The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M John Harrison review / Brilliantly unsettling

 

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The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M John Harrison review – brilliantly unsettling

Harrison is fabulously alert to the spaces between things in this novel of collapsing certainties in a haunted England

Olivia Laing

Friday 19 July 2020

T

owards the end of the last century, there was a spate of haunted London novels, by Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd and Chris Petit among others. Broadly psychogeographic in nature, they featured middle-aged men washed up on the outer reaches of the Thames, part of the detritus of a city ravaged by Thatcherism. In 1989, the science fiction writer M John Harrison took this mood and drove it out of London, crash-landing in the Yorkshire hills with the magnificently unsettling Climbers, a novel about an unhappy exile named Mike struggling to keep his footing among a group of temerarious local climbers.

Harrison described this real, gritty world with the same precise and estranging fluency with which he has more often mapped galactic space, using the dense idiolect of climbing to make atmosphere and geology resonate on an emotional, interior level. Some kind of breach or fault line was being cautiously staked out, a post-industrial, late-capitalist collapse in credit and confidence so amorphous and inarticulable that it would vanish altogether if apprehended too directly. 

While he has touched down on England’s terra infirma in the intervening years, notably in 2002’s Light, he hasn’t until now lingered for the entirety of a novel. At first, it feels as if no time has passed. Harrison’s entry point is a delicate pastiche of the old psychogeographic machinery. Middle-aged Shaw moves into a bedsit in a shared house abutting the river in Hammersmith. He’s in flight from a breakdown, its major symptom a sense of absence from himself. His mother has dementia, and spends their time together gleefully tearing up photos of the various broken family units he keeps trying to decode. He’s also failing to connect with a new lover, Victoria, who, like Mike in Climbers, ups sticks at the novel’s beginning, relocating to her dead mother’s house in Shropshire. 

M John Harrison ... the missing evolutionary link between William Burroughs and Virginia Woolf. Photograph: Kevin Nixon/Future/REX/Shutterstock

Neither of these new refuges is exactly stable. Shaw hears voices through the wall and keeps glimpsing something disturbing in the toilet bowl. He encounters a man in a graveyard who offers him a job shifting merchandise around the Midlands, hours of train travel to desolate offices that have plainly failed to survive some recessionary event. We’re in Brexit Britain, but it’s infested with rumours of a new species, part human but green. In Shropshire, Victoria encounters a small, repulsive green creature that resembles a drowned kitten. Copies of The Water Babies keep appearing, that sentimental Victorian account of evolution and its reverse. It has a talismanic function for her mysterious new neighbours, one of whom vanishes into a shallow grassy pond, exactly like someone descending the steps at Oxford Circus tube.

A communication failure is clearly at work, an inability to grasp some new frequency. There are crossed wires. Lines of conversation leak or wash between Shaw’s world and Victoria’s. The creation of the green people allows Harrison to explore a mood of rumour and suspicion that feels painfully familiar. Conspiracy theories proliferate on blogs. Maybe something ancient and atavistic has awoken, or perhaps a con has been perpetuated, a sleight of hand that passes off, leaving an ugly sense of being short-changed or cheated.

Maybe something ancient and atavistic has awoken, or perhaps a con has been perpetuated

That’s the mood, and the fact that it isn’t hopelessly depressing is down to Harrison’s gift for assembling the minute-by-minute, unceasing drama of inner and outer weather. No one alive can write sentences as he can. He’s the missing evolutionary link between William Burroughs and Virginia Woolf, bringing together new blooms of language, gathering up advertising copy and internet lingo and arranging them in startling hybrid forms. Take this impeccable sentence: “Landward, the crows were working out happily above St Mary Magdalen, loosening up in twos and threes, doing air-pocket work, breathing into their stalls and sideslips, wingsuiting around Richard Burton’s tented mausoleum.”

At his peak, Harrison summons the same awesome linguistic invocation of change as Dickens in Dombey and Son, another novel troubled by the collapse of certainty in the face of rapid social and economic transformation. It’s no coincidence that Victoria (clock the name) has come to roost at the edge of the Severn gorge. It’s haunted country, “the demented, unpredictable, immeasurably fortunate geology, fuel for the industrial light and magic that had once changed the world: the iron money, the engine money, the steam and tontine money, the raw underground money hidden in unconformable strata, secret seams and voids, in jumbled shales, fireclays, tar, coal measures and thinly bedded limestone – to exit as seeps and springs above the heritage museums and leisure trails and decommissioned railways; while associated subsidence gnawed quietly away at the superficial architecture of the Gorge.” 

We are in the fallout of that long boom now, its unpredictable collapse. Unsettling and insinuating, fabulously alert to the spaces between things, Harrison is without peer as a chronicler of the fraught, unsteady state we’re in.

• The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is published by Gollancz (RRP £20).

THE GUARDIAN