Harrison’s position as one of the most critically-acclaimed writers of genre fiction in the UK has been well-established for several decades. I remember, well, the awe, in which we held him back in the early 1990s, myself and the people I would hang out with at conventions, and that was based on… well, I’m not entirely sure what. Short stories? Novels? Not Climbers (1989, UK), because I didn’t know anyone who’d read it. But he had this corpus of work that was hugely admired, not just fiction, such as the Viriconium stories, but also criticism. And there was The Course of the Heart (1992, UK), which was generally reckoned to be brilliant, if only because few people actually understood it.
It was followed by Signs of Life (1996, UK), which was equally opaque. Although perhaps not as admired. And then, in 2002, Light (2002, UK) was published, which was pure space opera (The Centauri Device (1975, UK) had been too, of course, but that was twenty-five years before), and went on to be nominated for the BSFA and Clarke Awards (but lost the latter to Christopher Priest). It was certainly true that Light was space opera, and used the language of science fiction… but most commentary on the book described it as Harrison’s “return” to genre…
Which is not to say Harrison is not a divisive figure. Some think him a “writer’s writer”, others find his prose almost unreadable. Myself, I’m firmly of the opinion he’s a superior prose stylist, and his novels operate on more levels than is common in genre fiction, although not all of those levels are always successful… He is good, he is very very good, but he is also a writer who often needs to be read in a particular way.
Did Harrison ever really leave genre, as Ballard had done? Light, and its two sequels, were defiantly science fiction, although they were far from typical space opera. But with The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again Harrison has demonstrated he has always, even when donning space opera drag, circled around the same concerns, ones which in other author’s works have been labelled “psychogeography”.
I’m thinking here of Iain Sinclair’s novels, which explicitly use the term, and the films of Patrick Keiller, and perhaps even the novels of WG Sebald, and also Spain’s Agustín Fernández Mallo, whose The Things We’ve Seen (2021, Spain) name-checks Sebald and discusses his approach to psychogeography. It’s about place and how it impacts and distorts and enables stories.
But this is not all Harrison does, because his roots lie genre-adjacent. So The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is more of a psychogeographic fantasy than it is a novel that features, or is predicated on, psychogeography. Shaw is a drifter who lives in a soulless bedsit in London, and works for a man who has him delivering, and collecting, well, crap, from assorted pop-up shops around the country. Victoria Nyman (referred to as Victoria Norman at one point, which could be a typo, or the original version of the character’s name, or even a clue) has a fling with Shaw and then moves to a Shropshire town beside the Severn to sort out her late mother’s house. There she becomes involved with a strange group of characters centred around a café.
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again does not have a plot per se. Shaw tries to understand his employer’s business, but fails. Victoria tries to understand the relationships among the people she meets, but fails. The two correspond, but do not share their lives. There are links to Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863, UK), and the possible existence of a water-based humanoid race which may or may not exist, and which may intend to supplant humanity. And which sort of ties into a history of English fiction on that topic… much as Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (2020, UK) riffs off a history of occult writings in early twentieth-century England, even though it is ostensibly about a man trapped in a world which resembles Piranesi’s drawings. These are novels with secret histories, novels about secret histories, and novels in which secret histories are, well, the plot. Harrison often excels at the latter.
Despite all that, the one thing to really note about The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is how readable is the prose. It flows with a facility few heartland genre authors can match, despite all their claims about “beige” or “transparent” prose. Prose should not be “transparent to let the story shine through”, as one sf writer once said; it is the filter through which the story is told. Harrison’s ear for dialogue has always been remarkable, but his ability to capture a moment, a snapshot, in a handful of words, something I’ve always admired and the reason why I treasure authors such as Lawrence Durrell and Paul Scott, does indeed inspire awe, although unlike back in the 1990s now it is based on the actual words on the page.
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again won the Goldsmith Prize but did not feature on any genre prize shortlists. The genre, in the UK certainly, still claims him as a genre writer, although I suspect he is himself more ambivalent (but certainly not hostile, as Ballard became in his later years). Harrison definitely has one of the more interesting oeuvres of his generation in genre fiction. He has never written a bad book, although he was written difficult books and unsuccessful books. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is neither. It is, as I mentioned earlier, astonishingly readable, and yet also memorable to a degree few books are. Reading it, I wanted to go back and read all of Harrison’s earlier novels. Not to help me make sense of The Sunken Land Began to Rise Again, but because I wanted to read more of his incisive, observant and lucid prose.
Thirty years ago, I may been in awe of M John Harrison the writer, but I’m older and, I hope, wiser now, and these days I hold his books — not all of them, but many of them — in awe. Add his books to your reading list. You won’t regret it.
