Worlds within, worlds beneath

Four seasons in one day

Lying in the depths of your imagination
Worlds above and worlds below
The sun shines on the black clouds hanging over the domain

– Crowded House (Lyrics Tim Finn & Neil Finn)

In writing, much of my attention is turned to the craft and creation of fictional worlds. This is not simply a matter of science fiction or fantasy; every fiction instantiates and implies a rich collection of assumptions, designs, guesses, and diegetic facts that form the imagined world: the shadow of the text illuminated by the reader’s imagination.

Fictional worlds, their potential and danger, haunt two quite different recent works: M. John Harrison’s startling and unsettling The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again and Susanna Clarke’s lucid and compelling Piranasi. Each one considers, in quite different ways, the temptations and traps of the many worlds harbored in the imagination.

One knows, by now, what to expect of M. John Harrison. His technique is extraordinary; his worlds are indistinct, oblique, out of reach. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is set in England, but it is the profoundly alienated and drifting nation of the Brexit era. Beneath the surface lies the deep history of the land: geology, geography, the sediment of millennia of human occupation and industry, marked in the spiritual and material landscape. But the characters are detached from this, often both physically and emotionally isolated, in a post-industrial economy focused on gigs and temporary lodgings. One senses the movement to reconnect with the sunken lands, inherent in the fictional interest in the themes of spiritual renewal and transformation expressed in the sentimental Victorian tract The Water Babies. But the fixation on a lost sense of "English-ness" also evokes the toxic isolationism of Brexit. 

Harrison's technique focuses on exact, evocative description paired with inexact, oblique narrative. His work is often described as unsettling, and it is the way his precise, writerly skill with detail and landscape positions itself across an incomplete story that unsettles one’s sense of narrative and coherent action. Harrison’s characters, likewise, are drawn to the unspoken network of aspiration and conspiracy that informs the story but refuses to cohere.

Clarke's Piranesi is no less painstaking, but the narrative that begins as a mystery eventually becomes clear, as the protagonist's fractured memory is reconstructed, if not restored. Yet the fictional world, the structure inspired by the work of the historical Piranesi, in particular the astonishing Carceri d'invenzione or Imaginary Prisons series of prints, is the primary setting of the novel. The "World" of Piranesi — it is a proper noun, a character — is an archetypal labyrinth, a fictional construct, and a prison. The fantasy that begins as a dream of transcendence, an experiment in magic, becomes a trap, an exercise in manipulation and cruelty. What first appears as a consistent, even beautiful exercise in baroque classicism also has corrosive effects on the mind and memory. And although compassion and rescue are possible, it is only from outside the fictional world that we begin to understand its dangers as well as its potential.

There is a measure of peace and resolution at the end of Piranesi that The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again does not offer, but both works shape themselves around the potential and dangers of the other world, the imaginary, and the dangerous journey between the real and unreal, and what we may discover, recover and lose in the transition.

What happened in the end

Pandemic reading has led me to two quite different authors and two quite different formation of one of the crucial challenges of writing in the long form: the stakes and satisfaction of an ending. 

We take it for granted, of course, that novels end. If they simple finished, terminated arbitrarily, we would recognize immediately that we possess a fragment, not a whole. And even fragments, like The Mystery of Edwin Drood, suggest their own missing structure. If we were to come across half of a broken boat, we will still see in the broken beams and keel the shape of the whole.

Here, then, is a study in contrasts.

M. John Harrison's Empty Space is the last volume in the loosely federated Kefahuchi Tract series, but it rigorously resists any disclosure that could be taken as a resolution to the complex of unsettling questions of character and causality that the sequence raises. There's a remark about a control room instrument: "Everything was processed to look 'real', arriving preassembled as a narrative from selected points of view," which taken in reverse suggests Harrison's method. From separate, selected points of view, narrative is disassembled, the structural illusion of reality is unravelled to reveal the contradictions, incoherencies, and dissonance of a future poised on the shockwave between the unfathomable physics of chaos and quantum indeterminacy and the unbearable nostalgia of submerged human identities.

But, also on my e-reading device is the first volume of the Penguin series of Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret novels—French detective fiction from the 30s, almost as far from contemporary science fiction as you could get. And, of course, what happens at the end of any Maigret is that the crime is solved, the guilty are discovered, the selected points of view, clues, plot points, are assembled into the narrative of the crime and its solution.

And yet—I'm not sure anymore whether Empty Space can be called an "open" ending and Pietr the Latvian, for instance, a "closed" one. Because however the inspector exposes the material logic of the crime, the human problem, Maigret's point of entry into the solution, with all its paradoxes and contradictions, remains. And isn't that the point of Harrison's radical uncertainties and unresolved threads, and inchoate nostalgia, that the human problem persists, a struggle to assert a sense of reality and identity against the shimmering chaos of an unknowable universe?

Whether SF or police procedural, perhaps the distinction lies in what is settled and unsettled, the points that are decided and undecided. In this sense, Harrison's project is to disrupt the confident teleology of technological progress, where Maigret's detective can close the case but leave open, and subtly unstated, the implications of character and the ironies of morality, guilt and deviation. In any case, what happened in the end counts, but we are left with something beyond the ending that haunts our reading still.

On genre fiction

Some remarks by the inestimable M. John Harrison on his blog propose that in the crowded market of genre writing, which ranges from fantasy and science fiction to mystery, history, horror, and crime, our writer's consciousness that we are writing within a genre (and presumably to a formula) leads us to strive too hard:

Why are genre writers so desperate to convince? Treat ’em mean keep ’em keen seems to be lost advice. The result is chapter after opening chapter of needy, to which the experienced reader is only going to react with contempt.

Readers, asserts Harrison,

know the weakness of your position. They’ve passed the groaning tables at the front of the shop. They’ve heard all your desperate lines.... What else can you show them? Even as they ask they’re walking on by, looking for someone who knows the product but has the dignity not to oversell it. 

The point has resonance. The commercial genres make for crowded shelves. Some writers are so attached to replicating what most succeeds in the genre (I'm thinking of epic fantasy) that they come only to replicate the experience they believe the reader most wants: the fantastical becomes routine. But other mysteries, like detection, seem to satisfy only in the reiteration of certain stages and tropes: the murder, the investigation, the reveal.

I've been tinkering for a long time with what might be called the fluid boundary between genre fiction and literature. What can you achieve within the bounds of genre, and what are the limits? Can a detective's story also read like a novel? Can a novel enclose a mystery without losing its other qualities? It's important to bear in mind that literary fiction, as defined by an emphasis on complex characterization, on realistic settings and action, on aesthetic language, is itself a genre, with only a marginal claim on preeminence.

What is the writing problem here? If it's a problem with writing to the formula, of adhering too closely to the conventions in the hope that recognition will equal sales in a saturated marketplace, then that's a worthy and valid challenge. But I wonder about the bigger question: I was once asked what happens when the detective becomes "novelistic"? Would the mystery seize to function or capture our interest if, for example, if the detective became a fully rounded character, no longer bound to the principle of investigation? What if, for example, we only cared about Commander Dalgliesh for his poetry?

But I think the question only holds if we valorize some quality of the literary genre as superior to the qualities of other genres, and seek that to the exclusion of others, which leads us into the same formulaic round as before. So Harrison's answer, knowing the product and not overselling it, keeping ourselves open to the challenge of writing well while quietly acknowledging whatever conventions we choose, is at once our answer and our first task.

And so, for what it's worth, here are the first lines of A Hangman for Ghosts:

A woman was shrieking in the cells when the hangman and the surgeon met inside the gate of old Sydney Gaol.

On Viriconium

M. John Harrison's Viriconium sequence rightly stands as a landmark in literary fantasy, although to the new reader it might be difficult to tell why. This is not to say the Viriconium is not a brilliant, significant work; it is, but it is also a puzzle, a challenge, which subverts the narrative unities of the genre, of fiction, even.

The puzzle begins with the collection itself: it is a sequence only in the loosest sense, being comprised of three novels and a number of short stories, published and composed over many years, and presented not entirely in chronological order. The stories are haunting, sometimes elliptical. The novels form a rough narrative arc, but the whole effect is not that of a traditional fantasy trilogy, and more one of recursion and retelling, a revisiting and revising of the history and place that is Viriconium.

To identify the setting, then: Viriconium is a city, sometimes the centre of an empire, perhaps the world's last, located on the far edge of human time, in the Evening Cultures that follow from the environmentally devastating period of the Afternoon Cultures. This suggests a science-fantasy, perhaps even of the dying earth variety, but the world is too indistinct to support that notion entirely. In fact, Virconium is more like an  urban fantasy, an impossible city, an abstract compilation of London, Rome, Paris, Berlin, York, Venice, with its European street names and imprecise architecture. And although Harrison deploys many archaic technologies and weapons (toxic power-knives, combat airships) the era and level of technology is fluid, anachronistic, indefinite.

This same fluidity characterizes the narrative as it expands. The first novel, The Pastel City, is probably closest in form to the science fantasy, and roughly follows the conventions of a quest fantasy: there is a hero (teagus-Cromis), a conflict (The War of the Two Queens), a quest against the enemy in the north. But by the second novel, which ostensibly addresses the aftermath of the first, the quest is less heroic, the threat more metaphysical, the protagonist confused and cynical. And although the final novel replays some of the tropes of the first (the metaphysical plague, the faltering rescue), it has become a matter between artists, entertainers and policemen, rather than swordsmen, and the events of the first novels are touched on only as the most distant memories of allusions.

Well, as Harrison warns us, in a phrase that might be taken as a talisman: "All queens are not Mammy Vooley.... All heroes are not Ignace Retz." His characters constantly reprise and return to archetypal roles (queen, swordsman, magus, dwarf), as though playing with the masks of the hero, and yet never entirely fulfill them, or indeed lose their own identity in the effort, as Cellur, the immortal, alien maker of mechanical birds, forgets even his own identity across the vast stretch of time the novels allude to.

Indeed, memory is the basis on which Harrison constructs and deconstructs his city, likening it to a set of letters read and reread until the original meaning becomes unclear. In his important, elusive online essay "What Might it be Like to Live in Viriconium" Harrison argues against one of the standards of modern commercial fantasy: worldbuilding.

The apparent depth of the great fantasy inscapes—their appearance of being a whole world–is exhilarating: but that very depth creates anxiety. The revisionist wants to learn to operate in the inscape: this relieves anxiety and reasserts a sense of control over “Tolkien’s World.”

Viriconium cannot be mapped; it resists literalism. Hence, Viriconium steadily unbuilds, revises, breaks open its invented world. This is less a deconstruction, a taking the world apart, than a continuous revisioning, a seeing anew.

But one might ask, to see what anew? Defamiliarisation is a process, not a statement, so what does the work as such say in the end? One could assert that to make the world anew in each work is to renew our perceptions of it: a kind of recovery such as Tolkien describes. Harrison proposes that such strategies can serve to reveal the inevitable structures of power and language that define realities, political, social, and otherwise. Certainly, Viriconium is strongly concerned with world-views, the clash of alien and familiar umwelts, but it is not until the last novel, In Viriconium, that Harrison reveals his interest in the function of art, visual, literary, or otherwise. In this novel, the sword is replaced by the palette knife, as artists take over the roles of poet-warriors and queens. Just as Harrison's essay rehearses the tension between literary and commercial fantasy, this Viriconium has become sickly, moribund, trapped between the popular, meaningless commercial art of the High City and the ineffectual avant-garde pretensions of the Low City. Consequently, the gods of this city are equally ineffectual, literal dummies and figures of fun and revulsion.

The city is only saved when these gods are challenged and wounded, when an attempt is made to reconcile "high" and "low" art, to return to art-making as a first principle. Elsewhere, Harrison has indicated the metaphor is an activity, an exchange, like meaning, which cannot be reduced to a static formula. Viriconium is not so much a city as that process in action, boundless, metamorphic, iterative.

Of course, this sort of work cannot always satisfy: that's the point. Viriconium doesn't deliver a world, but glimpses of a shifting world view that you assemble as best you can. Sometimes, we fail, and we're left with the pieces, as the characters so often fail. This is not always the best thing for readers: we're provided with suggestions rather than resolution. In its place, we have Harrison's extraordinary, evocative, powerful language. Viriconium is a thrill to read, even if we're not sure what's going on, or what a "cynical room" consists of. Sometimes, characters seem to lack a critical agency; Harrison's female characters, most of all, are either figureheads or images of stoic acceptance.

This does not stop us from journeying towards Viriconium, or constructing it again in imagination and tracing its rise and fall. This ever-expanding, never resolved journey is the subject, suitably, of the last story in the collection. "A Young Man's Journey to Viriconmium" is a journey that can never be completed, or is likely to be punctuated with disasters, but in the middle of the story, a child's vision of a cafe interior reflected in the windows that look out on a garden, superimposing the two spaces, becomes a metaphor for the work that fantasy can accomplish, a moving and poignant vision of a world transformed. If you look for a plot in this story, or even continuity between scenes, you will be disappointed. But if, as in the last scene of the story, you want to keep digging in the storm, you will be rewarded.