The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison

Ten days later I was holding it in my hands. It took some 18 months of dedicated searching to find a copy at a reasonable price, but earlier this month I found a listing on eBay for the copy above, in great condition, for $8.24 (including shipping). Impossible to find paperback? Short story collection? Cool Chris Foss cover art? Man, I’m all over that. In fact, in four decades of collecting, I’d never even seen a copy. John Harrison, I did a little research and discovered that his first short story collection, the UK paperback The Machine in Shaft Ten (1975), had never had a US printing, and has never been reprinted.

While I was wondering where to make my own start on the works of M. Harrison has produced much more than just the Virconium series, including The Centauri Device (1974) the acclaimed Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy ( Light, Nova Swing, and Empty Space), and The Course of the Heart (2004). In this book, he is clearly taking it to task for that. While The Pastel City remains an excellent heroic fantasy tale, I’m now able to perceive it best as the template for Harrison to build on and spin off from mad, wild, meta-fictional constructs… Too much heroic fantasy relies on a lazy adherence to simple tropes – the hero, the obvious enemy, etc. Despite sharing a similar structure with its predecessor, A Storm of Wings, is a more potent book, filled with headier feats of prose and narrative gameplaying. Like the citizens of Viriconium, it leaves the reader dazed and more than a little confused at the end. The heroes are addle-minded or decidedly unheroic – even Tomb the dwarf, as much as he enjoys fighting, thinks of what he does as murdering.

This is most assuredly not your typical heroic fantasy tale. Here’s Fletcher on the second book in the Virconium saga, A Storm of Wings. At first blush, it strongly resembles the pulp work of Michael Moorcock the better points of the Hawkmoon books, for example, though Pastel City is much better written.īut it was Fletcher Vredenburgh, with this 4-part examination of the Viriconium books, that really sent me chasing after Harrison’s novels. The first book, The Pastel City, is clearly the most conventional. And it is frequently under threat, though what precise consequences these threats can bring is often nebulous. It is divided into different neighbourhoods along class lines. It is fundamentally decadent, filled with killers, artists, street gangs, and peculiar customs. Viriconium is a city of the distant future, surrounded by the polluted wastelands left by previous civilisations. Matthew David Surridge significantly heightened that interest with his thoughtful 2013 post To Unbuild the Unreal City: M. John Harrison, in his very first blog post for Black Gate back in 2007.

Howard Andrew Jones was the first to pique my interest in M.

The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison