expected. William Telford’s ‘The Attack at Delium’ sees a couple arguing over various academic points of history and science; matters are brought sharply and powerfully back down to earth at the end.

Further tales in the anthology revolve more around character. The narrator of Ellie Walsh’s ‘Jelly Feel Real’ takes a trip from Christmas Island to Perth with her friend Angel; it becomes clear for various reasons what a significant journey this is. The dry narration is very effective in illuminating the protagonist’s character. ‘The Swimmer’ by Lizzie Boyle is the story of Allan Fleming, who goes for an early-morning swim every day, pacing himself according to multiples of twelve. His ordered mind is reflected in the intense detail of the prose, and Boyle shows how Allan’s world starts to unravel when he comes across something he can’t explain – and a few too many prime numbers. Hilary Wilce’s ‘I Once Knew Salman Rushdie’ is about how chance encounters can have unforeseen consequences in life; its understated tone matches the mundane school hockey-game setting, but hides the stirring of some deep emotions.

Reading this book reinforced for me the notion that there’s nothing quite like a good anthology for variety and the potential for discovery. You may not know where you’ll be when you turn the page of a new story in the fifth Bristol Prize anthology, but you can be sure it’ll be somewhere interesting.

(This review also appears at Fiction Uncovered.)

Previously
Read my review of the 2010 Bristol Prize anthology.

M. John Harrison, Viriconium (1971-85)

3rd September 2012 / / 7 Comments

This is Viriconium: the city to end all cities; namesake of the dominant empire in Earth’s twilight. This is Viriconium: an omnibus of novels and stories by M. John Harrison. When you venture in, it’s important to bear in mind which of these statements is the more accurate.

By the way, this post is going to tell you quite a bit about what happens. I can’t really see that as a spoiler, because plot is not the point of Viriconium (except insofar as it’s an illusion, like much else in the stories). It’s the experience of reading Harrison’s work that counts, and nothing I say here can substitute that. Not that it’s going to stop me trying to give a sense of Viriconium, of course.

The first novel in the sequence, The Pastel City (1971), sees Viriconium under attack from the forces of the ruling queen’s cousin. One of the old king’s champions, tegeus-Cromis (‘who imagined himself a better poet than swordsman’), picks up his weapons and sets out to reunite his comrades-in-arms and defend the city. So far, so conventional, it might seem – albeit with a vividly realised setting of a decaying far future. Advanced technology from previous eras (the ‘Afternoon Cultures’) persists, but the world has forgotten how it works. The landscape is one of rust and garishly-coloured metal salts. The stars have been rearranged to spell the name of a past culture, but no one is left who can read it.

But the deeper themes of Viriconium are already becoming apparent. Some say that reality is becoming thin with age, forgetting itself. Cromis’s journey does not run according to plan, and he turns away from witnessing its ending, and away from greater knowledge. By the close of The Pastel City, individuals from one of the Afternoon Cultures have been resurrected – so Viriconium finds itself in danger of being superseded by the past.

As a fictional city, Viriconium is a timeless mish-mash; but, in The Pastel City, one nevertheless has the impression of a coherent, functioning place. That impression is predicated on the structure of the novel, though, as A Storm of Wings (1980) makes clear. This is a much more fragmented text, which could be seen in some ways as a parody of its predecessor’s quest-fantasy. Various characters (some from The Pastel City, some not) assemble in the queen’s palace to begin dealing with a threat to Viriconium. But the sense is much more that they have been moved there, like pieces on a gameboard; the reasons for their gathering are not so clear, to them or the reader.

All those reasons, it turns out, are aspects of the same thing: an invasion of insect-people who have their own way of perceiving the universe, radically different from humans’ – and these alternative perceptions vie for supremacy. Reality in Viriconium (in Viriconium) is literally what you make of it. The scenes of A Storm of Wings slide between perceptions; the reader’s best hope is perhaps just to hang on.

In the third novel, In Viriconium (1982), part of the city has been afflicted by a ‘plague’ which causes reality itself to thin out: people fall ill, buildings decay, ventures fail. A portrait-painter named Ashlyme attempts to rescue his fellow-artist, Audsley King, from the plague zone – a mission which, perhaps inevitably, leads to disaster. Harrison shows the reality of Viriconium to be ever flimsier here: so much so that the real world (our world) is leaking through. The mundanity of the novel’s events, and the fragmented nature of its ‘narrative’, suggest that the coherence of The Pastel City was illusory, no more than a matter of perception.

It might seem at first glance that the Viriconium novels take place in the same chronology, but there are enough discrepancies to make clear that it’s not so. And the stories which were assembled as Viriconium Nights (1985) – and are scattered throughout the 2000 omnibus I was reading – demonstrate that even more emphatically. Characters and places (even Viriconium itself) can have different names or histories. This is revealed to the character Ignace Retz in the story ‘Viriconium Knights’, when he is shown scenes of adventure featuring warriors who bear his face. ‘All knights are not Ignace Retz,’ he is told – but, if all these scenes have happened, or will happen, somewhere, what does that make him?

In my omnibus, ‘Viriconium Knights’ is placed first of all (even before The Pastel City); so we know from the start that there can be no such thing as a definitive vision of Viriconium. Essentially, the Viriconium Nights stories are slices of life from ‘places’ that can have no life beyond their individual tales. In ‘A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium’ – the final story – Viriconiun is no more than an abstract entity for which people in our world may yearn. The protagonist tries vainly to make the mirror of a café toilet act as a portal to Viriconium. After images of the far future and tales of saving the world, that is all you have left. That is what’s real.

Viriconium represents a systematic destruction of the idea of fantasy as escape. It is bleak, even nightmarish at times – yet it’s beautiful, too. You’ll have to read it for yourself, though, to really see what I mean.

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