Edmund Gordon: Uncanny Little Blighter

Edmund Gordon

In M. John Harrison’s short story ‘The Crisis’, first published in 2017, the world has been invaded by aliens that look like ‘stalks of fleshy, weak rhubarb’. Except they might not be aliens; it might not be an invasion. Nobody’s quite sure what they are, or where they’ve come from, or whether they’re even ‘here’ in the conventional sense. They gravitate towards the City of London, transforming it into a spectral no-go zone. ‘You would see them for a fraction of a second just at the city skyline behind the buildings, just under the cloudbase, evolving very fast like stop-frame film of something organic growing, then running out of energy, then growing again.’ Some people associate them with dark matter. Others think they’ve emerged ‘out of the internet’. They become known as the iGhetti, for some reason. Attempts to combat them are futile. ‘The sirens would go off, all across the city from Borough to Camden. The artillery would fire and recoil, fire and recoil. The iGhetti would pulse and grow against the lighted clouds.’ It’s hard to maintain a sense of emergency. Displaced finance workers go home to their Georgian terraces and occupy themselves collecting modern first editions or doing triathlons. In places as close to the front line as Liverpool Street and the Barbican, restaurants, cafés and art galleries remain open. ‘It was as if nothing had changed, as if the City fringe, like West London, still believed itself to be intact, functioning, the heart of what we used to call, before money lost its confidence, an “economy”.’

An atmosphere of collective denial – of a society adapting to disaster by learning to ignore it – is even stronger in The End of Everything. Harrison’s new novel is a return to the scenario of ‘The Crisis’, but the iGhetti are now more firmly established (a reference to Covid in a character’s childhood seems to place the action in the 2040s), and though they’re still focused on the Square Mile, the setting is the stretch of semi-gentrified, semi-bohemian coastal towns between Hastings and Margate. On one level, everything is painted in familiarly dystopian colours. Acts of sudden, extreme violence have become routine, and law enforcement is a matter for vigilante bands. Air travel and news media are things of the past. Refugees pile onto boats bound for Europe, ‘the lost continent’, but ‘no one ever comes back from there to say whether they found it or not.’ Yet all along the seafront, waiters serve coffee and croissants to weekenders watching the sunrise. Around midday, retirees emerge from their mansion flats to have amiable arguments about Henry VIII and the Battle of Britain. At night, music blares out of neon-fronted bars. Nobody makes much effort to understand or even acknowledge the changes that have occurred. ‘It had been a long time since anyone could make sense of anything.’

Phillip Tennent, the novel’s unsatisfied, ineffectual hero, came here from London in his early twenties, less in the hope of putting distance between himself and the iGhetti than because he was drawn by ‘some internal compass of nostalgia’ towards his aunt Marnie, a painter who arrived ‘a generation ago’, when the town was still ‘a thriving arts community’. Now Tennent is 38 and eking out a living as a beachcomber, while Marnie is 70, ‘lively and determined one minute, precarious the next’. They’re no longer close, but in the opening pages Tennent shows up at Marnie’s house with something he’s found in the sea. More or less human in appearance, it’s actually ‘hybrid technology, some kind of biological gadget the iGhetti had released in numbers when they first arrived, which was no longer of use to them’. It’s about the size of a baby, but growing fast. At first it speaks exclusively in gnomic phrases (‘I don’t want to see it, I just want to be it’ or ‘a new life … is beginning’), but by the end of the novel it has learned to read and can reel off various esoteric facts, though there’s no way of checking them. Tennent and Marnie don’t bother to give it a name. It’s referred to throughout as ‘the artefact’, ‘the object’ or ‘the item’. The plot – if that’s the right word for such a fragile, open-ended structure – largely revolves around their efforts to get rid of it.

On his blog, Harrison describes The End of Everything as his attempt to write a novel ‘that might have been submitted for serialisation in New Worlds in 1967’. That makes it sound like a throwback – a curious project for a writer of science fiction. Apart from the odd mannerism – the male characters are called by their last names and the female ones by their first – it doesn’t feel especially retro, but perhaps Harrison has in mind an attitude rather than a technique.

New Worlds sought to transform science fiction from a species of adolescent escapism into a branch of the avant-garde. In 1967 the magazine published countercultural classics including Thomas M. Disch’s Camp Concentration (in which draft dodgers are subjected to sinister medical experiments) and J.G. Ballard’s ‘Notes towards a Mental Breakdown’ (which features the Apollo 1 astronauts and an obsessive restaging of the Kennedy assassination). The following year, aged 23, Harrison joined its editorial staff; he ran the books pages until it ceased regular publication in 1976. The dozens of essays and reviews he wrote during his tenure (many of them published under the name Joyce Churchill) trace the formation of a distinct aesthetic. He came to feel that mainstream science fiction wasn’t just inane: in its indifference to ordinary experience it was reprehensible. As he put it in a 1975 essay, ‘at times there can be sensed at the hub of the genre something so repellent, so intolerably fixated and vacuous that you don’t know quite whether to choke or laugh.’

Since his New Worlds period, Harrison hasn’t limited himself to science fiction. The semi-autobiographical Climbers (1989), set in the Peak District, became the first novel to receive the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. The Course of the Heart (1992), about a group of Cambridge students dabbling in the occult, was a formative influence on the loosely defined fantasy/horror movement known as the New Weird (it was Harrison who gave it the name, in an introduction to China Miéville’s 2002 novella The Tain). But whether the setting is West Yorkshire in the 1980s or a semi-sentient spaceship in 2400, his determination to say something about ordinary experience – specifically, the experience of feeling rudderless and dazed – has been unwavering. In his ‘anti-memoir’, Wish I Was Here (2023), he sets out his credo:

Massive amounts of what happens to you will happen via invisible and/or unparsable causal chains. Much of life, you will never know what happens to you at all, let alone to anyone else. Much of what goes on around you, you will never even notice. Though causes are everywhere present and dependable, the search for causality is to welter around looking for explanations you can’t have, using epistemologies and ontologies at best provisional. Why waste time, especially in fiction? Let’s have some representation in fiction for everyone who, without knowing it, puzzles through their lives in what used to be called ‘a dream’ … I’m not sure life is a dream. But if your attempts to map it don’t feel like one, you may be making a serious error about what being awake actually is, or where and in what conditions it is carried out.

Harrison’s novels enact dreamy puzzling-through at every level. They dispense with much of the usual narrative infrastructure: linear plotting, legible motive, dramatic resolution. The dialogue is scrappy and oblique. The central characters are baffled underachievers, spiritually enervated men and women whose personal crises distract them from the crisis facing the species. The hero of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020) is typical:

During his fifties Shaw went through a rough patch. That was how he put it to himself. His adult life had been, until then, perfectly normal. He had been determined on normality. Perhaps that had been the problem. Anyway, his life lost shape and five years were expended on nothing very much. They slid into themselves like the parts of a trick box and wouldn’t open again. He would wake up to himself with utter clarity in – say – a crowded first-floor noodle bar at night, talking to people he didn’t know while he looked down into a street full of brand-new motorcycles. Then everything would slip away again, to be lived at one remove for a week or two.

In The End of Everything, ‘bad patches’ are external features of the landscape. They have something to do with the crisis, though it’s not clear whether they’re ‘a weapon in themselves’ or simply ‘a side issue of the iGhetti’s way of existing’. At times they’re static phenomena that cause epic hallucinations; at others they’re ‘smaller, unanchored events’ that drift around ‘like fogs or showers of rain’ and trigger nothing worse than light-headedness and a rush of false memories. One result of all this is that it’s hard to be confident that anything’s real. At one point, Marnie enters a bad patch in which she sees a strange vehicle speeding towards her from a roundabout. It’s described across four short chapters, each of which is titled ‘The Sign’: this mild formal breach is the only indication that the episode isn’t of a piece with all the other weird stuff in the book.

Novels in which the characters don’t understand what’s happening are hardly rare, but mystification is both Harrison’s subject and his method. It’s an approach that throws up some obvious technical problems. How to frustrate understanding without sacrificing interest? His solution is to be explicit about psychological and emotional matters while remaining vague about everything else. For a writer bent on capturing equivocal moods, he can be surprisingly fond of direct statement. He’s quite capable of conveying ambiguity by saying ‘there was a vigorous ambiguity to everything,’ or of evoking terror with the words ‘a sense of terror overcame her.’ Adjectives like ‘puzzled’, ‘confused’, ‘unsure’, ‘uncertain’ and ‘befuddled’ get a lot of exercise. At his best, though, his deranged images and impeccably glazed sentences create a powerful sense of puzzlement or terror without his having to spell it out. This effect is at its strongest when it comes to the artefact, which by the end of the novel is ‘the size of an adult human being’ but still has ‘an unformed look’ and ‘a shy, inturned smile’. At times it seems like a person, at others like an alien, at others like AI. At one point, frightened by a fire, it runs around ‘like a long dog’. It’s an uncanny little blighter, whatever it is. In the final section, it embarks on a road trip with Marnie, who begins to think of it as ‘the driver’:

She sat cocooned in the warmth of the car while the road rushed past and the driver told her about the stars. Its overwhelmingly boyish enthusiasms often made her think. Now she stared at its profile in the blue light of the dashboard … and saw once again that it was an artefact from the sea. No one knew what those things were supposed to do, or how they viewed a real person like her.

‘What’s the point of an alien artefact you can recognise?’ Harrison asked in Wish I Was Here. ‘As a branch of the fantastic, science fiction should accept that its currency is the inexplicable, not the explicable.’ That principle could hardly be taken much further than it is in The End of Everything. There’s little point in trying to make it all add up. The iGhetti are both here and not here. The world is ending and it isn’t. It’s 2040-something; it’s 2026; it’s still 1967.

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