M John Harrison - The End Of Everything
I've just finished M. John Harrison's The End of Everything, which is the third book from this year's Booker Prize longlist that I've made my way through. This is actually the second time I've read it, and the second time I've tried to sit down and write something coherent about it. I read it back in June, before I had any idea it would end up longlisted, and I wasn't sure how I felt about it then. I'm not sure I'm much clearer now, if I'm honest, but a second read has at least helped me figure out roughly where I stand.
It's a weird book. I don't just mean that as a vague descriptor, either. It feels very much like it's sitting in conversation with the New Weird of the late nineties and early 2010s - your Vandermeers, your Miévilles - but run through a JG Ballard filter. I like that combination. I like weird fiction, I like the New Weird, I like Ballard. But it does mean the book feels rooted in a very particular moment rather than like something new. If you'd told me this was published in 2011 I'd have believed you.
For long stretches I genuinely had no idea what was going on, or what any of it meant, and I think that's by design rather than a failure on my part (or at least I'm choosing to believe that). I described it to my wife after finishing as feeling like post-fiction, and I still don't really know how to unpack that phrase, but it's the truest thing I can say about it.
There's a blurb on the back of the book that calls it "both a dream and the dream state itself - reading beyond reading, disturbing yet revelatory" and that's about as accurate a summary as I've seen. It's that feeling of waking from a dream that felt completely coherent while you were in it, and then watching the meaning drain away as you come round, until all you're left holding is a handful of fragmented images that clearly mean something but that you can't pin down.
That's the whole book, really. Slippery, surreal, funny in places, and then shockingly violent in others - not gratuitously so, but in the way that the violence just appears out of nowhere. That's a hard thing to do in prose. Jump scares are ten a penny in film, but landing that same gut-punch on the page is rare, and there were a few moments here where it properly worked for me.
My problem, and it's the same problem I had back in June, is that I couldn't extract much in the way of meaning from any of it. I get the sense that Harrison is reaching for something, that there's a thesis buried in here somewhere, but even on a second pass it never coalesced into anything I could articulate. I don't think that's necessarily a fatal flaw, but it does leave me a bit stranded when it comes to actually reviewing the thing.
I am genuinely pleased to see the Booker judges recognising proper genre fiction this year, and I mean that specifically - not the sort of soft-focus, doesn't-really-count sci-fi of something like Orbital, but actual speculative fiction with teeth. When the longlist first came out I said I was surprised to see Harrison on there, and someone kindly pointed out that he's been a Booker judge himself in the past and has won the Goldsmiths Prize. I've only recently started properly exploring the Goldsmiths Prize backlist, so that context had passed me by, but it makes his inclusion make a lot more sense, and I'm happy for him.
This isn't my favourite Harrison, and I don't think it's his best work, but I did enjoy it, even if I still can't quite tell you what it is or figure out how to talk about it properly. It's the third out of the three Booker longlisted books I've read so far this year, and I can't see it making the shortlist - official or my own personal one - but I'm glad I read it, and I liked it enough to read it twice, which counts for something. I suspect my feelings on this one will keep shifting as more time passes, and I might well end up revisiting it again.