Books like In Viriconium

M. John Harrison's prose is filled with a rich, idiosyncratic music, and the structure of his "Viriconium" novels is musical too. If The Pastel City is a late symphony by Beethoven (a classical, conventionally constructed work, filled with individualistic energy, straining to break its bonds), and if A Storm of Wings is a symphony by Mahler (brooding beauties from an immense modern orchestra, fragmented in its structure, held together by unexpected key changes and passages of dark humor), then In Viriconium must be a piece of chamber music: at first deceptively simple, then darkening like a string quintet by Schubert--something he wrote after the spirochetes and a cosmic melancholy had come to call--it soon begins to teem with modernist effects, surprising atonalities and bleak burlesque, no longer Schubert but a "Weimar Republic" homage to Schubert, by Alban Berg or perhaps Kurt Weill.Three very different kinds of music indeed, but they complement each other.