Szplug's Reviews > A Storm of Wings

Harrison had matured as a writer when he penned this sequel to The Pastel City - some nine years having passed in between - and it showed: he discarded or relegated to the background the weaker elements from the prior book and concentrated upon its, and his, strengths. Harrison has always excelled at painting atmospheric scapes and moods; at finding the sorrow and melancholy, the potentiality for loss and regret that is inherent in existence, in the passage of space through the straitening parameters of time, and wringing it forth onto the page - and doing so with crystalline prose. Thus the questing journeys and battle scenes that comprised the story arc of TPC have been mostly abandoned for the existential annals of a smattering of battered and wounded figures, shuffling through a tired and confused world - one bereft of purpose or hope, unable to read the past or divine the future - that suddenly finds itself challenged by an alien awareness. Harrison constructs A Storm of Wings in panels, dream sequences and buzz-bomb exchanges, where violence explodes off of the page and immediately subsides, where reality becomes progressively harder to distinguish from mirage - and all is tinged with the patina of listlessness that is Viriconium in the Evening. It's futuristic fantasy-science fiction with the arc-welding ambience of Neuromancer and the molting-matter creativity of The Street of Crocodiles blanketed by the dust of a creaking, rheumatic world à la Gene Wolfe.

In Storm Harrison brings back the strongest characters from the prior book - Tomb the Dwarf and Cellur the Birdlord - while replacing the brooding poet-warrior tegeus-Cromis with the more effective brooding dissolute aristocrat-assassin Galen Hornwrack; Queen Jane also remains, though she is a nominal figurehead, both politically and novelistically. He expands upon the apocryphal Methven aeronaut Benedict Paucemanly (last seen rocketing towards the Moon and now become very weird), and introduces a pair of characters from the Reborn Men, the Afternoon Culture personalities resurrected towards the end of The Pastel City to defeat the savage Northmen. The Reborn are a fascinating addition, humans trapped between the Afternoon and the Evening cultures, existing in a present day reality that is overlain with chimerical visions and hallucinations projected by the stirring, struggling memories of their pre-existing lives in a technologically rich, but morally decadent clime. Seemingly destined to overshadow the anemic denizens of the Eventide empire, the Reborn appear to be worryingly susceptible to mass insanity; meanwhile, a strange new religion - The Sign of the Locust - has arisen out of nowhere to infect the Viriconium citizenry with its alarming metaphysical doctrine. Into such troubled times comes a northern female Reborn bearing a man-sized insect head and incommunicable madness. The Pastel City powers come to suspect a disturbingly alar alien presence in the occluded northwestern wastes, one whose radically different ontology is seeking to surmount that of the Evening culture - and from this existential struggle the very fabric of reality is being torn asunder, awakening the demiurgical memories dormant in the earth's very bones. With these two irreconcilable verities assaulting each other, corporeal existence has begun to change - and the end result may well prove catastrophic for both native and invader.

This is a great book. I'm a fan of Harrison, especially the way he digs inside otherwise banal or routine situations and plucks out the peculiar, the touching, the sinister. His descriptive prowess is remarkable, and some of the set pieces - a metal-sailed vessel thrusting forth from a fogbound grey seaside, aflame and bloody and echoing with the crew's desperate shrieks, before the startled eyes of Hornwreck and company; a hallucinatory romp through a buzzing earthen maze; the honeycombed, amorphous twin of Viriconium shimmering amidst a barren continent - are fantastic. The bifurcation of the Reborn and their conflicting consciousnesses, the alien entities and their mosaic mindset, are deftly handled; and though at times the plot threatens to recede behind the rich and lustrous atmospheric prose, the one actually reinforces the other. A Storm of Wings is the case of the sequel bettering the original; and with its own followup, In Viriconium , this happy trend would continue.