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The End of Everything
Phillip Tennent makes his living at the tideline, collecting artefacts that wash up from the Channel. It's been years since the crisis changed everything, but its exact nature remains obscured. Government barely functions, the seas are full of new creatures, Europe has been mislaid. It feels like the end.
Now Phillip has fished out of the water an object he can't keep. A creature that keeps changing. An artefact he must take inland, before it destroys everything he thinks he knows.
Now Phillip has fished out of the water an object he can't keep. A creature that keeps changing. An artefact he must take inland, before it destroys everything he thinks he knows.
208 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 18, 2026
About the author
M. John Harrison
113 books914 followersaka Gabriel King (with Jane Johnson)
Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space.
Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 115 reviews
July 30, 2026
Now Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026
The nomination of Jarvis Cocker as a Booker judge made me hope for a list that embraces the weird and the whacky, and I was not disappointed: Not only is "The End of Everything" genre lit (SciFi), which makes some self-declared high-end literati shudder, it also tells an intentionally opaque story about an alien invasion - at least on the obvious plot level. The whole vibe remindede me of Brautigan's classic In Watermelon Sugar, and I'm sure the iGhetti, Harrison's alien species, are not only named like this as a nod to Apple, thus sticking to the theme of a super intelligence that is taking over an increasingly disoriented humanity, but also points to Brautigan's concept of iDeath - "In Watermelon Sugar" revolves around this equally enigmatic concept, also prompting readers to fill in the blanks regarding what is even going on.
Harrison gives us a dystopia set in Britain in the near future, after "the crisis" - we don't know what exactly happened, but the iGhetti, spectral entities, have taken London, the government is merely functioning, mainland Europe has become even more detached, and there is no reliable source of information anymore, neither in form of legacy nor social media, so people don't know what is happening regarding the war against the iGhetti: This is an eternal now of insecurity, a dangerous world of instability. Our protagonist Phillip Tennent is a beachcomber who lives with his artistic aunt Marnie, and one day he drags an object out of the sea that is somehow connected to the iGhetti, an artefact that keeps changing and evolving, becoming more and more dangerous...
There is no one way to read this novel, but I was constantly thinking of AI and Silicon Valley dreams of transhumanism and super-intelligence, of an ever-evolving technology becoming maybe not conscious, but alive and efficiently following a script by learning and adapting. And then there's the people: They cut ties with other countries (there's reverberations of Brexit here) to increase the power of the financial haven by getting rid of regulations, then this haven (London) is taken by aliens (aka the technology developed by the richest of the rich) enforcing their own agenda, and then the periphery is tranformed. And I'm so curious to read all the other interpretations this story invites.
This is truly something else for a Booker list, and it's a novel that's particularly suited for discussion - and that's the power of the Booker, to invite global discussions about books.
The nomination of Jarvis Cocker as a Booker judge made me hope for a list that embraces the weird and the whacky, and I was not disappointed: Not only is "The End of Everything" genre lit (SciFi), which makes some self-declared high-end literati shudder, it also tells an intentionally opaque story about an alien invasion - at least on the obvious plot level. The whole vibe remindede me of Brautigan's classic In Watermelon Sugar, and I'm sure the iGhetti, Harrison's alien species, are not only named like this as a nod to Apple, thus sticking to the theme of a super intelligence that is taking over an increasingly disoriented humanity, but also points to Brautigan's concept of iDeath - "In Watermelon Sugar" revolves around this equally enigmatic concept, also prompting readers to fill in the blanks regarding what is even going on.
Harrison gives us a dystopia set in Britain in the near future, after "the crisis" - we don't know what exactly happened, but the iGhetti, spectral entities, have taken London, the government is merely functioning, mainland Europe has become even more detached, and there is no reliable source of information anymore, neither in form of legacy nor social media, so people don't know what is happening regarding the war against the iGhetti: This is an eternal now of insecurity, a dangerous world of instability. Our protagonist Phillip Tennent is a beachcomber who lives with his artistic aunt Marnie, and one day he drags an object out of the sea that is somehow connected to the iGhetti, an artefact that keeps changing and evolving, becoming more and more dangerous...
There is no one way to read this novel, but I was constantly thinking of AI and Silicon Valley dreams of transhumanism and super-intelligence, of an ever-evolving technology becoming maybe not conscious, but alive and efficiently following a script by learning and adapting. And then there's the people: They cut ties with other countries (there's reverberations of Brexit here) to increase the power of the financial haven by getting rid of regulations, then this haven (London) is taken by aliens (aka the technology developed by the richest of the rich) enforcing their own agenda, and then the periphery is tranformed. And I'm so curious to read all the other interpretations this story invites.
This is truly something else for a Booker list, and it's a novel that's particularly suited for discussion - and that's the power of the Booker, to invite global discussions about books.
August 2, 2026
Watch out for this one. It smells like a winner.
Tuesday, when the Booker longlist was announced, I was surprised by many books. It happens every year. The End of Everything wasn't one of them. I've seen this book appear on my radar constantly in the past months and, of course, I ignored it because I rarely read sci-fi. The Booker made me realise the obvious: word of mouth came from spaces that weren't necessarily genre-friendly. So don't make this mistake when you see this (maybe for the first time) on a list that this year seems to have more weird titles than usual. This will be the one that deserves the inclusion, and maybe even more. Perhaps the time has come for M. John Harrison to be more than a cult author. We will see.
This post-apocalyptic novel, about a world where an unknown entity has changed the course of humanity in ways that aren't really clear, is the kind of blank space that offers the reader the opportunity to tell what they see in it, and maybe what their fears are. iGhetti has invaded London, but we don't know what it is or what it wants. It could be the effect of the climate crisis, aliens, or just AI.
Probably the most fascinating part is what humans do when they encounter the unknown. The answer may surprise you: they survive. Adaptation is just the fastest way back to the ordinary.
Phillip Tennet, a beachcomber who just discovered an artefact that may offer the answers everyone is searching for, and his aunt Marnie, an artist who shows signs of dementia, aren't really anything more than two ordinary people. Even their violent outbursts aren't that special for a dystopian environment. Maybe the (non)response to those acts shows the unpredictability of living in an unruled place, but their life is pretty regular. The end of the world can be a continuous event, just like a war, and when you are in the middle of it, you learn to see your life as best as you can. Marnie lives like any other person battling old age and dementia, trapped between lost memories and false nostalgic ones, while Phillip, like any other man close to middle age, can still hope for another future, maybe in another place that maybe was untouched by this entity.
Because, like a character says, the end means that a new beginning is around the corner. The question is who will be at the top. Can humans willingly surrender control to something else, or learn to coexist?
This is a profound novel that can be read in so many ways, and I think its value comes from offering all those possibilities and making readers see, in this story, something that happens right now in the world. And here is another idea: the end of everything doesn't matter. The end is personal, and it will always remain that way.
Tuesday, when the Booker longlist was announced, I was surprised by many books. It happens every year. The End of Everything wasn't one of them. I've seen this book appear on my radar constantly in the past months and, of course, I ignored it because I rarely read sci-fi. The Booker made me realise the obvious: word of mouth came from spaces that weren't necessarily genre-friendly. So don't make this mistake when you see this (maybe for the first time) on a list that this year seems to have more weird titles than usual. This will be the one that deserves the inclusion, and maybe even more. Perhaps the time has come for M. John Harrison to be more than a cult author. We will see.
This post-apocalyptic novel, about a world where an unknown entity has changed the course of humanity in ways that aren't really clear, is the kind of blank space that offers the reader the opportunity to tell what they see in it, and maybe what their fears are. iGhetti has invaded London, but we don't know what it is or what it wants. It could be the effect of the climate crisis, aliens, or just AI.
Probably the most fascinating part is what humans do when they encounter the unknown. The answer may surprise you: they survive. Adaptation is just the fastest way back to the ordinary.
Phillip Tennet, a beachcomber who just discovered an artefact that may offer the answers everyone is searching for, and his aunt Marnie, an artist who shows signs of dementia, aren't really anything more than two ordinary people. Even their violent outbursts aren't that special for a dystopian environment. Maybe the (non)response to those acts shows the unpredictability of living in an unruled place, but their life is pretty regular. The end of the world can be a continuous event, just like a war, and when you are in the middle of it, you learn to see your life as best as you can. Marnie lives like any other person battling old age and dementia, trapped between lost memories and false nostalgic ones, while Phillip, like any other man close to middle age, can still hope for another future, maybe in another place that maybe was untouched by this entity.
Because, like a character says, the end means that a new beginning is around the corner. The question is who will be at the top. Can humans willingly surrender control to something else, or learn to coexist?
This is a profound novel that can be read in so many ways, and I think its value comes from offering all those possibilities and making readers see, in this story, something that happens right now in the world. And here is another idea: the end of everything doesn't matter. The end is personal, and it will always remain that way.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize
With the coming of the iGhetti, the military operators of the state had regained all it sense of entitlement, while the City of London, puzzled and defeated, had relinquished the top spot in the conversation and could only huddle at the edges of its old power base, like a monarchist staring into a museum display.
I first encountered M. John Harrison in 2017, rather late in his brilliant career, via his short-story and flash-fiction compilation You Should Come With Me Now, published by Comma Press and entered by them into the Republic of Consciousness Prize for fiction from small presses.
One of the more striking works in that collection, which Harrison also included in the curated collection Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020 (also from Comma Press) was The Crisis (link to an online version at the Morning Star). At first read the banker-bashing put me off, but revisiting in the later collection, I saw the brilliance of what he'd done.
The Crisis told of the 'invasion' of the UK by the iGhetti, who ended up occupying the City of London, which itself turned into a form of ghost world (oddly prescient of the City during Covid), a form of surreal, disconcerting take on war of the worlds :
No one was certain whether the arrival of the iGhetti was an invasion or a natural catastrophe.
They resembled stalks of fleshy, weak rhubarb, which appeared and evolved very quickly from nothing, like the tentacles which seem to bulge out of nowhere when you burn a piece of mercuric sulphocyanate. You would see them for a fraction of a second just at the city skyline behind the buildings, just under the cloud base, evolving very fast like stop-frame film of something organic growing, then running out of energy, then growing again. They seemed like neither a thing nor a picture of a thing: they seemed to be extruded from a space that wasn’t quite in the world. 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. Then they were gone again for another day.
Various simple beliefs surrounded the invasion. Some people associated the iGhetti with Dark Matter; some with the banking crisis of the late Noughties. Others believed that they “came out of the internet.” (Indeed, this was the favoured theory of the internet itself: the medium still firmly – if a little desperately – casting itself as the message.) While none of these theories could be described as true, they did, perhaps, mirror the type and scale of the anxieties that led the iGhetti to us.
I was drawn particularly to Harrison's views on genre, but one not delivered from the snobbish camp of a writer of self-proclaimed high-brow literary fiction, but rather from one writing within genres, the F/SF world and an authot, at that point, relatively unrecognised by literary fiction awards.
from the Guardian
from SFSite.com (via Wayback Machine)
That overdue recognition from the literary fiction world came with Harrison's brilliantly unsettling novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, a worthy winner of the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize, and a story that drew on one of the pieces in You Should Come With Me Now, Babies from Sand.
That's all a lengthy contextual preamble to my review of The End of Everything, Harrison's latest novel, and another brilliantly unsettling work which challenges genre conventions.
The author himself describes it as 'Conceived around 2010 as a book that might have been submitted for serialisation at New Worlds in 1967, The End of Everything is about trying to live as if nothing has gone wrong.'
The End of Everything builds on the world of the story The Crisis, and a discombobulated England in the aftermath of the iGhetti, indeed large parts of that story are incorporated in the novel.
[- the unnamed narrator of that story here becomes Philip (who now only pretended to work on 14th floor of the stub of Undershaft rather than actually working on the 14th floor of the stub of the Shard)
- Jane and Jack, become Alice and Jack, and the financially successful Jack is now a reinsurer not an investment banker.
- Balker becomes Hampson, who now enacts under his own volition the experiments he was forced to do in the story
- and to the list of theories about the iGhetti is, importantly, added others believed it to be less an invasion than a 're-enchantment of the world', a process of spiritual toruism and gentrification pursued by advanced civiliasations from a mooted ninth planet]
But crucially the action of the novel is relocated from City of London to the sea-side art towns of the UK from Margate to Hastings and 'Dalston-on-Sea'.
In the beginning–if there could be said to have been one–no one really understood what had happened. There was a decade of confusion. Populations declined across the board, as you would expect given the accompanying economic changes. All along the coast the little places that had made an income from retirees and weekenders–from tourism in general, from a proximity to remnant medieval priories or bijou nature reserves compiled out of two or three acres of hawthorn scrub, a pond and the possible presence of a locally occurring frog–fell in on themselves. By the time things came back into focus, the climate had changed. Geography had changed. Everyone had a different idea about that. The internet was patchy and undependable; and though the war with the aliens continued, people could never agree on what kind of a war it was, or what its boundaries were.
Coastal time always lags behind. In places like this one–which had previously thought of itself as a convenient weekend refuge two hours drive south-east of the Square Mile, comprising a couple of pubs, a terrace of flint-faced alms houses and a Queen Anne vicarage, organised around a small but somehow spacious square–it seemed to stretch out and pass even more slowly than before.
When the novel opens, a decade or two after the events of The Crisis, Philip Tennant has been living on the edge of the sea as a beachcomber, biding his time, one of those 'waiting for the item that will give them pause for thought'. He finds it in the form of 'an artefact' - a humanoid/machine hybrid that grows visibly while in his care. He takes it with him to his aunt Marnie, a painter who has lived in the area for far longer, who decides to set it free while Philip is otherwise engaged. And the two then each abandon their homes embark on a road-trip along the coast - Philip in search of the artefact, and then when he finds it in search of someone who will buy it; Marnie in search of Philip, and then when she finds him in search of passage out of England and into the fog that surrounds in in search of the lost continent of Europe.
This is a beautifully written novel, deeply human, simulateneously compassionate and creepy, and one that speaks, subtly, to themes of Brexit, of gentrification, and of climate change. But one which also follows the manifesto of the weird that the author included in his anti-memoir Wish I Was Here:
"The space of the book wants to be big, empty, yet resonant, a space in which the characters don't even know they've lost their orienta-tion. There's some kind of alien invasion or hauntological action or whatever going on in there, but even that's at one remove or maybe two. The space is loaded, but as the reader you don't know how to tap it for its resources; or complete it. You don't know what your side of the bargain is. It would be easier if you thought the characters knew the right kinds of things about themselves, but they so very clearly don't.
...
Weird text may not add up. It may not resolve. In fact it almost certainly won't. Nevertheless there will be no signposts. The author is not on this tour to guide you. The author's work has been to strip out affects, conclusions and motivations, then replace them out of order and at an odd angle. The way the picture is painted questions what's being painted; the things that are painted question each other; the internal lighting questions everything: any episteme you can assemble to 'understand' the Weird should fail; or even better, almost succeed."
And perhaps long-overdue Booker recognition will follow (addition: it did!!!) - the author in 2002 (SFsite link above) on why he had not been recognised:
'Like most writers whose origin is in F/SF, I don't engage my own humanity sufficiently to earn a visible X on that "literary map" you were talking about above. It doesn't help to be very good at something when the majority of readers, reviewers and literary editors ask of it with a kind of puzzled distaste, "Yes, but why would you do this?" ... To win a worthwhile literary award, you have to write about people: after all, that's what we are. But I wouldn't mind having a Booker nomination some day. Who wouldn't?'
Thanks to the publisher for an ARC.
4.5 stars rounded to 5.
A favourite passage, on the architecture of the iGhetti:
The iGhetti had solved - so they claimed - many of the issues we associate with the mathematics of Grothendiecke and Mochizuki.
By way of those solutions, they gained access not just to the astral plane, but to the even more complex and distant spaces beyond. Their relations with such spaces were controlled through architecture, either their own or that of the human builds that most attracted them. As a result, on a coast so fully dedicated to the arts - and thus to fresh new museums, performance halls and galleries - it had always been hard to tell these alien structures from their nearest human equivalent. The iGhetti were rarely, if ever, found in them, so what they were used for was, like everything else, a matter of speculation.
It was as if, initially at least, they had been determined to demonstrate - not simply to us but to themselves - that they had something of us in them. From Hastings round to Thanet and the North Foreland, new builds set out to combine the wafery values of the wasp nest with the disconnected perspectives of a postmodern waste disposal facility in Gloucestershire. They were often a silvery colour, or featured sheaves and fans of wavelength-sensitive glass. They redistributed light along mysterious channels. Some were sited on distinctive and highly visible points such as cliffs and head-lands, inshore islands or chalk ridges in the near hinterlands; others hidden in landscape folds or back streets. From whatever direction you approached, they most often resembled a cluster of buildings rather than a single one, viewed from an 'inexplicable' - that is, not anthropocentric - angle. You came upon them slowly, across a morning's walk, appearing and disappearing from sight like the lighthouses of a new kitsch, or, in town, discovered them inserted into sudden, windy, peculiarly graceful spaces between amusement arcades and Korean restaurants.
The judges' commendation
‘Two beachcombers meet and exchange words at the intertidal; we are in Kent, and it is the near-future, but one that recognises itself to be in the middle of a catastrophe. The sky is glitching, and something strange, formless and growing is soon to come out of the sea, to imitate our speech, forms, and customs. Our left-behind inhabitants scavenge where and what they can, provisional alliances are made and broken, shocking violence occurs, and no one can agree on exactly what has happened. A book not just about everything but about now. Shimmering and oblique, it holds the reader to the surface of something very grave and deep.’
With the coming of the iGhetti, the military operators of the state had regained all it sense of entitlement, while the City of London, puzzled and defeated, had relinquished the top spot in the conversation and could only huddle at the edges of its old power base, like a monarchist staring into a museum display.
I first encountered M. John Harrison in 2017, rather late in his brilliant career, via his short-story and flash-fiction compilation You Should Come With Me Now, published by Comma Press and entered by them into the Republic of Consciousness Prize for fiction from small presses.
One of the more striking works in that collection, which Harrison also included in the curated collection Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020 (also from Comma Press) was The Crisis (link to an online version at the Morning Star). At first read the banker-bashing put me off, but revisiting in the later collection, I saw the brilliance of what he'd done.
The Crisis told of the 'invasion' of the UK by the iGhetti, who ended up occupying the City of London, which itself turned into a form of ghost world (oddly prescient of the City during Covid), a form of surreal, disconcerting take on war of the worlds :
No one was certain whether the arrival of the iGhetti was an invasion or a natural catastrophe.
They resembled stalks of fleshy, weak rhubarb, which appeared and evolved very quickly from nothing, like the tentacles which seem to bulge out of nowhere when you burn a piece of mercuric sulphocyanate. You would see them for a fraction of a second just at the city skyline behind the buildings, just under the cloud base, evolving very fast like stop-frame film of something organic growing, then running out of energy, then growing again. They seemed like neither a thing nor a picture of a thing: they seemed to be extruded from a space that wasn’t quite in the world. 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. Then they were gone again for another day.
Various simple beliefs surrounded the invasion. Some people associated the iGhetti with Dark Matter; some with the banking crisis of the late Noughties. Others believed that they “came out of the internet.” (Indeed, this was the favoured theory of the internet itself: the medium still firmly – if a little desperately – casting itself as the message.) While none of these theories could be described as true, they did, perhaps, mirror the type and scale of the anxieties that led the iGhetti to us.
I was drawn particularly to Harrison's views on genre, but one not delivered from the snobbish camp of a writer of self-proclaimed high-brow literary fiction, but rather from one writing within genres, the F/SF world and an authot, at that point, relatively unrecognised by literary fiction awards.
Dividing literature into genres is limiting, a marketing device that got out of hand, and leaked into the audience ... A good ground rule for writing in any genre is: start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself. Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide – then write that.
from the Guardian
My urge is less to transgress genre boundaries than insult them ... writing specifically for a genre isn't just reductive, it's an attempt to hide, a form of cowardice. It's special pleading, but it doesn't work.
from SFSite.com (via Wayback Machine)
That overdue recognition from the literary fiction world came with Harrison's brilliantly unsettling novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, a worthy winner of the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize, and a story that drew on one of the pieces in You Should Come With Me Now, Babies from Sand.
That's all a lengthy contextual preamble to my review of The End of Everything, Harrison's latest novel, and another brilliantly unsettling work which challenges genre conventions.
The author himself describes it as 'Conceived around 2010 as a book that might have been submitted for serialisation at New Worlds in 1967, The End of Everything is about trying to live as if nothing has gone wrong.'
The End of Everything builds on the world of the story The Crisis, and a discombobulated England in the aftermath of the iGhetti, indeed large parts of that story are incorporated in the novel.
[- the unnamed narrator of that story here becomes Philip (who now only pretended to work on 14th floor of the stub of Undershaft rather than actually working on the 14th floor of the stub of the Shard)
- Jane and Jack, become Alice and Jack, and the financially successful Jack is now a reinsurer not an investment banker.
- Balker becomes Hampson, who now enacts under his own volition the experiments he was forced to do in the story
- and to the list of theories about the iGhetti is, importantly, added others believed it to be less an invasion than a 're-enchantment of the world', a process of spiritual toruism and gentrification pursued by advanced civiliasations from a mooted ninth planet]
But crucially the action of the novel is relocated from City of London to the sea-side art towns of the UK from Margate to Hastings and 'Dalston-on-Sea'.
In the beginning–if there could be said to have been one–no one really understood what had happened. There was a decade of confusion. Populations declined across the board, as you would expect given the accompanying economic changes. All along the coast the little places that had made an income from retirees and weekenders–from tourism in general, from a proximity to remnant medieval priories or bijou nature reserves compiled out of two or three acres of hawthorn scrub, a pond and the possible presence of a locally occurring frog–fell in on themselves. By the time things came back into focus, the climate had changed. Geography had changed. Everyone had a different idea about that. The internet was patchy and undependable; and though the war with the aliens continued, people could never agree on what kind of a war it was, or what its boundaries were.
Coastal time always lags behind. In places like this one–which had previously thought of itself as a convenient weekend refuge two hours drive south-east of the Square Mile, comprising a couple of pubs, a terrace of flint-faced alms houses and a Queen Anne vicarage, organised around a small but somehow spacious square–it seemed to stretch out and pass even more slowly than before.
When the novel opens, a decade or two after the events of The Crisis, Philip Tennant has been living on the edge of the sea as a beachcomber, biding his time, one of those 'waiting for the item that will give them pause for thought'. He finds it in the form of 'an artefact' - a humanoid/machine hybrid that grows visibly while in his care. He takes it with him to his aunt Marnie, a painter who has lived in the area for far longer, who decides to set it free while Philip is otherwise engaged. And the two then each abandon their homes embark on a road-trip along the coast - Philip in search of the artefact, and then when he finds it in search of someone who will buy it; Marnie in search of Philip, and then when she finds him in search of passage out of England and into the fog that surrounds in in search of the lost continent of Europe.
This is a beautifully written novel, deeply human, simulateneously compassionate and creepy, and one that speaks, subtly, to themes of Brexit, of gentrification, and of climate change. But one which also follows the manifesto of the weird that the author included in his anti-memoir Wish I Was Here:
"The space of the book wants to be big, empty, yet resonant, a space in which the characters don't even know they've lost their orienta-tion. There's some kind of alien invasion or hauntological action or whatever going on in there, but even that's at one remove or maybe two. The space is loaded, but as the reader you don't know how to tap it for its resources; or complete it. You don't know what your side of the bargain is. It would be easier if you thought the characters knew the right kinds of things about themselves, but they so very clearly don't.
...
Weird text may not add up. It may not resolve. In fact it almost certainly won't. Nevertheless there will be no signposts. The author is not on this tour to guide you. The author's work has been to strip out affects, conclusions and motivations, then replace them out of order and at an odd angle. The way the picture is painted questions what's being painted; the things that are painted question each other; the internal lighting questions everything: any episteme you can assemble to 'understand' the Weird should fail; or even better, almost succeed."
And perhaps long-overdue Booker recognition will follow (addition: it did!!!) - the author in 2002 (SFsite link above) on why he had not been recognised:
'Like most writers whose origin is in F/SF, I don't engage my own humanity sufficiently to earn a visible X on that "literary map" you were talking about above. It doesn't help to be very good at something when the majority of readers, reviewers and literary editors ask of it with a kind of puzzled distaste, "Yes, but why would you do this?" ... To win a worthwhile literary award, you have to write about people: after all, that's what we are. But I wouldn't mind having a Booker nomination some day. Who wouldn't?'
Thanks to the publisher for an ARC.
4.5 stars rounded to 5.
A favourite passage, on the architecture of the iGhetti:
The iGhetti had solved - so they claimed - many of the issues we associate with the mathematics of Grothendiecke and Mochizuki.
By way of those solutions, they gained access not just to the astral plane, but to the even more complex and distant spaces beyond. Their relations with such spaces were controlled through architecture, either their own or that of the human builds that most attracted them. As a result, on a coast so fully dedicated to the arts - and thus to fresh new museums, performance halls and galleries - it had always been hard to tell these alien structures from their nearest human equivalent. The iGhetti were rarely, if ever, found in them, so what they were used for was, like everything else, a matter of speculation.
It was as if, initially at least, they had been determined to demonstrate - not simply to us but to themselves - that they had something of us in them. From Hastings round to Thanet and the North Foreland, new builds set out to combine the wafery values of the wasp nest with the disconnected perspectives of a postmodern waste disposal facility in Gloucestershire. They were often a silvery colour, or featured sheaves and fans of wavelength-sensitive glass. They redistributed light along mysterious channels. Some were sited on distinctive and highly visible points such as cliffs and head-lands, inshore islands or chalk ridges in the near hinterlands; others hidden in landscape folds or back streets. From whatever direction you approached, they most often resembled a cluster of buildings rather than a single one, viewed from an 'inexplicable' - that is, not anthropocentric - angle. You came upon them slowly, across a morning's walk, appearing and disappearing from sight like the lighthouses of a new kitsch, or, in town, discovered them inserted into sudden, windy, peculiarly graceful spaces between amusement arcades and Korean restaurants.
The judges' commendation
‘Two beachcombers meet and exchange words at the intertidal; we are in Kent, and it is the near-future, but one that recognises itself to be in the middle of a catastrophe. The sky is glitching, and something strange, formless and growing is soon to come out of the sea, to imitate our speech, forms, and customs. Our left-behind inhabitants scavenge where and what they can, provisional alliances are made and broken, shocking violence occurs, and no one can agree on exactly what has happened. A book not just about everything but about now. Shimmering and oblique, it holds the reader to the surface of something very grave and deep.’
June 22, 2026
Good books are back on the menu, boys! Harrison is my ride or die britbong, and this new novella features him in prime form. It's a Brexit novel; it's an internet novel; it's a "reality is glitching" novel. In this book, nothing feels quite right, and that's not even acknowledging the alien invaders, but rather the little day-to-day things. Something fundamental about reality is broken, but is it caused by the aliens, or are they only here as a byproduct of our brokenness? Honestly, as long as M John keeps writing new books, I don't care what's wrong with reality, let it stay broken for as long as he's able to keep rubbing my face in it. I gave this book 6 stars but if you only see 5, it's because you haven't yet reached iGhetti enlightenment.
August 2, 2026
Longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize
This feels like what you get if you vibe coded a 2026 British literary science fiction novel; some comments on our current concerns with AI and the climate, Europe being far away (Brexit) and the English landscape as eternal and observant
She wasn’t sure if she had killed the girl. It had been such a moment of confusion, so quick yet so endlessly stretched out.
Phillip Tennet, scavenger along the coast of post-apocalyptic Britain, invaded by water dwelling aliens(?) called the iGhetti (like the latest Apple product) who love the Square Mile in the City of London. The End of Everything gives me a bit of a sci-fi Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant vibes, with jumbled memories and a Britain in thralls of an unspecified crisis. There is a shapeshifting, regenerating and living artefact that seemingly induces humans into unexplained violence that for me screamed International Booker Prize nominated The Employees by Olga Ravn. Maybe some overtures of Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, with nature and reality morphing into something strange, unexplained and if not hostile at least indifferent to humans. For me the ambiguity and opaqueness in this novel just didn't come together or ever really held my attention, even though the commentary on our current times is not hard to miss.
Quotes:
Age is an immense sadness which seems to be folded into everything
The visceral sublime
The world’s over he decided but that doesn’t matter because another one will be around soon enough
No history will remain at this site, only heritage, an interpretation of the past as much as an act of theft as the appropriation of another cultures arts and artefacts
This feels like what you get if you vibe coded a 2026 British literary science fiction novel; some comments on our current concerns with AI and the climate, Europe being far away (Brexit) and the English landscape as eternal and observant
She wasn’t sure if she had killed the girl. It had been such a moment of confusion, so quick yet so endlessly stretched out.
Phillip Tennet, scavenger along the coast of post-apocalyptic Britain, invaded by water dwelling aliens(?) called the iGhetti (like the latest Apple product) who love the Square Mile in the City of London. The End of Everything gives me a bit of a sci-fi Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant vibes, with jumbled memories and a Britain in thralls of an unspecified crisis. There is a shapeshifting, regenerating and living artefact that seemingly induces humans into unexplained violence that for me screamed International Booker Prize nominated The Employees by Olga Ravn. Maybe some overtures of Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, with nature and reality morphing into something strange, unexplained and if not hostile at least indifferent to humans. For me the ambiguity and opaqueness in this novel just didn't come together or ever really held my attention, even though the commentary on our current times is not hard to miss.
Quotes:
Age is an immense sadness which seems to be folded into everything
The visceral sublime
The world’s over he decided but that doesn’t matter because another one will be around soon enough
No history will remain at this site, only heritage, an interpretation of the past as much as an act of theft as the appropriation of another cultures arts and artefacts
August 2, 2026
Felt like I had forgot how to read
Read
August 4, 2026If you're going to make me wade through pages upon pages of inconsequential prose, the least you could do is give the runaway AI a name that doesn't sound like a proprietary product from a certain well-known company.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
My rating for this was gonna be a 3.5 as I was lost the whole time, but then when i read over parts again and sat down to gather my thoughts one night I thought well maybe that the whole point of the book??? ⭐
Going straight in I was just in the backseat of this book there for the ride, not sure what was going on but happy to be there.
This however does an interesting take on what people would be like if all this kicked off, sort of like well, shrug...best get on with the usual. Just get on with your life as there's nothing you can do, no changes can be made so whatever.
The ending of the book along with the whole idea of the people in the UK being just left to deal with this with no help is how I felt while reading it and that's what makes me think maybe that's the point, to almost make the reader feel just as lost as the characters in it.
Marnie had me cheering at parts LOL but I was also just sad to see her go through certain things and also witness the deterioration of her memory/mind.
Interesting take on using something so bleak, easily terrifying when we think about it and what we would actually do.
Going straight in I was just in the backseat of this book there for the ride, not sure what was going on but happy to be there.
This however does an interesting take on what people would be like if all this kicked off, sort of like well, shrug...best get on with the usual. Just get on with your life as there's nothing you can do, no changes can be made so whatever.
The ending of the book along with the whole idea of the people in the UK being just left to deal with this with no help is how I felt while reading it and that's what makes me think maybe that's the point, to almost make the reader feel just as lost as the characters in it.
Marnie had me cheering at parts LOL but I was also just sad to see her go through certain things and also witness the deterioration of her memory/mind.
Interesting take on using something so bleak, easily terrifying when we think about it and what we would actually do.
February 22, 2026
Strange, beautiful, and illuminated by a spectral coastal light. Ranks alongside his best work.
July 24, 2026
Some lovely writing but it is completely up its own arse. There’s using confusion and warped perception as a literary tool, and then there’s this. As soon as it started approaching interesting concepts, it swiftly turned away to then prattle on about nothing of substance. I understand that Harrison first introduced the iGhetti in a short story, it should have stayed that way. It shouldn’t be this much of a slog to get through a 200 page book.
June 22, 2026
M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything is an ambitious and unusual science-fiction novel, but one that I found both fascinating and frustrating.
The story follows Phillip Tennent, who is trying to survive in a broken future Britain after a mysterious event involving the strange alien presence known as the iGhetti. When Phillip discovers an unexplained object washed up from the sea, he becomes drawn into the mystery of what happened to the world and what the iGhetti really are.
The book succeeds in creating a strange, unsettling atmosphere. Harrison explores big ideas about humanity, alien life and whether we can ever truly understand something completely beyond us. The world feels eerie and unpredictable, and the sense of mystery is one of the novel’s strongest points.
However, the distance between the reader and the characters made it harder to connect emotionally. The story raises many questions but gives very few answers, which some readers will love, but I found it occasionally frustrating. The ending is thoughtful and ambiguous, suggesting that the real “end” is the collapse of human certainty rather than just the destruction of the world.
Overall, this is a clever and atmospheric novel with some brilliant ideas, but its slow pace and lack of resolution stopped it from becoming a favourite. I admired it more than I loved it.
July 30, 2026
M.J. Harrison’s books are not easy to pinpoint. Underneath his deceptively easy writing style, a lot of themes wriggle their way into the reader’s subconscious and then after closing the book one realizes the impact of the book.
The scene is a post apocalyptic Kent. A substance called the iGhetti has taken over and is leaving its mark over everything it comes in contact with, thus land is filled with derelict houses with nature taking over: so far so Ballard.
The main protagonist Phillip is a beachcomber and he finds a continuously developing humanoid he calls the artifact. Phillip wants to sell it.
The other main protagonist, Phillip’s aunt Marnie is kicked out of her house (it’s one of the book’s best moments) and is wandering. The two meet and travel across the desolate wasteland.
I saw the novel as a Jan on capitalism, also the migrant experience, probably themes of separation (Brexit?) conspiracy theories. But I’ll admit if I read it a second time, I’ll throw out theories and have a handful of new ones.
There’s a lot of weirdness in End of Everything. Yet the writing is so unpretentious that, although it does not make it an easy read it’s not dense - just remember that the author like to confuse his readers so don’t expect things to be clear cut. For me this was an enjoyable, playful read which I’ll recommend for fans of the New Weird genre.
The scene is a post apocalyptic Kent. A substance called the iGhetti has taken over and is leaving its mark over everything it comes in contact with, thus land is filled with derelict houses with nature taking over: so far so Ballard.
The main protagonist Phillip is a beachcomber and he finds a continuously developing humanoid he calls the artifact. Phillip wants to sell it.
The other main protagonist, Phillip’s aunt Marnie is kicked out of her house (it’s one of the book’s best moments) and is wandering. The two meet and travel across the desolate wasteland.
I saw the novel as a Jan on capitalism, also the migrant experience, probably themes of separation (Brexit?) conspiracy theories. But I’ll admit if I read it a second time, I’ll throw out theories and have a handful of new ones.
There’s a lot of weirdness in End of Everything. Yet the writing is so unpretentious that, although it does not make it an easy read it’s not dense - just remember that the author like to confuse his readers so don’t expect things to be clear cut. For me this was an enjoyable, playful read which I’ll recommend for fans of the New Weird genre.
July 13, 2026
Another excellent book from Mr Harrison.
There's been an unspecified disaster affecting the world, or perhaps just the UK? It's all kept deliberately vague. It's somehow perhaps tied in with the appearance of sentient creatures called the iGhetti - or perhaps they are just a side effect?
Along the way the UK appears to somehow be distanced either in reality or psychologically from mainland Europe, an obvious metaphor for Brexit.
There's been an unspecified disaster affecting the world, or perhaps just the UK? It's all kept deliberately vague. It's somehow perhaps tied in with the appearance of sentient creatures called the iGhetti - or perhaps they are just a side effect?
Along the way the UK appears to somehow be distanced either in reality or psychologically from mainland Europe, an obvious metaphor for Brexit.
July 11, 2026
The blurb made the book sound post-apocalyptic and interesting. However, I just didn’t get it, I felt like I was reading a book that the author has made specifically for super fans of an already established book series to give those readers Phillips back story. Any time I thought I was close to getting it something else would happen and I would ask myself what am I reading? I don’t even think I could explain this book to anyone. This one did completely go over my head, maybe I missed something.
It would have been good to have an introduction into how the world crumbled and what the iGhetti’s were doing and why.
It would have been good to have an introduction into how the world crumbled and what the iGhetti’s were doing and why.
July 29, 2026
This bold, experimental and thoroughly enjoyable short novel concerns an alien invasion of Britain set in the near future.
The iGhetti have arrived, albeit slowly and steadily and in a variety of forms to British shores. Sometimes they cause havoc in daily life and sometimes they just observe from the perimeter. In the wake of their arrival, the government is crumbling, and a dense fog has descended on the whole of Europe. Various odd and uncanny objects wash ashore. It is a time of chaos, but in a small town on the Kent coast, the novel’s two main characters, Philip the beachcomber and Marnie the elderly artist, are determined that their lives should be affected as little as possible.
This is a gem of a novella, and one that refuses to be labelled by genre; it leans towards science fiction but it isn’t, also towards fantasy but it isn’t. Just as it settles into something like a more usual piece of writing something quite unexpected and weird happens, an elderly woman nonchalantly murders a teen, for example, and a moment later she is doing this dishes and admonishing the grandchildren - did that really happen? It begs for the passage to be reread..
It’s one of those short books in which every sentence, indeed every word, has a function, stressing Harrison’s theme of disconnection, a reality that is absurdist by its nature.
It’s one of the books of the year, the only quibble, and it’s not really that, would be with the title.
The iGhetti have arrived, albeit slowly and steadily and in a variety of forms to British shores. Sometimes they cause havoc in daily life and sometimes they just observe from the perimeter. In the wake of their arrival, the government is crumbling, and a dense fog has descended on the whole of Europe. Various odd and uncanny objects wash ashore. It is a time of chaos, but in a small town on the Kent coast, the novel’s two main characters, Philip the beachcomber and Marnie the elderly artist, are determined that their lives should be affected as little as possible.
This is a gem of a novella, and one that refuses to be labelled by genre; it leans towards science fiction but it isn’t, also towards fantasy but it isn’t. Just as it settles into something like a more usual piece of writing something quite unexpected and weird happens, an elderly woman nonchalantly murders a teen, for example, and a moment later she is doing this dishes and admonishing the grandchildren - did that really happen? It begs for the passage to be reread..
It’s one of those short books in which every sentence, indeed every word, has a function, stressing Harrison’s theme of disconnection, a reality that is absurdist by its nature.
It’s one of the books of the year, the only quibble, and it’s not really that, would be with the title.
July 28, 2026
Longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize
M.John Harrison came to me in the form of Viriconium and Centauri Device. I had read some blog posts by him if remember correctly where he pan Centauri Device. He has certain views regarding what could be Science Fiction and Fantasy. All of this I am writing from my memory and as Harrison writes in The End of Everything, memory is not a stationary train where you can enter a bogie as you wish from the present platform; and may be all of this what I am writing is nonsense.
The way i remember his interviews, he cares and values craft and technic above everything else. A writer should not play god and a book is a game between the author and the reader. Both of them trying to play the god.
In his opinion (the way i remember), an author should not play god and an author should try to write employing the technics which erase the author from the text, and let the reader also put an effort to form a pattern from the amorphous text that the author produced.
A true pivot to postmodern aesthetic if there was one.
The result is there from his later carreer out put for everyone to see. I read few of his short stories which are some of the best I had ever read. I had also read some short stories which I have no clue what is it about and may only Harrison knows what it is about. One thing I am sure about it is, none of what Harrison write is shallow mumbo jumbo or nonsense. This is an author with clear intention of not imposing himself in the text and let the text breath through the mycelium or gills or stomata.
For me, as usual I waited eagerly to get my hand on a copy of this book and started reading immediately. As in Sunken Land Rise Again the going is tedious at best. There are a lot of description that fills these small novella.
There is something poignant underneath all of this purposefully alienating text about some sort of alien invasion or unexplained catastrophe befallen on the city of London. Something human and whimsically so breaths at the core of this book that is trying so hard to pretend there is no core.
I had read the story Crisis which was developed into this novel before starting this novel. It definitely helped getting into the novel. There are certainly some great writing and craft on display but I do not know what to make of it. As i find this novel may have gained much more by a pinch of exposition. I know I have rated only 2 stars, I was thinking of not rating this book initially , as with any of Harrsions work they cant be rated.
Harrsion is an author one need to read to understand what he is trying to do as the fragmented prose and sometimes overlong weird descriptions of events are going to be a dance between the text and the reader. As LeGuin said in one guardian review of one of harrsion's work, this book is for that one special reader who is going to experience the sublime through this. I will keep reading harrison regardless of my 2 stars.
Oh, the plot, this novella as I said again is not mubo jumbo. there is a clear human story of encountering the unknown and the horror of it in a present day London. May be some of the things doesnot make sense to me. Especially the tourism aspect, yet dark tourism exists. Some of the reactions by people in certain situations is befuddling rather than humorous or surreeal. There is memory loss as a plot point "sign posted" but I am not sure where to contextualise it.
There is the idea of what meaning of meaning and what is living itself is. In these days of AI fearmongering by the grown up boys who cried wolf, ideas like mimicry, mime, and meme etc comes to mind. Are we getting replaced by AI and humanoid robots ? Is society and community are truly at the end? has history was truly ended and we all are trying to just exist whimsically? Is there below all this postmodern fragmentation of narratives and splitting of individuals, and anxiety of post-brexit-post chatgpt world, M.John Harrison has hidden romantic notion of golden days of london and the English?. As someone reading from a third world common wealth country its hard to forget what churchill thought about us and did to us. Who knows. Thats literature.
It may bring Roadside Picnic and Annihilation by Vandermeer into mind. The short story crisis is about how state or an overarching authority uses homeless people to explore a zone of alien invasion. Any way I cant say i was able to make fully coherent sense out of this book. May be that is the point, an encounter with the unknown is only going to be horror. The following excerpt is a spoiler but I really liked it so sharing it here.
Though Marnie, an artist, is the older person who may have grown up and seen a very different world compared to her nephew Phillip (who had his trouble growing up during Covid and all), the beachcomber is more connected to the new reality. His special situation with Alice, his connection with maybe alien may be Biotechnological AI artefact, his relationship with Marnie herself are all too human. He was asked to come along on the reverse refugee boat by alice but where is better. What is better? Marnie the older artist on the other side goes around with the plackard "How can you misplace a continent' or a slogan similar to that. The darkness in Marnie realising her bleak and depressing present was the culmination to which she lived upto, was never overtly sentimental about the state of the affairs. Her despair is matter of fact and pragmatic. Phillip the younger is thinking maybe, a pessimistic may be that is, a better future somewhere.
M.John Harrison came to me in the form of Viriconium and Centauri Device. I had read some blog posts by him if remember correctly where he pan Centauri Device. He has certain views regarding what could be Science Fiction and Fantasy. All of this I am writing from my memory and as Harrison writes in The End of Everything, memory is not a stationary train where you can enter a bogie as you wish from the present platform; and may be all of this what I am writing is nonsense.
The way i remember his interviews, he cares and values craft and technic above everything else. A writer should not play god and a book is a game between the author and the reader. Both of them trying to play the god.
In his opinion (the way i remember), an author should not play god and an author should try to write employing the technics which erase the author from the text, and let the reader also put an effort to form a pattern from the amorphous text that the author produced.
A true pivot to postmodern aesthetic if there was one.
The result is there from his later carreer out put for everyone to see. I read few of his short stories which are some of the best I had ever read. I had also read some short stories which I have no clue what is it about and may only Harrison knows what it is about. One thing I am sure about it is, none of what Harrison write is shallow mumbo jumbo or nonsense. This is an author with clear intention of not imposing himself in the text and let the text breath through the mycelium or gills or stomata.
For me, as usual I waited eagerly to get my hand on a copy of this book and started reading immediately. As in Sunken Land Rise Again the going is tedious at best. There are a lot of description that fills these small novella.
There is something poignant underneath all of this purposefully alienating text about some sort of alien invasion or unexplained catastrophe befallen on the city of London. Something human and whimsically so breaths at the core of this book that is trying so hard to pretend there is no core.
I had read the story Crisis which was developed into this novel before starting this novel. It definitely helped getting into the novel. There are certainly some great writing and craft on display but I do not know what to make of it. As i find this novel may have gained much more by a pinch of exposition. I know I have rated only 2 stars, I was thinking of not rating this book initially , as with any of Harrsions work they cant be rated.
Harrsion is an author one need to read to understand what he is trying to do as the fragmented prose and sometimes overlong weird descriptions of events are going to be a dance between the text and the reader. As LeGuin said in one guardian review of one of harrsion's work, this book is for that one special reader who is going to experience the sublime through this. I will keep reading harrison regardless of my 2 stars.
Oh, the plot, this novella as I said again is not mubo jumbo. there is a clear human story of encountering the unknown and the horror of it in a present day London. May be some of the things doesnot make sense to me. Especially the tourism aspect, yet dark tourism exists. Some of the reactions by people in certain situations is befuddling rather than humorous or surreeal. There is memory loss as a plot point "sign posted" but I am not sure where to contextualise it.
There is the idea of what meaning of meaning and what is living itself is. In these days of AI fearmongering by the grown up boys who cried wolf, ideas like mimicry, mime, and meme etc comes to mind. Are we getting replaced by AI and humanoid robots ? Is society and community are truly at the end? has history was truly ended and we all are trying to just exist whimsically? Is there below all this postmodern fragmentation of narratives and splitting of individuals, and anxiety of post-brexit-post chatgpt world, M.John Harrison has hidden romantic notion of golden days of london and the English?. As someone reading from a third world common wealth country its hard to forget what churchill thought about us and did to us. Who knows. Thats literature.
It may bring Roadside Picnic and Annihilation by Vandermeer into mind. The short story crisis is about how state or an overarching authority uses homeless people to explore a zone of alien invasion. Any way I cant say i was able to make fully coherent sense out of this book. May be that is the point, an encounter with the unknown is only going to be horror. The following excerpt is a spoiler but I really liked it so sharing it here.
Though Marnie, an artist, is the older person who may have grown up and seen a very different world compared to her nephew Phillip (who had his trouble growing up during Covid and all), the beachcomber is more connected to the new reality. His special situation with Alice, his connection with maybe alien may be Biotechnological AI artefact, his relationship with Marnie herself are all too human. He was asked to come along on the reverse refugee boat by alice but where is better. What is better? Marnie the older artist on the other side goes around with the plackard "How can you misplace a continent' or a slogan similar to that. The darkness in Marnie realising her bleak and depressing present was the culmination to which she lived upto, was never overtly sentimental about the state of the affairs. Her despair is matter of fact and pragmatic. Phillip the younger is thinking maybe, a pessimistic may be that is, a better future somewhere.
July 31, 2026
Inscrutable. Surreal. Timely. Sometimes funny. One fantastically shocking opening. An LLM alien with fashion sense. My perfect match on paper, but it left me feeling flat.
What I enjoyed: the themes of AI, the boiling frog metaphor, the UK setting, the apathy that often comes hand in hand with crisis, discussions on memory, identity and creativity, and references to Brexit (Marnie’s protest placard reads ‘how can you misplace a continent?’). I adored the writing, I just got lost somewhere along the way.
The constant choppiness of the scenes made me feel like every time I turned a page I felt like I was reading a new novel. Even though I love experimental writing, this approach served as a way to detach from its ideas rather than draw you in deeper. I’m sure a man as intelligent as M John Harrison had his reasons for this - how can you know the unknowable, understand the understandable - but I found it alienating. I enjoyed thinking about the themes of this book rather than the actual experience of reading it.
That being said I’m so pleased to see sci fi / speculative fiction / dystopia represented in the Booker longlist and hope others more intelligent than I can tell me why I should have given it 5 stars. 👽
What I enjoyed: the themes of AI, the boiling frog metaphor, the UK setting, the apathy that often comes hand in hand with crisis, discussions on memory, identity and creativity, and references to Brexit (Marnie’s protest placard reads ‘how can you misplace a continent?’). I adored the writing, I just got lost somewhere along the way.
The constant choppiness of the scenes made me feel like every time I turned a page I felt like I was reading a new novel. Even though I love experimental writing, this approach served as a way to detach from its ideas rather than draw you in deeper. I’m sure a man as intelligent as M John Harrison had his reasons for this - how can you know the unknowable, understand the understandable - but I found it alienating. I enjoyed thinking about the themes of this book rather than the actual experience of reading it.
That being said I’m so pleased to see sci fi / speculative fiction / dystopia represented in the Booker longlist and hope others more intelligent than I can tell me why I should have given it 5 stars. 👽
July 2, 2026
2.75⭐ yet another book that should not of taken me this long to read ? I’m clearly either not smart enough to completely understand what m. john harrison was putting down… or this book isn’t for me💔I wanted to enjoy it so bad - beach combing/mud larking, alien babies and an apocalypse like landscape ?? hello ??
July 21, 2026
The shoreline is a perfect liminal space for Harrison, who always searches for the edges of things and the places where people wash up. It’s a boundary line where things enter the world or leave it, and Harrison approached that idea before in his book Light (2002) and its sequels. That series featured a shoreline in space, along a boundary of impossible physics that made strange alien tech wash up on the worlds around it. This time, Harrison brings it back to Earth, to Britain and to an actual shoreline, but the alien invasion he brought along with him…
The aliens bring with them a distortion of perception, or a distortion of meaning. Theories abound of what they are and where they might come from, but it lies beyond our understanding. Beings from an astral plane visiting us as spiritual tourism; a living ectoplasmic spaghetti drawn to us because of our own behaviour, such as the invention of the internet or the 2008 banking crisis. In any case, the crisis has the same scope and warping effect on our existence as those events. Harrison deliberately ties his speculative alien invasion to such real world influences to suggest that he might as well be talking in metaphor, but it would be self-limiting to spell it out completely. The world is going through an apocalypse. The internet, the banking system, climate change, alien invasion. They all produce the same effect and leave us all adrift in a world beyond our understanding, and the world of the past is lost.
It doesn’t help our sense of understanding that the main character Marnie is suffering from dementia and her commentary is disorienting. In her scattered way of thinking, she isn’t totally present in what she does. Marnie is a painter—a keen observer of the light and mood—but that doesn’t help her. She kept her life so small. Unlike her nephew Phillip, whom she loves and lives vicariously through. Random impressions or thoughts from the past bubble up in her mind, but then again, the crisis has a similar effect on everyone. And isn’t it the same for all of us, to an extent, that we randomly remember how the world used to be, and how it bewilders us how those memories contrast with today? It is future shock, perhaps.
No writer can pinpoint the uncanny and bewildering like Harrison. The zeitgeist element above may sound a little abstract, but nephew Phillip Tennent combs the beach for actual alien artefacts. One object he finds starts growing, and talking to him. There’s something in the way Harrison just matter-of-factly lets things happen like that that makes it funny and arresting.
What puzzles me are the random bits of philosophy that Harrison has Marnie and Phillip fling into the world, which made me uncomfortably aware of my own life. He’ll add something like: “What happens to you the first time you wonder whose life you’re looking at? It’s not your own, but it isn’t anyone else’s either.” Or: “Nothing anyone wants - or doesn’t want - fits the fantasy of it anyway.” It isn’t enough to turn the world into an impossible to understand place, but Harrison always turns it around to our human reaction to it. That’s also how he constructs his chapters: to introduce something hard or impossible to understand, only to bring it back to the relationship between Phillip and Marnie. To observe ourselves struggling with reality, only to see how we wash up at weird places and try to construct meaning from it in the aftermath.
The result of all of this is like reading a dream state of anxiety, in which snippets of recognisable human emotions and of the history bleeding out from detailed geographical descriptions still provide an anchor of reality. According to Harrison, the novel is about “trying to live as if nothing has gone wrong.” But it is that inability to come to grips with the apocalypse that makes it all so claustrophobic. That nicely mirrors how I feel about the world lately.
I found it all quite confrontational in the emotions it generates. Yes, I also often live as if everything is normal, because I do not know what to do about the world’s large-scale problems. The text doesn’t seem to suggest that we should just try harder. Phillip tries hard. His anxiety leads him to try to understand and first this is an adventure for him, then a profession, and finally a burden. In Tove Jansson’s Comet in Moominland (1947), Moominmamma copes with the incoming comet by baking a cake and having a cuppa. In that story, the domestic action is restorative, but for Harrison, such activities are simply the only language we still possess.
The aliens bring with them a distortion of perception, or a distortion of meaning. Theories abound of what they are and where they might come from, but it lies beyond our understanding. Beings from an astral plane visiting us as spiritual tourism; a living ectoplasmic spaghetti drawn to us because of our own behaviour, such as the invention of the internet or the 2008 banking crisis. In any case, the crisis has the same scope and warping effect on our existence as those events. Harrison deliberately ties his speculative alien invasion to such real world influences to suggest that he might as well be talking in metaphor, but it would be self-limiting to spell it out completely. The world is going through an apocalypse. The internet, the banking system, climate change, alien invasion. They all produce the same effect and leave us all adrift in a world beyond our understanding, and the world of the past is lost.
It doesn’t help our sense of understanding that the main character Marnie is suffering from dementia and her commentary is disorienting. In her scattered way of thinking, she isn’t totally present in what she does. Marnie is a painter—a keen observer of the light and mood—but that doesn’t help her. She kept her life so small. Unlike her nephew Phillip, whom she loves and lives vicariously through. Random impressions or thoughts from the past bubble up in her mind, but then again, the crisis has a similar effect on everyone. And isn’t it the same for all of us, to an extent, that we randomly remember how the world used to be, and how it bewilders us how those memories contrast with today? It is future shock, perhaps.
No writer can pinpoint the uncanny and bewildering like Harrison. The zeitgeist element above may sound a little abstract, but nephew Phillip Tennent combs the beach for actual alien artefacts. One object he finds starts growing, and talking to him. There’s something in the way Harrison just matter-of-factly lets things happen like that that makes it funny and arresting.
What puzzles me are the random bits of philosophy that Harrison has Marnie and Phillip fling into the world, which made me uncomfortably aware of my own life. He’ll add something like: “What happens to you the first time you wonder whose life you’re looking at? It’s not your own, but it isn’t anyone else’s either.” Or: “Nothing anyone wants - or doesn’t want - fits the fantasy of it anyway.” It isn’t enough to turn the world into an impossible to understand place, but Harrison always turns it around to our human reaction to it. That’s also how he constructs his chapters: to introduce something hard or impossible to understand, only to bring it back to the relationship between Phillip and Marnie. To observe ourselves struggling with reality, only to see how we wash up at weird places and try to construct meaning from it in the aftermath.
The result of all of this is like reading a dream state of anxiety, in which snippets of recognisable human emotions and of the history bleeding out from detailed geographical descriptions still provide an anchor of reality. According to Harrison, the novel is about “trying to live as if nothing has gone wrong.” But it is that inability to come to grips with the apocalypse that makes it all so claustrophobic. That nicely mirrors how I feel about the world lately.
I found it all quite confrontational in the emotions it generates. Yes, I also often live as if everything is normal, because I do not know what to do about the world’s large-scale problems. The text doesn’t seem to suggest that we should just try harder. Phillip tries hard. His anxiety leads him to try to understand and first this is an adventure for him, then a profession, and finally a burden. In Tove Jansson’s Comet in Moominland (1947), Moominmamma copes with the incoming comet by baking a cake and having a cuppa. In that story, the domestic action is restorative, but for Harrison, such activities are simply the only language we still possess.
July 22, 2026
I have never read anything by this author before. I found out about him as he was mentioned in a book review in The Times for a completely different book. In fact, this was mentioned as a book just about to be published. I was lucky that I got a copy from the library. From the outline here at GoodReads, I thought it would be interesting; a book dealing with the aftermath of an alien invasion. However, I found it very confusing and I can't say that I could work out what was going on. It may well be that this was the intention of the author to deliberately mirror the confusion after an alien invasion but I'm afraid it lost me! I made myself read it to the end but I still couldn't tell you what it was really about.
June 19, 2026
A profoundly untethered, dreamlike, amorphous novella fixing upon the aftermath of an apocalyptic event that seizes the British isles and feverously shakes away all certainty. Nothing can be known in M. John Harrison's England, except that the iGhetti, a mysterious alien species, has peopled itself across the country, leaving the place only a vestige of what it once was.
Phillip Tennent is a thirty-eight year old 'beachcomber' who lives on the Kentish shores, collecting debris and 'artefacts' thrown up by the tides. Tennent discovers one such artefact, an unformed glob about the size of the baby, and embarks on a mission to sell it. As the story goes on, the glob develops in size and autonomy, until eventually .
A considerable amount of post-apocalyptic fiction wrestles with the disintegration of language alongside its respective world. Namely The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, or even The Handmaid's Tale, and so on. Once the word loses its referent there is no need for that word. So it sits there like an empty vessel, a broken bag for life. There are parallels in Marnie's onset of dementia - how she forgets the word for a robin, or doesn't understood how plants can 'come up'. Her memory loss figures as a small part of the gradual loss of the country's collective memory. Why do we need to know what a robin is when society's rigid taxonomy has already disintegrated?
A part of me knows to accept this fact, and a part of me rails against it. I really did ache for more detail. What do the iGhetti look like - what does the artefact look like? How does a disaster-struck society still have cars, tourism, technology, restaurants and community, all while free from anarchy and political factionism? How does Marnie get away scot-free with A novel novel full of non-sequiturs that make even the characters themselves unsure whether to burst out laughing or curl up in discomfort, The End of Everything feels like a Carroll-esque dream sequence.
I can sketch out more details of the plot, but the more you read on, the less you understand about where the book is going. At first you are frustrated that nothing is making sense. Eventually you give into a peaceful acceptance that nothing needs to make sense. I decided to treat The End of Everything like a very long, beautiful and surreal poem, and that was more meaningful.
Phillip Tennent is a thirty-eight year old 'beachcomber' who lives on the Kentish shores, collecting debris and 'artefacts' thrown up by the tides. Tennent discovers one such artefact, an unformed glob about the size of the baby, and embarks on a mission to sell it. As the story goes on, the glob develops in size and autonomy, until eventually .
A considerable amount of post-apocalyptic fiction wrestles with the disintegration of language alongside its respective world. Namely The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, or even The Handmaid's Tale, and so on. Once the word loses its referent there is no need for that word. So it sits there like an empty vessel, a broken bag for life. There are parallels in Marnie's onset of dementia - how she forgets the word for a robin, or doesn't understood how plants can 'come up'. Her memory loss figures as a small part of the gradual loss of the country's collective memory. Why do we need to know what a robin is when society's rigid taxonomy has already disintegrated?
A part of me knows to accept this fact, and a part of me rails against it. I really did ache for more detail. What do the iGhetti look like - what does the artefact look like? How does a disaster-struck society still have cars, tourism, technology, restaurants and community, all while free from anarchy and political factionism? How does Marnie get away scot-free with A novel novel full of non-sequiturs that make even the characters themselves unsure whether to burst out laughing or curl up in discomfort, The End of Everything feels like a Carroll-esque dream sequence.
I can sketch out more details of the plot, but the more you read on, the less you understand about where the book is going. At first you are frustrated that nothing is making sense. Eventually you give into a peaceful acceptance that nothing needs to make sense. I decided to treat The End of Everything like a very long, beautiful and surreal poem, and that was more meaningful.
July 30, 2026
I really like this version of a post-apocalyptic future. I like the fact that you never really know what happened, who or what the thing was that brought the apocalypse, or if it has even properly begun or ended yet. It could almost-apocalypse fiction. And the fact that people are still taking holidays to the Kent coast add to both the realism and the confusion.
We probably know how we would react if there was a war, but what would we do if we didn’t understand what was attacking us given it only seemed to make part of the garden vanish. It’s all a very British apocalypse.
That is all so inventive. And then as if that wasn’t British enough, we have a chapter called ‘A Bad Patch’ which made me laugh:
For the first half of the book I thought the central character was Phillip Tennent, who lived on the edge of the shore collecting things that wash up. He is leaving with an “object”, when he meets a woman as he walks away from the sea:
Tennent has an aging aunt, Marnie, who lives in a terraced townhouse on the edge of a south-coast town. By the end of the book I felt that most of it was about her rather than Phillip. Surprisingly, by page 14 she had turned out to be the rather ruthless killer of a young boy who was gross, rude and annoying.
All the events in the book are set against a malaise and uncertainty about what is happening. Harrison exploits this really well and piles uncertainty onto the reader with passages like:
There may be some question that the iGhetti is a single entity made up of a huge number of components with variable functions. Immediately after the invasion, hundreds of thousands of these were discarded everywhere. The seas are still full of them, like a stew. Our perspectives on this monster have been shadowy, parallactic, indeterminate. All the crimes – and there have been so many – have taken place in the face of – under the auspices of – the confusion caused by the iGhetti: but none of it ever treated as a crime.
The little details are the thing that lift the book onto another level. I don’t want to spoil the plot too much, but Marnie ends up carrying the cremated remains of Phillip around in a biscuit tin, looking for an ideal resting place. But not just any tin; it is one with a
Just announced on the Longlist for the Booker Prize. This is weird enough to go all the way, and would be a well deserved winner.
We probably know how we would react if there was a war, but what would we do if we didn’t understand what was attacking us given it only seemed to make part of the garden vanish. It’s all a very British apocalypse.
What were the iGhetti and where had they come from?
They had seemed at first like neither a thing nor a picture of a thing: they seemed to be extruded from a space that wasn’t quite in the world. Various simple belief surrounded the invasion. Competing authorities associated the iGhetti with dark matter or with the banking crisis of the late 2000s, while others believed it to be less an invasion than a ‘re-enchantment of the world’, a process of spiritual tourism and gentrification pursued by advanced civilisations from a mooted ninth planet. More popularly, they were seen as having ‘come out of the internet’: indeed this was the favoured theory of the internet itself; the medium still firmly – if a little desperately – casting itself as the message…
Were they ‘here’, in any sense a human being could understand?...
…in London the iGhetti seemed content to be contained by the Square Mile. You had the sense they were focused on other projects. New buildings began to appear, for instance – elaborate, not entirely stable parodies of 00s vanity architecture, which lasted a week o a month before toppling slowly away into a kind of dark blue air.
That is all so inventive. And then as if that wasn’t British enough, we have a chapter called ‘A Bad Patch’ which made me laugh:
Use of this term was as problematic as the crisis itself.
Static phenomena were all over London by then, permanent features of a street, or even a corner of someone’s house, whole smaller, unanchored events drifted about like fogs or showers of rain, or perhaps more like temporary shifts of the light on a predominantly sunny day. The middle-classes, even if they lived near a bad patch – or had one in their garden, or if the corner shop had disappeared into one – tried to avoid mentioning it.
For the first half of the book I thought the central character was Phillip Tennent, who lived on the edge of the shore collecting things that wash up. He is leaving with an “object”, when he meets a woman as he walks away from the sea:
She looked at the object – which was at that time about the size of a baby, and which he had wrapped in some bleached-out rags – and nodded with a kind of measured approval.
Tennent has an aging aunt, Marnie, who lives in a terraced townhouse on the edge of a south-coast town. By the end of the book I felt that most of it was about her rather than Phillip. Surprisingly, by page 14 she had turned out to be the rather ruthless killer of a young boy who was gross, rude and annoying.
All the events in the book are set against a malaise and uncertainty about what is happening. Harrison exploits this really well and piles uncertainty onto the reader with passages like:
There may be some question that the iGhetti is a single entity made up of a huge number of components with variable functions. Immediately after the invasion, hundreds of thousands of these were discarded everywhere. The seas are still full of them, like a stew. Our perspectives on this monster have been shadowy, parallactic, indeterminate. All the crimes – and there have been so many – have taken place in the face of – under the auspices of – the confusion caused by the iGhetti: but none of it ever treated as a crime.
The little details are the thing that lift the book onto another level. I don’t want to spoil the plot too much, but Marnie ends up carrying the cremated remains of Phillip around in a biscuit tin, looking for an ideal resting place. But not just any tin; it is one with a
…well fitting lid featuring UK royals down the ages dressed in uniforms of their own design – this was just one more small disappointment in a growing succession of them.
Just announced on the Longlist for the Booker Prize. This is weird enough to go all the way, and would be a well deserved winner.
August 4, 2026
The End of Everything by M. John Harrison — ⭐⭐⭐⭐¼
This is unlike any speculative or post-apocalyptic novel I've read. I was drawn in within the first few pages, and what struck me most was how central ambiguity and uncertainty are to the whole experience that uncertainty isn't a flaw here, it's the genius of the book.
The novel follows Philip Tennent, who makes his living as a beachcomber, collecting artefacts that wash up from the sea. One day he pulls out something he can't keep an object that keeps changing form and he has to carry it inland before it unravels everything he thinks he knows. Running alongside this is his aunt Marnie, who, after nonchalantly killing someone, sets off on her own journey away from her apartment. What's remarkable is how little the book explains. There's no worldbuilding, no real account of the incident or the invasion or what the iGhetti actually are — even by the end, Harrison doesn't bother to spell it out. You're simply dumped into the world with the characters and left to make sense of it alongside them, right up to the final page.
The prose took some getting used to it's slippery in a way that meant some plot details and sections didn't fully land for me at first. But once I adjusted, I found myself pulled all the way in. The story itself has the same slipperiness: there's a plot, but it isn't the point. This is a deeply atmospheric book, and what struck me most is how deliberately Harrison refuses to "boat-build" — no exposition, no single clear explanation of the aliens or the catastrophe. I later found out this refusal is part of what's being called "anti-state-of-the-nation fiction," and it fits: the same resistance to explaining the world also shows up in the book's refusal to sit inside a single genre. It opens looking like post-apocalyptic science fiction, but it becomes clear pretty quickly that it's after something else entirely.
I really enjoyed this - it's an experimental, genuinely strange piece of work, and now that I've adjusted to the prose, I want to reread it to fully re-immerse myself in that weird, unsettled atmosphere. I'm still turning over what it's actually about something like the world going quietly astray, and people simply continuing to live, trying to get through the day regardless. It's a book I'm still thinking seriously about days later, which feels like its own kind of endorsement.
This is unlike any speculative or post-apocalyptic novel I've read. I was drawn in within the first few pages, and what struck me most was how central ambiguity and uncertainty are to the whole experience that uncertainty isn't a flaw here, it's the genius of the book.
The novel follows Philip Tennent, who makes his living as a beachcomber, collecting artefacts that wash up from the sea. One day he pulls out something he can't keep an object that keeps changing form and he has to carry it inland before it unravels everything he thinks he knows. Running alongside this is his aunt Marnie, who, after nonchalantly killing someone, sets off on her own journey away from her apartment. What's remarkable is how little the book explains. There's no worldbuilding, no real account of the incident or the invasion or what the iGhetti actually are — even by the end, Harrison doesn't bother to spell it out. You're simply dumped into the world with the characters and left to make sense of it alongside them, right up to the final page.
The prose took some getting used to it's slippery in a way that meant some plot details and sections didn't fully land for me at first. But once I adjusted, I found myself pulled all the way in. The story itself has the same slipperiness: there's a plot, but it isn't the point. This is a deeply atmospheric book, and what struck me most is how deliberately Harrison refuses to "boat-build" — no exposition, no single clear explanation of the aliens or the catastrophe. I later found out this refusal is part of what's being called "anti-state-of-the-nation fiction," and it fits: the same resistance to explaining the world also shows up in the book's refusal to sit inside a single genre. It opens looking like post-apocalyptic science fiction, but it becomes clear pretty quickly that it's after something else entirely.
I really enjoyed this - it's an experimental, genuinely strange piece of work, and now that I've adjusted to the prose, I want to reread it to fully re-immerse myself in that weird, unsettled atmosphere. I'm still turning over what it's actually about something like the world going quietly astray, and people simply continuing to live, trying to get through the day regardless. It's a book I'm still thinking seriously about days later, which feels like its own kind of endorsement.
July 29, 2026
I read a Booker-nominated book! Actually, I read two - Gwendoline Riley’s Palm House! And I read them before they were announced rather than, say, years after anyone else finished talking about them.
Great book this one. I’d read Jacob’s Room recently on MJH’s rec and that’s a useful touch point here, the way the narrative circles around this missing presence at the centre of the book. I could say it’s like Woolf writing a Ballard novel, but that would exclude the very particular genius that Harrison has been developing for half a century. This most resembles his magickal catastrophe, Course of the Heart, combined with the declining nostalgia-fixated managed decline Britain of The Sunken Land… with a narrative much more fragmented, like the short stories in You Should Come With Me Now, or the collage anti-memoir Wish You Were Here. There’s also a Zone (London) like in Nova Swing, occupied by the iGhetti, the alien entity responsible for the disaster people were only sort of half aware of before it was too late, and now they mostly carry on as before, some of them risking life to escape their broken island in tiny boats across a foggy sea, glimpses of the Lovecraftian entities that occupy London and the nostalgic Ww2 paraphernalia that imagines protecting them.
A vague and hallucinatory dream of a novel. While short it’s dense and Infound myself having to reread sections frequently. Possibly his most experimental novel length work, great to see it nominated for the Booker.
Oh and there’s a reference to Baskinski’s Disintegration Loops in a chapter title, which would make a perfect soundtrack to reading, while also giving an idea of what this book is doing.
Great book this one. I’d read Jacob’s Room recently on MJH’s rec and that’s a useful touch point here, the way the narrative circles around this missing presence at the centre of the book. I could say it’s like Woolf writing a Ballard novel, but that would exclude the very particular genius that Harrison has been developing for half a century. This most resembles his magickal catastrophe, Course of the Heart, combined with the declining nostalgia-fixated managed decline Britain of The Sunken Land… with a narrative much more fragmented, like the short stories in You Should Come With Me Now, or the collage anti-memoir Wish You Were Here. There’s also a Zone (London) like in Nova Swing, occupied by the iGhetti, the alien entity responsible for the disaster people were only sort of half aware of before it was too late, and now they mostly carry on as before, some of them risking life to escape their broken island in tiny boats across a foggy sea, glimpses of the Lovecraftian entities that occupy London and the nostalgic Ww2 paraphernalia that imagines protecting them.
A vague and hallucinatory dream of a novel. While short it’s dense and Infound myself having to reread sections frequently. Possibly his most experimental novel length work, great to see it nominated for the Booker.
Oh and there’s a reference to Baskinski’s Disintegration Loops in a chapter title, which would make a perfect soundtrack to reading, while also giving an idea of what this book is doing.
June 23, 2026
Hopefully I'll sort my thoughts out on this when the time comes to write a proper review, but here's a start. In this remarkable novel, the end of the world is neither passed, nor passing, nor to come. Something terrible has already happened, but is it the promised judgement, or mere image of that horror? Strange visitations loom large in the distance but they seem oddly indifferent to us, if not completely ignorant. But their presence alone has wrought great confusion, and now the word is saturated in delusion as hallucinations proliferate while inchoate, uncanny doublings stalk the land. Amidst all this, a charade of continuity repeats itself day in, day out. Keep calm, because we can't go on, and must go on. Reading this novel is a strange feeling, a room where murmurs of a weak dawn have begun to seep in, where the air and light are still indistinguishable from nightmare, so you lie and wait. I don't read much fiction on release, but in any sane world this is Book of the Year material.
August 6, 2026
I can’t make sense of this book.
I wish I could write a review, but I didn’t understand it at all. Is it about artificial intelligence, Brexit, climate change, or human adaptability? Perhaps it's all of these topics intertwined. I feel this book left too many gaps for readers, and I wasn't equipped to fill them.
Booker Prize 2026 longlist
I wish I could write a review, but I didn’t understand it at all. Is it about artificial intelligence, Brexit, climate change, or human adaptability? Perhaps it's all of these topics intertwined. I feel this book left too many gaps for readers, and I wasn't equipped to fill them.
Booker Prize 2026 longlist
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
this one's for my VanderMeer-kats #annihilationbutbritish #natalieportman
July 2, 2026
Fantastic as always
Read
July 8, 2026On the one hand, it's always great to see M John Harrison more widely recognised as the remarkable writer he is. On the other, it's a little concerning that the current upsurge in attention is because a book about slow motion apocalypse in near future England has so thoroughly caught the national mood. The incomprehensible invasion of the iGhetti, who may or may not be aware that we exist, might have come from space, but also could be from the internet, or dark matter, or perhaps be nesomething to do with the 2008 financial crisis, though which is cause and which symptom is anyone's guess. At one point, looking out to sea, "something was racing towards the shore. It might have been an object or an animal, it might have been some change in the medium itself", and that's the tone here – you can tell that something is happening, but trying to get to grips with what will probably frustrate you. And even the event itself is frequently pretty leisurely about occurring. The plot, such as it is, centres on beachcomber Phillip Tennent finding what is described as an alien artefact, but comes across much more like a child, albeit slightly less annoying than most of them. But coming to The End Of Everything for plot would be a mistake. Or for character, really. Hell, even the occasional glimpses of something like satire (the flow of small boats has reversed; it can sometimes be hard telling iGhetti structures from try-hard gentrifying architecture) don't really have the energy to fit the term. This is all about the mood of exhaustion, confusion, decline, people trying to keep living semblances of lives that haven't made sense for a long time, turned up only the tiniest notch from today. But then, within that, the persistence and stubborn reality, even as reality itself glitches, of particular textures, lights, scents, overheard snatches of conversation and the tallness of hollyhocks; the hitherto unguessed territory between Woolf and Ballard, perhaps.
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