Can we start by talking about Viriconium? It appeared in your first novel, and it's still going strong. Did you imagine that when you started out on The Pastel City?
M. John Harrison
No, I didn't think it would take 20 years to work out. In fact it appeared before the first novel; the original version of 'Luck in the Head', one of the Viriconium stories published about 1983, was re-written from an original story published about 1965/66. So it's an obsession that's lasted 20 years.
Paul Kincaid
How come it has obsessed you so much?
M. John Harrison
I think the kinds of images and themes that are handled and the way in which Viriconium the concept allows you to handle them have really been fascinating enough to take that length of time for me to become bored with. But I am now. I wouldn't say bored, but it's worked itself out. I probably won't do any more. I might give the odd snapshot here and there as it were, because it is an addictive method of writing. They're addictive images.
Paul Kincaid
I've described Viriconium as a strange mixture of fin de seicle Paris, Weimar Berlin and Medieval England all mixed up together. Do you have a clear image of the city?
M. John Harrison
No, mine is about as clear as the reader's. Intentionally so. It is a collage in the sense that it's put together from odds and sods quite deliberately. I never wanted there to be a recogniseable period of Viriconium's history as it were. These things should suggest to the reader that it is a temporal collision really.
Paul Kincaid
I like the way that history is always changing, you can have a character killed in one story and in another which appears to be later in the sequence he's alive again.
M. John Harrison
Yes, exactly. The rationale allows this. It's stated two or three times in the novels and through the stories that time, the universe has become to exhausted that it's beginning to forget itself, it's beginning to forget how to do, as it were, temporal narrative. As you say, there are hitches and ellipses, prolapses and so on. The whole idea was to make it as mixed up as possible, for the simple reason that it aids you in preventing closure for the reader. It forces the reader to look for the closure of the story somewhere other than in the narrative.
Paul Kincaid
Was 'A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium' intended as a closing off of the sequence?
M. John Harrison
Yes, very much so. The story is in itself a use of the Viriconium replication methods on 'Egnaro'. It makes the equation between Viriconium and Egnaro, and between what Viriconium and Egnaro represent, which is the act of fantasy itself. And it says the same thing as 'Egnaro' which is that we should think very very very carefully when we make an act of fantasy, especially an act of escapist fantasy. Obviously, too, it's rather perjorative.
Paul Kincaid
I was surprised that in Young Man's Journey, Viriconium doesn't become as attractive as it might otherwise have seemed.
M. John Harrison
Well exactly. I had regarded it for some time as my ideal escape, and I looked at it and thought: My God, this isn't actually a very attractive place. Most of what goes on there is not what you'd want to escape to from our world simply because it is so heavily based on how our world seems to me to operate anyway. I mean it's about contingency, it's about the fact that in real life you cannot depend on anything, you cannot operate by ideological systems, moral systems and so on. Because of that it's not the ideal escape world, so it is quite reasonable that the guys who go there from Huddersfield should discover this. At the same time there is a polarity involved in that discovery because one of the guys does think the world is beautiful and escapable to. He does see it as a fantasy and the other sees it as a terribly cold, realistic, dangerous place from which you have to escape in another way, by practical methods. There are more paradoxes of that nature involved in the subject matter of my work than I could ever possibly have guessed, and my next novel will get into some of those.
Paul Kincaid
Is it meant to be a counter-Viriconium.
M. John HARRISON
It will very much be a counter-Viriconium. The idea this time is to present an actually accepted fantasy world. It's very similar to 'Egnaro' again, and Viriconium as 'seen in 'Young Man's Journey'. but it is definitely presented - though you don't get very many glimpses of it in the novel - as an acceptable alternative. There is also a heavy meta-language in the novel that tells you constantly it is more acceptable. In the end some of the characters do manage to achieve it.
Paul Kincaid
Is it as entropic as so much of your fiction seems to be?
M. John Harrison
No. The real world is shown as entropic in the sense you associate with M. John Harrison, in 'Running Down' or 'Egnaro' or 'The Ice Monkey' or any of those things. But it is definitely seen towards the end that characters have escaped that, and they have escaped it by operating in one of the paradoxes the book is about, which is to do with that constant antithesis since the Middle Ages or before in cultural or political history between what I term 'love' 4nd what I term 'order', between as it were anarchy and call it fascism, statism, whatever. This fabulous new fantasy land, which Is called the Couer d'Alene, actually is a resolution of this paradox, or rather is a level of existence which can contain them as non-paradoxical as parts of its structure. Unfortunately I can't tell the reader how to attain this, otherwise we might solve the world's problems tomorrow.
Paul Kincaid
This seems to be not so much a counter-Viriconium as a counter to a large proportion of your writing.
M. John Harrison
Yes. it's a deliberate attempt to look at the other side of the question.
Paul Kincaid
Is it very difficult to write because of that?
M. John Harrison
Easier than I would have thought. I sat down thinking: alright, this is where I state the antithesis of 20 years of work. And I found that it flows, it comes out very fluently indeed. Of course at the moment I'm only doing the miserable bits, we may find a little difficulty with the ending which is supposed to be happy. There's no point in me saying a lot about it now because I've only done three chapters, but it does indicate there's going to be a different point to my work from now on.
Paul Kincaid
You're writing a mainstream novel at the same time. Do you find any conflict there?
M. John Harrison
Well, I do one or the other, and at the moment I'm working on the fantasy. The mainstream novel works by a methodology which is crazily documentary. aimost everything in it has occurred. It's material that has been collected by observations in situ. It's about climbing and most of these observations have been collected on the crag. Because of that I had to wait for certain things to occur so I could write about them, and I'm still waiting for a couple of incidents to crop up. I mean I could ham them up but I don't see the point since they will inevitably happen. Also of course if you work by this method you often have to see one incident or a particular type of incident several times before you can really get the feel of it, take several notes, many observations, and layer them on top of one another to give the reader a feel of the complete experience.
Paul Kincaid
Did you find it an imaginative gear change to move from fantasy to something realistic?
M. John Harrison
No, because I did it slowly All the stories in rhe Ice Monkey collection move, from about 1974, towards a fiction totally empty of science fiction. I've only ever used the science fiction and the fantasy elements in my work as metaphors anyway. Metaphors for stuff that a mainstream novelist would deal with directly, because he's allowed to, whereas I was never allowed to in the sense of having to write for a genre audience.
Paul Kincaid
But some people would claim that the freedom of fantasy allows you to say even more than the mainstream writer is allowed to say.
M. John HARRISON Yell it does and it doesn't. It's an argument you could have all the way. I think that's probably why I'm still continuing to do sane fantasy, because you feel this need to out things metaphorically rather than directly. Complex metaphysical ideas can be handled directly because you can act then out in front of the reader, you can't do that in realistic fiction. You can do it in 'real' fiction, 'real' writers have written fantasy if they needed to. This is where distinctions break down. A real writer takes what he needs to do the Job that he wants to do. The fantasy element is used as a metaphor.
For instance in 'Rnning Down' I'm not writing about entropy. Somebody said in Foundation a while back that M. John Harrison had misunderstood entropy when he was writing about it. I had no intention of writing about entropy. Entropy doesn't interest me as a thing, it intejests me as a metaphor for the human condition. As far as I'm concerned - and this is very important about all my work and it's very rarely stressed - I write about people. Fiction is about people. it isn't about anything else. The fiction of ideas can go stuff itself as far as I'm concerned. Ideas mean nothing, what counts is people. Entropy in my work is a metaphor for the condition that people find themselves in. A reader who can't see that and who thinks I'm trying to write about same aspect of astro-physics is crazy. I mean it's quite obvious from reading 'Running Down'.
Anyway, they're metaphors. Because of that they can be taken out and they steadily have been, and finally if you lock for instance at 'The Ice Monkey' there are only three sentences in there which make it a fantasy. They could very easily be lifted out and one day I will just lift them out and leave a story about Climbers. This is how Climbers was developed, very slowly and across a long period, to remove all those fantasy metaphors and only leave the realism which I was already doing in 'Running Down' and stories like that.
So no, it wasn't a difficult transition, it was wonderful. It's so relaxing to be able to write about the world, what you see, you don't have to make it up all the time. You're not constructing it to the extent that you're constructing a fantasy. You watch somebody walk past in the street, you listen to what they say, you put it down in a notebook, the next day it's in the fiction, or a year later it's in the fiction, whenever it's necessary. It means that you have a direct contact again with the world. You're writtng for people, about people. My biggest quarrel with science fiction as a genre and as a philosophy of life which a lot of people use it as - is that it's so damned inhuman. There is so little to do with people in it. And I just think that's a tragedy. It's not just a tragedy but it seams to me to be a deliberate avoidance of human affect. It's an attempt to escape from the difficulty of being human, the pressures of being human.
Paul Kincaid
Do you feel that writing fantasy has given you a sideways entrance into that, a slightly different angle than other peaple might have got?
M. John Harrison
Oh yes, l wouldn't change anything. I don't approve of a lot of the early stuff that l wrote, but wouldn't change any of that because it allowed me to come to realistic fiction, or mainstream fiction whatever you like to call it, with a tool box that is quite different to what a normal mainstream writer would have. If I can then add his toolbox to mine it would be a strange workshop and it would enable me to do what every writer ought to do, which is to write himself, to write with his own voice out of himself, not just out of his own opinions but out of his own temperament and the rhythms of his own brain. So fantasy at its best provides an oblique look at the real world. I'd be really happy if it was said that I was doing that.
Paul Kincaid
M. John Harrison, thank you very much.