Reviews: The End of Everything (4)

M. John Harrison has been one of the brightest, and often strangest, lights of the British speculative fiction field for decades, since entering the field as a member of the New Wave in the 1960s. In that time, he has moved across genres with abandon, taking in literary, fantasy, science fiction, and even (anti-)memoir, and The End of Everything feels in some ways like a distillation of much of that work: the strange alien presences and objects of the Kefahuchi Tract, the failing and fading Britain so brutally skewered in The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again, the post-apocalypse and dying world of Viriconium, and the games with form of Wish I Was Here.

The End Of Everything is in some ways a simple novel, about people living after a strange, unexplained (and extended) event has overtaken Britain, rolling into one environmental catastrophe, isolating event, and alien invasion. Harrison focuses on two people, Phillip Tennant, a scavenger on the shoreline for artefacts of both the past and the strange alien presences, and Marnie, an old woman whose memory is fading but who is in some ways stuck in the past. Along the way their complicated relationship is expanded out, as is their relationship with a small number of other characters - the focus here is extremely tight, letting us really get to know the small cast. One of the great strengths of that is what it allows Harrison to do with Marnie's fading memory; we watch her change and her grasp on the past and present go across the course of the novel, in a way told with immense sympathy but also an honest brutality.

Harrison uses the geographical specificity of the south coast of Britain to draw out both the strangeness and familiarity of his setting; the fading British coastal holiday towns, with slightly crumbling hotels, are vividly evoked and extremely familiar, and Harrison's use of the senses to bring everything to life makes the world feel intensely real. He isn't afraid of politics; there is explicit commentary here ("HOW CAN YOU LOSE A CONTINENT", as Marnie's sign reads, or the recurring references to fleeing by boat), but mostly The End of Everything is evoking, rather than showing, its sense of melancholy, of a past better than the present. It is a beautiful, sad, and deeply strange book, and deserves your time.

Like trying to discern the breathy, whispered mutterings of a dying relative or attempting to perceive the cobwebs swirling on your retinas, this novel makes itself difficult to grasp, slipping out and away from understanding as swiftly as the astigmatism starbursts of streetlights when we finally stop squinting.

Inexplicable violence is punctuated with the beautiful meanderings of nature and the mundane.

This is good. It is wonderful, even. Above all, it is haunting haunting haunting

Strange, beautiful, and illuminated by a spectral coastal light. M John Harrison is possibly England’s greatest living writer, certainly its most criminally underrated, and The End of Everything ranks amongst his best work. I’m tempted to tout it as a contender for all the major prizes (would be the best booker winner for years) but I suspect it is too liminal and weird to get the recognition it deserves.

MJ Harrison is a hugely versatile writer – winner of the 2007 Arthur C Clarke and Philip K Dick awards for his Science Fiction novel “Nova Swing” (second in a trilogy – the first in 2002, the last in 2012) and the 2020 Goldsmith Prize for his previous novel (his first since that trilogy) “The Sunken Land Beings To Rise Again” which I described as Sarah Perry, Esther Kinsky and Daisy Johnson thrown in a food blender with a dash or Dr Who and as a modern time-set parable on Brexit/Populism and the way in which London based middle classes did not follow the drivers of these trends (or their complicity in them).
 
And this novel I think is more in the spirit of that last book. 

Set here in a near future, post-apocalypse in many ways but a slow-burn apocalypse whose actual nature and ramifications are still rather mysterious to those who are living through it. 

And I think also serving as a part-satire, part-analogy on ideas like Brexit, gentrification (particularly of the seaside towns of the South East, and by the artist class as well as the rich), the role of the City in the UK economy, environmental degradation and possibly (although I think this is a stretch) on the increasing gap between the Global Tech Elite and the general population.
 
For me also it serves best of all as a parable on the seemingly inexorable downward trend of the British (I perhaps should say English as this feels a very white and English book – like his previous one the only non-white characters seem to be aliens) body politic and economy – a theme which seems more pertinent than ever as have yet another seeming failure of a prime minister – a sequence in which the main common factor seems to be the country itself.
 
From the extent we can understand the catastrophe it appears to involve some non-terrestrial beings the iGhetti (from another “astral plane” and initially manifesting as a form of slime/jelly in and near water) but whose actual purpose (or even interest in England) is unclear, but whose presence centred on the City has rendered the government ineffective as well as leading to a series of “bad patches” – seeming glitches in reality or possibly projections from another reality. 

This background is taken from the author’s short story “The Crisis” from the collection of his writing - and the first time I encountered him - in “You Should Come Either Me Now”.
 
Previous attempts around the coast to stop migration have been reversed – with people instead despairing of England and trying to get abroad, a task made rather tricky by the complete lack of news from overseas, in fact (in what for me was an amusing link to the famous if possibly apocryphal headline “Fog in Channel, Continent Cut Off”) the European continent appears to have been misplaced entirely. 
 
The novel has two main characters – Philipp Tennant who lives as a beachcomber on the tideline, looking out for the various oddities which wash up on the shore from the seas seemingly full of odd creatures – and at the novel’s opening he finds some form of living artefact which grows before his eyes  - and quits his role trying to find some way to dispose of it.   The second characters – with who he interacts and who later inherits both the creature and the narrative – is his Aunt Marnie – and sets out on something of a seaside road trip.
 
My favourite passage was this one:
 
“Everyone knew someone who, unable to bear any longer the loss of their routine, had found their way back into the invasion site, to re-emerge weeks or even months later atter wandering puzzledly about the empty towers, lost souls eyeing other lost souls in the deserted corridors and partner washrooms. With a decent pair of binoculars, you could see them from Jack and Alice's garden, staring out of the Lloyds lifts - which still travelled in their stately way up and down the outside of the structure - in despair. In a way, the Lloyds building, designed to question the relationship between the inside and the outside, remained the great metaphor of the disaster. It was the zone's dead centre in that sense, even though it lay towards the western edge”
 
Overall this is a eerie but engrossing novel – stronger in my view than its predecessor.