The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

The Pastel City by M John Harrison

Thanks to Bookmooch I'm able to reread some pulp fantasy novels that I enjoyed in my teens.. The Pastel City was always a favourite of mine. I loaned my original copy to a friend and that was the last I ever saw of it.

It's a compact novel with a simple linear story. The main character suffers from a mild case of the Elric mopes. It is firmly in the dying earth tradition and bears similarities to some of Moorcock's works. Indeed Moorcock is a significant fan of M John Harrison's work. It is Harrison's descriptive prose and sense of the fantastic that really lifts this novel above similar sword and sorcery offerings. The landscape of endless rust deserts and encroaching moors is truly alien. I have read none of his later works and I believe The Pastel City is supposedly the most accessible and most easily defined as genre fiction.