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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.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published June 18, 2026
About the author
M. John Harrison
110 books876 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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Review of advance copy received from Publisher
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 - 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.
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.
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 - 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.
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.
February 22, 2026
Strange, beautiful, and illuminated by a spectral coastal light. Ranks alongside his best work.
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.
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.
June 18, 2026
Literary fiction melds with weird and surreal dystopia to create something unlike anything I’ve read before. It’s excitingly new & experimental. It’s a seaside novel set in South-Eastern England that’s also a road movie and a satire that incorporates climate fiction, cultural change & creeping catastrophe. And all in less than 200 pages!
Our main characters are Phillip and his Aunt Marnie. Phillip is a beachcomber who one day finds an artifact. These artifacts grow and appear to have malleable bodies that take on human characteristics. They’re sentient beings and are linked to the crisis that saw the country invaded by aliens but this is not your usual alien sci-fi novel. I was often as baffled as the characters as to what was happening in the world. It’s a book to read and ponder over and see the bigger picture coalesce in your mind.
Life has changed since the iGhetti appeared and became the overlords but it’s a gradual change mirroring the cultural shifts in our world, especially noticeable in seaside towns which have been gradually emptying out for significant parts of the year due to second homes and the vagaries of tourism.
Where the iGhetti came from, no one knows. They seem to have appeared through the fabric of space and time and no one understands what they want. There are now glitches in reality called bad patches and it did make me laugh every time a character went through a bad patch.
There are unexpected scenes of violence, mostly involving 70 year old Marnie whose confusion could also be the onset of dementia. But then, everyone is confused. After all, Europe appears to have been misplaced! Does it still exist? Is there anything beyond the horizon and the coastal fog?
Have I fully understood what is going on? Probably not. But I’ve enjoyed it and it’s a novel to revisit.
Thank you very much to the publisher and author for the ARC.
Our main characters are Phillip and his Aunt Marnie. Phillip is a beachcomber who one day finds an artifact. These artifacts grow and appear to have malleable bodies that take on human characteristics. They’re sentient beings and are linked to the crisis that saw the country invaded by aliens but this is not your usual alien sci-fi novel. I was often as baffled as the characters as to what was happening in the world. It’s a book to read and ponder over and see the bigger picture coalesce in your mind.
Life has changed since the iGhetti appeared and became the overlords but it’s a gradual change mirroring the cultural shifts in our world, especially noticeable in seaside towns which have been gradually emptying out for significant parts of the year due to second homes and the vagaries of tourism.
Where the iGhetti came from, no one knows. They seem to have appeared through the fabric of space and time and no one understands what they want. There are now glitches in reality called bad patches and it did make me laugh every time a character went through a bad patch.
There are unexpected scenes of violence, mostly involving 70 year old Marnie whose confusion could also be the onset of dementia. But then, everyone is confused. After all, Europe appears to have been misplaced! Does it still exist? Is there anything beyond the horizon and the coastal fog?
Have I fully understood what is going on? Probably not. But I’ve enjoyed it and it’s a novel to revisit.
Thank you very much to the publisher and author for the ARC.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
For the rest of the journey, it slept fitfully, waking suddenly for no reason, staring excitedly out of the window as if it had seen something it recognised, then losing energy and looking around with a helpless air. Tennent was tired too. In retrospect, the bad patch puzzled him. It had seemed so pointedly aimed at him, yet so personally irrelevant: though it presented as one, it wasn't a memory. Generally, a patch had a more public narrative as well as a more obvious one. It placed you in the position of an accidental spectator. Everyone saw roughly the same thing, as though the world was patiently replaying an extract from its repertoire for an audience that would never quite understand it.
MJ Harrison is a hugely versatile writer – winner of the 2007 Arthur C Clarke and Philip K Dick awards for his Science Fiction novel “Nova Swing” (second in a trilogy – the first in 2002, the last in 2012) and the 2020 Goldsmith Prize for his previous novel (his first since that trilogy) “The Sunken Land Beings To Rise Again” which I described as Sarah Perry, Esther Kinsky and Daisy Johnson thrown in a food blender with a dash or Dr Who and as a modern time-set parable on Brexit/Populism and the way in which London based middle classes did not follow the drivers of these trends (or their complicity in them).
And this novel I think is more in the spirit of that last book. Set here in a near future, post-apocalypse in many ways but an slow-burn apocalypse whose actual nature and ramifications are still rather mysterious to those who are living through it. And I think also serving as a part-satire, part-analogy on ideas like Brexit, gentrification (particularly of the seaside towns of the South East, and by the artist class as well as the rich), the role of the City in the UK economy, environmental degradation and possibly (although I think this is a stretch) on the increasing gap between the Global Tech Elite and the general population.
For me also it serves best of all as a parable on the seemingly inexorable downward trend of the British (I perhaps should say English as this feels a very white and English book – like his previous one the only non-white characters seem to be aliens) body politic and economy – a theme which seems more pertinent than ever as have yet another seeming failure of a prime minister – a sequence in which the main common factor seems to be the country itself.
From the extent we can understand the catastrophe it appears to involve some non-terrestrial beings the iGhetti (from another “astral plane” and initially manifesting as a form of slime/jelly in and near water) but whose actual purpose (or even interest in England) is unclear, but whose presence centred on the City has rendered the government ineffective as well as leading to a series of “bad patches” – seeming glitches in reality or possibly projections from another reality.
Added note: As my brother pointed out to out below this background seems to be taken from the author’s short story “The Crisis” from the collection of his writing - and the first time I encountered him - in “You Should Come Either Me Now”.
Previous attempts around the coast to stop migration have been reversed – with people instead despairing of England and trying to get abroad, a task made rather tricky by the complete lack of news from overseas, in fact (in what for me was an amusing link to the famous if possibly apocryphal headline “Fog in Channel, Continent Cut Off”) the European continent appears to have been misplaced entirely.
The novel has two main characters – Philipp Tennant who lives as a beachcomber on the tideline, looking out for the various oddities which wash up on the shore from the seas seemingly full of odd creatures – and at the novel’s opening he finds some form of living artefact which grows before his eyes - and quits his role trying to find some way to dispose of it. The second characters – with who he interacts and who later inherits both the creature and the narrative – is his Aunt Marnie – and sets out on something of a seaside road trip.
My favourite passage was this one:
Everyone knew someone who, unable to bear any longer the loss of their routine, had found their way back into the invasion site, to re-emerge weeks or even months later atter wandering puzzledly about the empty towers, lost souls eyeing other lost souls in the deserted corridors and partner washrooms. With a decent pair of binoculars, you could see them from Jack and Alice's garden, staring out of the Lloyds lifts - which still travelled in their stately way up and down the outside of the structure - in despair. In a way, the Lloyds building, designed to question the relationship between the inside and the outside, remained the great metaphor of the disaster. It was the zone's dead centre in that sense, even though it lay towards the western edge.
Overall this is a eerie but engrossing novel – stronger in my view than its predecessor.
My thanks to Serpents Tail for an ARC.
You say: We're suspended in this new catastrophe. We're held in suspension. It's ongoing and unresolved. It never ends. The nature of the catastrophe is that it has no nature. Not for us. It's permanent, but I don't mean that in Walter Benjamin's sense? Well, in what sense do you mean? The only other sense seems to be that everything has gone wrong and we all hate it.
We were all of us, at least in the beginning, Marnie thought, thrust back inside ourselves by circumstance. Back into the refuge of our humanity because we thought we could now be certain there was something outside it; something which, though it was here now fully extant and recognisable, might not entirely understand that we were here too. The contemporary fear was that we might have brought all this - whatever it was - on ourselves.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Like trying to discern the breathy, whispered mutterings of a dying relative or attempting to perceive the cobwebs swirling on your retinas, this novel makes itself difficult to grasp, slipping out and away from understanding as swiftly as the astigmatism starbursts of streetlights when we finally stop squinting.
Inexplicable violence is punctuated with the beautiful meanderings of nature and the mundane.
This is good. It is wonderful, even. Above all, it is haunting haunting haunting.
Inexplicable violence is punctuated with the beautiful meanderings of nature and the mundane.
This is good. It is wonderful, even. Above all, it is haunting haunting haunting.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Without a doubt the best novel I’ve read so far this year. A thinly veiled horror-satire on the rise of AI and its duplication of the human experience, The End of Everything replaces AI with an invasive alien parasite that slowly dominates and mimics the everyday life of human beings. Funny, bizarre and nightmarish, this is a novel that deserves multiple readings. A true modern masterpiece.
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