M. John Harrison's Blog

JG Ballard was one of the five or six genuinely contemporary UK writers of the mid-to-late 20th Century, and perhaps the only one with a completely individual internal landscape, a fully achieved escape velocity from the UK literary establishment as then comprised, and a genuine appetite for writing into the vast social, political and scientific shifts of the century. His awareness was broad yet finely tunable; his conclusions were always his own. He wanted to know the real time in the universe. All of this is noted and developed in Chris Priest & Nina Allan’s biography of Ballard, published on the 23rd of April. Exciting, too, to see a major UK publisher investing in an unconventional turn on an often stale and trudging genre. Ballard and Priest would both have enjoyed the challenge The Illuminated Man represents to our idea of how a biography should comport itself. It’ll be interesting to see the reactions of the UK literary establishment as comprised today. (Many congratulations to Nina Allan, by the way, on her Ondjate Prize longlisting for The Granite Silence!)

“What are you having?”
“The idea of reverse-glass painting, Anthony says, was to get at the immanent. It exploited refraction to get at the light inside things.”
“I don’t expect to pay to be barked at by dogs.”
“…Hackney on Sea!”
“So what are you having?”
“Every pebble on that beach had something to recommend it.”
“A tangle of pipes in four colours is still a tangle of pipes. I wouldn’t be surprised to find this was from the 1970s.”
“There are about six people still speaking to her.”
“…the obsession with colour charts and optics, science and spirituality you see burning itself out later in UK religious painting of the 30s…”
“What are you having?”
“I’m not sure it’s a good idea to plant a rose under an apple tree.”
“I went to my lovely friend Richard, the hay man, and like any farmer he recommended…”
“…an aesthetic of semi-abandoned objects.”
“The subtitles of the print I watched did translate the Turkish though, into something like, ‘I love you, I love you.’ I assumed we were to take that as a cry of genuine sexual need on the part of the sailor.”
“It’s like one of those adverts that only really sells being an advert.”
“What are you having?”
“Vanilla, because it’s an ice cream. As opposed to rhubarb sorbet, which is a colour of housepaint.”

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Tunnelling my way into a new book through the predictable rubble of notes, journal entries, epistemological cave-ins and losses of nerve, under the working title What For God’s Sake Is This Even.

Meanwhile, publication of The End of Everything will be make 2026 a lifetime lifestyle benchmark for me, so here’s the cover in case you haven’t seen it yet–

Pre-order, obviously, at your outlet of choice.

Ribbons of dead people wind across the vast floor of Processing, each ending at a terminal. Everyone has their assigned queue. It’s a long wait, and the queues are sometimes mischieviously organised, so that victims wait next to their rapists and exploiters; while the celebrities, politicos, tech CEOs and aristos-turned-pimp of Earth, used to special treatment, find themselves sharing space with the very people who had no idea what they were up to. Now, before they can be judged, they have to face their delusory image of themselves, as the victims look on. Edi, who died of cancer years ago, sits at her terminal, and subjects them to a wake up call of managed humiliation.

The quality of the dead arriving at Edi’s terminal has been poor for some time. She blames–among other things–social media and consequent performative living, in which fantasy determinedly replaces the reality of being alive. Processing the Dead in these numbers would be “an adminstrative nightmare of universal proportions”, even without the mysterious event happening down there on Earth… The Delusions is a satire in the manner of Self, Pelevin or Welsh. Also a big novel compressed into a small space, as if Jenni Fagan had decided to pack Sachaverel Sitwell”s Journey to the Ends of Time; Wyndham Lewis’s Childermass; and Powell & Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death into a 300 page overnight bag. It’s livelier than the first two, and neatly reverses the implied hierarchies of the third.

Read my review of The Delusions in the Guardian today.

Click the pic & you might able to make out, on the far right, The End of Everything—

I’ve been waiting to be able to promote this for some time: Lara Pawson’s savage and superb Spent Life, with an introduction by Teju Cole, joins the McNally Editions list this Autumn. Every book on that list has something to it, something that will get under your skin. & their presentation is just beautiful.

Delighted to be joining Lara there soon with Climbers, more news on that as soon as I get it.

From an interview with Alejandro Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 2000) in today’s Guardian—

“It’s when you are liberated from the narratives that we are so addicted to – plot twists and all that – when you liberate the images from that, the images have to say something,” he said. “Not by serving any narrative, but by just being what I found. The way you remember a film is never complete, you always remember flickers, images, moments. That’s the way our memory works. So, this is kind of a representation of how our memory works when we remember a film – it’s fragments of light and memory that are not related, but in a way they mean something, they hopefully make you feel something.”

Calculated return. Articulate theories of memory & the real. His process then & now. Why–it turns out–Amores Perros is one of my top ten films. Ever.

Looking forward to this!

Commodification values compete with the raw beauty of the show and, for the participant, the kinaesthetic rewards of the activity, the sense of it as a self-expression and an art. However good you are you can’t do the moves unless you have the right shoes, the coaching, the hours in the gym. So in some aspects everything is very classed and costed now, and also a bit like amateur golf.

But Gabriel Tallent’s second novel opens with two adolescents night-climbing without mats at Joshua Tree, one of the legendary bouldering venues of the world. They’re still young enough to be rehearsing their wry dirtbag dialogue, which is delivered subtly and fills the reader with an inexplicable sense of heartbreak. They aren’t safe. Their relationship is quite complex. They are using it to navigate two or three potential disasters. The threat of having to follow the same life as their parents. The economic precarity of their own future, metaphorised by the chains of tiny, fractious holds that cross the highball slab they’re working on. You can so easily fall off.

Tallent tells the truth about how it looks, how it sounds and smells. There’s a real sense of being there. He’s good at the lyrical too; although sometimes prone to banality, as in “the clouds were tangles of cotton-candy pink”. Accurate descriptions not only of the rock, its demands and the accompanying sensations, but of the kind of people who do the activity. The character of the rock and the character of the people who engage with it. So what are you climbing for? Have you forgotten? Or are you only just this minute realising? While they are not entirely rhetorical, there is no real answer to these questions, as Dan and Tamma discover, “except in the terrifying, day-in, day-out work of the attempt.”

Read my review of CRUX in the TLS, here