Bill Kerwin's Reviews > A Storm of Wings

One of the most memorable characters in A Storm of Wings is the fabled lunanaut Benedict Paucemanly, who, after one hundred years of imprisonment on the moon, can not only no longer retain his original form, but also has difficulty maintaining any particular shape. He expands and contracts automatically, helplessly, and occasionally disintegrates into little globules resembling scores of floating clouds. His speech, although suggestive and poetic, is difficult to decipher. Occasionally he comes to resemble something akin to his former self, and the poetry he utters may be briefly united to sense, but more often he resembles a dirigible or a wraith, not so much an explorer as a vessel, not so much a hero as a ghost. The only thing he longs for is his own dissolution, the closest thing to happiness he can imagine.

Paucemanly can be seen as an ironic metaphor for A Storm of Wings when it is evaluated by the standards of a traditional fantasy novel. If it be a quest, it is a quest gone awry. The novel sets off on its explorations, sure, but soon the description--evocative and precise though it may be--expands beyond acceptable limits, and the plot contracts into small, isolated spheres of events, only occasionally re-forming into anything resembling a traditional narrative. During much of the action, three of the five characters are not only mad but periodically raving, struggling, isolated; it is as if Shakespeare stretched the King Lear storm scene out to two acts and omitted Lear and Cordelia's reconciliation entirely. Indeed, it often seems not to be a novel at all, but more like a prose poem with incidental characters (Maldoror, The Book of Disquiet and Naked Lunch come to mind). Is it surprising, then, that the book seems to be so much about decline, that it--like Benedict Paucemanly--seems to long only for oblivion?

And yet . . . M. John Harrison is a master of prose and mood, and he holds this grim pageant together with a style that is close to magical. Much of the magic lies in the vivid picture he paints of the many Viriconiums that strive for predominance--the Afternoon Culture, the Evening Culture, the Insect Swarm, and (I suspect) many other present and future Virconiums as well--asserting themselves in a surprisingly malleable present. These many Virconiums conspire to amaze the reader with their marvels, captivate his intellect with their complexity and lift up his heart with the valor of their battles and the vivid glimpses of their dark beauties. A Storm of Wings is, among other things, a powerful meditation on the nature of great cities, how each contains within itself not only the many cities of the present struggling for preeminence, but also the cities of the past and the cities that are yet to come.