'The Pastel City' – M. John Harrison (New English Library)

I already have the Fantasy Masterworks edition of 'Viriconium' but when I saw this New English Library Edition of 'The Pastel City', I had to get it. I mean, just look at that cover, isn't it just the best? And back in the day when a paperback would set you back 30p. They don't make em' like that any more etc, etc... ;o)

Anyway, middle-aged reminiscing over...

So yep, mostly the cover then but even though it's been a while since I last read 'The Pastel City', I remembered enough that I knew it would be a good read (which should give you some idea about how this post is going to end). That and the fact that this edition is only a hundred and forty four pages long, just the right length for a couple of commutes to and from work (with a lunch break in between). So that's just what I did and here I am to tell you all about it.

For millenia, the Pastel City had been the sole centre of civilisation on an Earth despoiled and ruined by it's own inhabitants; but now the coloured towers were charred and tottering, as two queens fought for supremacy, armed with the relics of a culture that had already destroyed the world once...

tegeus-Cromis, the moody, introvert Lord of the Methven, left his seashore retreat to fight for the Young Queen against the barbaric hordes of the Old. He travelled and fought amongst the wasted deserts and dreaming marshes of Viriconium, only to find that the War of the Two Queens was merely a prelude to a vaster and more dangerous conflict...

Would the Empire fall? Who would halt the invincible automata of an ancient science, resurrected by the Old Queen to tear down the Pastel Towers? Could a poet, a braggart and a heroic dwarf halt the irresistible flow of time and save the Empire from a destiny worse than barbarism...?

'The Pastel City' is one of those books that looks relatively straightforward on the surface but has a few more things to say if you're prepared to go and look for them..I already knew what I was letting myself in for so certain bits weren't too hard to spot. The environmental message hiding behind the carnage of millenia of industry for example but more than that, living in a world that's so old, time and reality have both started to behave erratically, leading to interesting questions around what is real and what isn't. It’s a theme that is delved into in greater depth over the course of the series but for now, it’s not central to the plot but is still something that is worth chewing over a little. If nothing else, that and the introduction of Cellur really make it clear to the reader just how much time has passed, between the present and the time in which Viriconium finds itself, and that really adds to the atmosphere of the piece as well as raising a few questions of its own. When time itself is old and dying, at what point do you give up? In ‘The Pastel City’, the answer is ‘not quite yet’, not when there is still something to fight for.

When set against this dying landscape, you may question whether it’s worth fighting a bunch of invading Northmen, just let them have Viriconium if they want it so much? Luckily for us, the last surviving members of the Methven think otherwise and what that means for us is a ‘quest’ tale that neatly offsets the bleaker themes in this book. We’re talking ‘getting the band back together’, fighting Northmen and then going on the quest that they should have gone on from the start. For a couple of grim old commutes to work, this side of the book was just what I was after, it’s a lot of fun to read. Cromis is the bridge between the two sides of this book, cool enough to carry the more swashbuckling pages and introspective enough that you can easily travel with him through his bleak musings on a bleak world.

‘The Pastel City’ proved to be an ideal ‘commute read’ and a little more besides; well worth picking up if you come across a copy.