M John Harrison: ‘If we met a real stranger we wouldn’t know what they think’ | Books

Tthree years ago, in a greasy spoon on the edge of the City of London, M John Harrison – Mike to his friends – told me about the book he was working on. Instead of telling his story, he just talked about the problem he was given as a writer. With this one, he said, he wanted to push things as far as they could go.

Now the book, The End of Everything – his 13th book – is about to be published. It describes the end of Britain where the iGhetti – the largest, most powerful and strange life forms that appear as powder explosions, slow explosions – dominate the country and possibly the world. Or do they? Not wanting to reveal more than its characters know, which isn’t much, the book is more evasion than attack.

No one knows where iGhetti came from. Maybe the astral plane, or “offline”. Their purpose is also unclear. The remnants of the authorities see them as enemies, sending ineffective waves of bombs and helicopters, but the investors may also be doing “spiritual attraction and expansion” like the colonialists. “If we met a real stranger,” says Harrison, sitting on the sunny terrace of a riverside pub in Barnes, south-west London, where he lives, “we wouldn’t know anything about what he ‘thought’, why he did anything, or if he thought he was doing anything.” Science fiction often pays lip service to that idea, he says, but “they don’t give that idea to the reader”.

Harrison is thin, 80 years old, with a full beard and long, shiny white hair. His skin has a nutty tone – unusual in writers – of someone who has lived most of his life outside. The planes of his face look stern in the pictures but in his face he often laughs, and the enthusiasm with which he talks about fulfilling the demands of the new book shows how much he is enjoying himself.

This was not always the case. In 1998, a year after Harrison published his scathing dystopia Signs of Life, Iain Banks took him out for a night of drinking in Soho with the intention of persuading him to return to the sci-fi sanctum where his career began. “I always remember what Iain told me,” admits Harrison, “which is that I don’t have enough fun on the page. The next day, he began writing notes for Light, the first volume of the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy. Not a space opera, Banks said, but a tale of one, because none of Harrison is straightforward. “Nothing,” he happily admits.

Harrison was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, in 1945. He had a difficult relationship with his father, an engineer, who died when Harrison was 13. He was bored at school, spending part of each day in the local library. “The great thing about libraries back then was that there weren’t a lot of dust jackets,” he tells me. “I would pick up a book, read the first two pages, and think, ‘Oh wow, that’s amazing’, and it would be Robbe-Grillet, and it would open the door to an anti-novel. Or it would be Ballard, or some science fiction novel.

When Harrison began writing as a teenager in the 1950s, the science fiction and fantasy genres were supported by many monthly magazines. In 1966, one of them accepted his story. He moved to London and began writing voraciously through the night. He met Michael Moorcock, who was the editor of New Worlds magazine, and became a regular assistant. “I had to be in New Worlds,” he says, “because it was Ballard’s main form of short story telling at the time. It was at the height of my interest in him as a kind of combination of surrealist and imagist. Especially in the form of a short story. And I wanted to be like that. I really wanted to be like that.”

On his blog, Harrison described The End of Everything as the type of book that could have been published in New Worlds circa 1967. I’m not sure he would have agreed. “I think it was probably too much for them,” he admits. “I wanted it to have the flavor of the book that I would have given at that time if I had the talent, skill or ability, a book that looks like sci-fi but, as you read it, it grows deeper.” This is what I wanted. My heroes could do that. And now, 60 years later, I can too.

He says this with a laugh, but it took Harrison a long time to get to the point where he was happy with his work and his reception. The 1970s saw him grappling with the tensions between sci-fi and fantasy, which he tried to mitigate in The Centauri Device (a book he now despises) and his Viriconium series. Success came when he decided to write a short story without allowing himself to prepare it or keep notes. The New Rays is “about Katherine Mansfield. And for Katherine Mansfield.” He admired what he and Virginia Woolf had done with fragmented stories in the 1910s and 20s (Eliot’s The Waste Land was also a creation) but didn’t know how to use that technique. “The only options I had were the exact opposite of what I needed.” It was a genre fiction process: creating a story, creating a narrative, following a narrative, elaborating, following a trigger. And nothing can do it. “

By the time The New Rays was published in 1982, Harrison had left London for “the boondocks outside Huddersfield” to pursue a passion for rock climbing. The next twenty years, during which the books Climbers (1989), The Course of the Heart (1992) and Signs of Life (1997) were published, were the most productive of his life. “I let it take over,” he says now in writing. “And I produced, as a result, a number of short stories and three books that had a real depth and depth of vision, and depth of place.”

This is irrelevant when it comes to Climbers, which is not one of Harrison’s masterpieces but one of the best English novels of the last 50 years. The book follows a group of climbers in the Peak District, men and women who, like many of Harrison’s opponents, don’t fit in with the rest of the world. It is not yet known whether, among others, Robert Macfarlane and Olivia Laing have a strong interest.

As we moved from one cabin to another, walking the quiet streets of Barnes, Harrison recalled the moment when the book was made possible. I’m leaving the stones outside Sheffield at sunset one day, “I noticed that the way the sun interacts with the curved top of the stones, in my mind, means that the shadows look like the turned pages of a book. I stopped and wrote them in one of my notebooks. I suddenly thought, I can do this. I’m the person who stopped writing my. fiction, I didn’t feel like I was the person to do this. It was amazing, “he says, still sounding as bewildered as he had been in the dark ruins of Yorkshire decades ago. “You hunt all your life.”

Harrison, “determined to stop apologizing for not being an SF writer”, now began to create the work he believed in most. He explains: “It was like discovering a different voice inside you. “And it was better than me, I tell you this,” he says, lowering his voice as if the other presence could hear us. “He knows more than me, he is more mature than me, he is a better writer than me, and he mocks me a lot. But often they see something and think, yes, that’s good, and they step in and take control and make something like Climbers.”

Sometimes, Harrison says, he feels like an impostor. “There are two of us and one of us knows it’s the real me, and it’s not me.” Then, fortunately, he laughs, and dismisses the horrors that have crept into his fiction, where the worst things are revealed in pedestrian places: Pizza Express, the dimly lit courthouse, or the pub in Barnes after lunch.

After returning to London after realizing that he was too old to continue climbing (and perhaps because some in the area were “offended by the description of the image”), in 2012 Harrison found himself suddenly angry at a book launch party in Covent Garden. “I went outside,” he says, “and it was raining and I started back to 1968: the same road, the same rain, the same failure, the same attitude of not continuing the business.” He remembers thinking: “I’ve spent 30 years of my life in London and I’m not getting any further. The answer, he thought, was to “be too stagnant in the provinces”.

He moved to Shropshire with his friend, editor and writer Cath Phillips, and began writing The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again. That book won the Goldsmiths prize in 2020. Frances Wilson, chair of the jury (of which I was one), called it “a literary masterpiece”. Harrison recalls the event, which was online due to Covid restrictions. I felt so good that I had a drink or two and then went to bed, rested for the first time in almost 40 years. I thought: ‘I have won a well-deserved prize.

The works of many authors who published until the 70s and 80s are very limited. With Sunken Land and The End of Everything, and his “anti-memoir” I Wish I Were Here, Harrison has produced some of his best work. One reason why climbing a mountain was such a good story is that he is motivated by adversity, and mountain climbers see rocks as a source of adversity.

The problem presented by the End of Everything, which he spoke about in the oil spoon in 2023, was how to leave much and explore how “people are working with broken epistemologies to try to understand the world we have created. Real difficulties,” he explains, “as we can say, quantum mechanics’ any real my real mechanics. but we have done the world, why we did it, and the epistemology we use to destroy these things.”

Providing distractions without neglecting to read is Harrison’s recurring problem, which he has faced “for 30 or 40 years. You have to be very careful when explaining,” he says, sounding very painful. “The more you help the reader, the more you lose his misunderstanding. You have to be committed. The End of Everything is the result of this commitment, interesting to hear because, not even, his refusal to reveal.

The book is amazing in its creation – not only in Harrison’s creation of the world after the attack of the abandoned coastal villages, destroyed planes and reconstructed polytunnels, but also in the time when you want to go back, sometimes for the sake of understanding, sometimes just to see the “strange stars” after recognizing their strange stars: the arrival of iGhetti; “heavy waves of matter” – alien detritus – his characters litter the ocean. It’s a continuation of Soho’s midnight conversation almost 30 years ago. “I thought: OK, I’m going, Iain,” says Harrison. “I’m happy but I’m committed. This will be written without compromise.”

And if the title sounds scary, we shouldn’t read it. “I have two or three short stories that,” he says cheerfully, “are becoming unintelligible.” On to the next challenge then? He is laughing. “Yeah, what’s the problem?”