The End of Everything by M John Harrison review: 'exceptional'
In his latest novel M John Harrison proves himself to be our edgiest genius, writes Stuart Kelly
As a former judge of the Booker Prize, for which this book has just been longlisted, it seem mildly heretical to confess that I tend to pay more attention to who wins the Goldsmiths Prize these days. It rewards “creative daring” and is “given to a book that is deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best”. They shy away from saying “experimental” writing but I see no reason why they should not embrace “avant-garde”. Many of its recipients – Lucy Ellmann, Nicola Barker – are writers I’ve been enthusing about for years; others – Eimear McBride, Mike McCormack – have become fixed points in my literary constellation subsequently. So it was with joy unconfined six years ago that I read that the prize had gone to M John Harrison. Leafing over his older books in advance of writing this review it was a joy to see his praises being sung by the likes of China Miéville, Robert Macfarlane and Ursula Le Guin, also luminaries in my own personal pantheon.
M John Harrison is a singular, exceptional writer and although comparisons can be made to John Wyndham or JG Ballard he remains his own chameleon self. Although he is generically promiscuous – it is almost impossible to hold in one’s head that the author of the fragmented fantasy epic Viriconium also wrote the existentialist, realist Climbers and the sinister sci-fi Kefahuchi Tract novels, Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space. Even within that, it is almost overwhelming reading works that not only feature but interlink a theoretical physicist and serial killer in the present day with the folkloric Welsh Mari Lwyd and a futuristic anorexic cyborg.
With such an astonishing backlist it is a little peculiar to suggest that readers new to M John Harrison’s oeuvre might start with his new novel, The End of Everything. The novel begins focussed on Phillip Tennent, living on the beach or with his aunt Marnie in the south of England on the aftermath of the – arrival? emergence? invasion? – of something non-human known as the iGhetti. “They had seemed at first like neither a thing nor a picture of a thing: they seemed extruded from a space that wasn’t quite in the world… competing authorities associated the iGhetti with dark matter or with the banking crisis of the late 2000s, while others believed it to be less an invasion than a ‘re-enchantment of the world’, a process of spiritual tourism and gentrification pursued by advanced civilisations from a mooted ninth planet. More popularly, they were seen as having ‘come out of the internet’.” Phillip is a beachcomber, a snapper-up of biological flotsam and jetsam associated with the iGhetti.
He finds an object, “about the size of a baby”, and when Phillip takes it back to Marnie’s, she notices immediately it is already growing. Marnie is anxious in its presence and shoos it away; Phillip storms off to find what it now “the artefact”. It has “smooth facial features and wisps of hair on a round, predominantly bald skull” and flesh “as translucent as sandwich ham”. It can regenerate limbs like an axolotl and speaks, or parrots phrases. It is “like the art object a conscientious child makes from putty”. When the iGhetti first manifested it was “as a kind of transparent jelly that was not to be confused with ectoplasm”.
The genius here is to give details and specifics but no overall description. The reader’s ability to visualise is smeared and smudged. Harrison did the same in the award-winning The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again, when Victoria encounters a slithering thing with “a foetal look but at the same time it seemed finished and complete… it wasn’t a mammal, perhaps not even a fish. It made her shiver. She wondered if it was some stage in the life of an octopus”.
There is plot here: Phillip’s attempt to capitalise on or understand the artefact; Marnie’s strange liberation – she continually writes posters stating “How can you misplace a continent?” to which Phillip snarks “Is this what you think art is now?” There are moments of extreme and utterly unexpected violence. There are fleeting epiphanies. At one point Marnie says: “‘I don’t want what’s happening to be owned’ – and by that, she said, she meant described or explained - ‘by anyone else’”. It is almost the Harrison credo and crisis. Another character – a sadist, so it complicates things – writes “Believe all you like that at some level unavailable to you an organising principle exists. You will never have any evidence of that”. Similar sentiments are stitched through the book. As the iGhetti flare above London, the third person narrator wonders “Were they ‘here’, in any sense a human being could understand?”
At a simplistic level this is Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations: “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” Every frame of reference, intent and distinction would be so utterly different to be inhuman in the pure sense. Critics trying to see The End of Everything as a comment on Brexit or climate change or late-era capitalism are not barking up the wrong tree: they’re barking. It is about the limits of the knowable. The iGhetti are the McGuffin, as Harrison’s message throughout his oeuvre has been consistent: maybe humans just can’t understand everything or even each other. He is the laureate of the liminal, the arch-mage of the margin, our edgiest genius.
The End Of Everything, M John Harrison, Serpent’s Tail, £16.99. M John Harrison is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 18 August.
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