The Luck in the Head: Book Review

M. John Harrison's fantastical conurbation Viriconium, or The Pastel City first appeared in the early 80s as an update of Gormenghast-style fantasy, but Harrison's Viriconium cycle of stories is poetic and strange enough to defy easy catagorisation. In this graphic novel, adapted from the short fiction (published in the collection by Fantasy Masterworks, no. 7) the city is re-named, a fact central to the plot, such as it is, which appears to concern an ancient weapon, an attempt to assassinate a member of the city's ruling class and a poet troubled by nightmare visions. The city exists as a sort of troubled vignette of a decaying future, but in fact it isn't placed in a historical context at all. Harrison has said that everything glimpsed in Viriconium is based on stuff that was already happening in Thatcher's Britain - the urban decay and sense of ruined empire was already present at this time in the blasted industrial landscape of the 1980s, and Viriconium, then, is an inner world to which we can retreat, which is changing all the time.

This story concerns also (appropriate to the time of year) a bizarre arcane ritual, called The Luck in the Head. The artist was one Ian Miller, (who previously worked with Ralph Bakshi, who made Lord of the Rings - the crappy animated version). He has rendered the scenes in a style faithful to the original story - at least how I imagined it would be. His drawing is impressionistic and probably completely uncommercial. Ironically this comic has little in the way of words or explicatory dialogue for an adaptation.

Author Mick Harrison himself appears in one scene, seated in a cafe eating gooseberries soaked in gin, in the part of one Ansel Verdegris, mad poet of the city, another conspirator in the plot. I don't think it would be giving too much away to say that this plot is doomed to fail, miserably and comically. Is Harrison trying to say something about narrative itself in Modern fiction?

The Luck in the Head is a dark and troubling book. It opens a door to a world not quite anything like our own.