The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

by M. John Harrison

Shaw had a breakdown, but he's getting himself back together. He has a single room, a job on a decaying London barge, and an on-off affair with a doctor's daughter called Victoria, who claims to have seen her first corpse at age fourteen.

It's not ideal, but it's a life. Or it would be if Shaw hadn't got himself involved in a conspiracy theory that, on dark nights by the river, seems less and less theoretical . . .

Meanwhile, Victoria is up in the Midlands, renovating her dead mother's house, trying to make new friends. But what, exactly, happened to her mother? Why has the local waitress disappeared into a shallow pool in a field behind the house? And why is the town so obsessed with that old Victorian morality tale, The Water Babies?

As Shaw and Victoria struggle to maintain their relationship, the sunken lands are rising up again, unnoticed in the shadows around them.

Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Weird Fiction, Magical Realism, Science Fiction, Novels

219 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 25, 2020

About the author

aka 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.

Reviews

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Now winner of the 2020 Goldsmith Prize. I have proposed in the past that given its rather obvious lack of diversity the prize should be renamed the Celtic Prize. So how appropriate to have a “state of the nation” book where the only characters not white are green.

Essex Serpent (by Sarah Perry), River (by Esther Kinsky), Fen (by Daisy Johnson) thrown in a food blender with a dash of Dr Who.

Sea change, taking place in damp air, foul weather, at a distance, at night. Everything liquidised. Where it wasn’t the moon shining on water, everything looked like the moon shining on water: it was hard to see what the artist had been thinking. Bathed in the transformational odours of care-facility cooking and floor polish, the traffic rolling in on the A316 like surf or tinnitus behind him, Shaw sat captivated until visiting hours were over and he was asked to leave. If all change is sea change, he thought on the train back to Mortlake, then he could describe his own crisis – whatever it had been – as distributed rather than catastrophic. Sea change precludes the single cause, is neither convulsive nor properly conclusive: perhaps, like anyone five fathoms down into their life, he had simply experienced a series of adjustments, of overgrowths and dissolvings – processes so slow they might still be going on, so that the things happening to him now were not so much an aftermath as the expanding edge of the disaster itself, lapping at recently unrecognisable coasts.

I read this book following its shortlisting for the 2020 Goldsmith Prize albeit I already had the book lined up to read, thanks to my brother Paul – who also tipped it as a Goldsmith contender. I first came across the author when “You Should Come With Me Now” was submitted for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize (for which I was as judge), that book while fascinating as an insight to this author being rather too patchwork a collection of writing to make my own (or the eventual) longlist.

This book is, slightly unusually for Harrison, a novel and equally slightly unusually set in modern times – functioning as something of a parable on Brexit/The Rise of Populism and in particular the way in which the middle classes (particularly those London based) seemed to be entirely unaware of the forces driving those developments, despite their own complicity in them.

The story has two alternating main characters – Shaw and his sometime lover Victoria.

Shaw who has suffered a kind of existential crisis (see the opening quote of my review) and who lives in a London bedsit, takes a job as a kind of under-utilised gofer (based on a river boat) to Tim, a peddler of odd and never quite defined merchandise to the towns of the midlands, and peddler or even odder (and never quite defined) conspiracy theories about a kind of fish/human hybrid. His work is also punctuated with visits to his dementia afflicted mother in her care home.

Victoria, after the (possibly mysterious) death of her mother, moves to Shropshire and the banks of the Severn to her mother’s rather odd house where she meets her even odder collection of acquaintances and friends in a town rather obsessed with under the cover copies of The Water Babies.

Their stories overlap and coincide – both find that the cast of characters they meet in their day to day lives seems to oddly coincide with neighbours that they had previously considered mysterious and unknown. Both find themselves drawn to, strangely repulsed by and above all surrounded by water, particularly the water of urban river-banks and bracken pools and ponds. Both feel like they are on the edge of but excluded from some conspiracy theory that almost all their acquaintances follow. Both are trying to re-discover the past: Shaw his own, Victoria her mothers.

There is a lot to admire in the book – particularly its simultaneous air of a book where the author knows precisely what is going on and the reader has really very little idea at all but always feels on the verge of making sense of things. Which of course leads the reader very much in the situation of the two main protagonists.

It is also a book which is on the surface too repetitive but where in depth the repetition and replication is integral to the book. It felt very much like the text was so dense that even at a sentence level there was complexity which could be unwound, but that the complexity was of a self-similar nature: the book where pretty well any subset of the book contained and replicated the whole novel – perhaps I have invented a new way of describing this type of novel: a fractal novel. And that I think is highly appropriate for a book whose main location and theme is the liminal – the shifting and complex boundary of water and land. And also how appropriate that the depth of reading the book is very different to its superficial impressions.

The book is shot through with imagery, simile and metaphors – but my experience of these was very uneven.

Some of these are impressive, especially those of landscape, for example I enjoyed “Last year’s muesli of oak mast, crab apples and damp leaves remained trodden into the ground under the trees” and the way in which the book captures the history of England and the way in which the geology of reasons quite literally fuelled their subsequent decline and fall;

the demented, unpredictable, immeasurably fortunate geology, fuel for the industrial light and magic that had once changed the world: the iron money, the engine money, the steam and tontine money, the raw underground money hidden in unconformable strata, secret seams and voids, in jumbled shales, fireclays, tar, coal measures and thinly bedded limestone – to exit as seeps and springs above the heritage museums and leisure trails and decommissioned railways; while associated subsidence gnawed quietly away at the superficial architecture of the Gorge

But too often (and particularly when describing people – I felt the language was impressive but the comparison simply did not represent anything I could recognise.

On the first page for example and Shaw’s first impression of Victoria (presumably fairly important to the novel) is that she has “the studiedly flat humour of the high-functioning romantic” which meant nothing to me”. I felt very much when reading many of these images like Shaw did while reading the arguments and theories in Tim’s bizarre musings “essentially unrelated objects were connected by grammatically correct means [I would add and with beautiful language] to produce apparently causal relationships”

I think that I also struggled to really relate to the book. Some of this I think is perhaps never having lived or experienced the kind of urban river scenes in which the book is almost entirely set. I have never really lived near a river and those I do know are more like country streams. But I far more enjoyed Esther Kinsky’s “River” which covered (literally) similar ground.

And I think my bigger issue of identification related to the people – more that I did not really believe them at all. Shaw in particular, when looking back at his earlier life I found very unbelieavable . What sort of person aged 10-11 ”watching his cohort take control of its own destiny …. could easily imagine himself grown up: but less as the agent of self-change than as a an organism which – having reached some gate level he couldn’t be expected to recognise – would flip automatically into a thoroughly novel state” – I guess the same sort of person who when six thought of his mother as “like a sphinx or other savage mythological creature – charismatic, mood-driven, hard to parse, harder to defuse” - in other words the sort of person who only exists in books, particularly those written by someone many decades from their own childhood.

And I was also left with a sense of unease about the book.

On one level it can be seen as a pro-Brexit, pro England-ex-London book: what after all does the title represent except for (quite literally) levelling up? And there is nothing wrong with that – in fact in a literary world which is almost entirely left wing, anti-Brexit, liberal, secular etc – a different voice is welcome. But the author is more left wing, more anti business than even most of his contemporaries I think.

The Goldsmith Prize clearly has had an issue with diversity – before this year only 3 non-white authors had ever been listed for the prize. And even this year, after the annual Goldsmith lecture was by Bernardine Evaristo on a new manifesto for literary canons, and when two non-white authors were eventually listed, there was justifiable controversy around the shortlisting of DBC Pierre over Meera Kandasamy. And in this context I am not sure what to make of this novel (and to the extent I am, I am not very reassured):

- It is the second Goldsmith shortlisted book (after The Wake) to be explicitly inspired by Charles Kingsley – both in the title (and related epigraph) from his “From The Gravel Pit Lecture” and in the samizdat copies of Water Babies passed around. Kingsley a “fervent Anglo-Saxonist”. Now while The Wake very explicitly drew on this element of Kingsley’s writing, “Water Babies” was on the face of it a pro-evolution, anti-child labour satire and “From The Gravel Pit” about ancient ecology. But the former is not read today due to its anti-Irish/American/Jewish diatribes and the latter still has heavy references to very ancient Britain laced through it. And the problem is that (as a brilliant and brave New Statesmen essays pointed out in 2018 and 2019) much natural/ environmental writing (particularly when it harks back to a bygone age of England, and particularly when laced with anti-capitalism, anti-globalisation) flirts quickly (despite its clear left wing bias) with eco-facism.

- There seems to be something slightly off to me in a novel which seems to be a current state of England novel and in which, at least as far as I can see, the only people of colour are green. Evaristo’s description of “A limited pallete of writers who are mostly white and writing whiteness” seemed very appropriate here.

Overall a fascinating book which left me very unsettled – but not entirely for the right reasons.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

"As I said, in July..."Recommended - and one that would make a good Goldsmith's contender" - now winner of the Prize!!

Is logic in any sense the right method to be applying here?

Two years ago I had the pleasure of reading a range of innovative fiction from UK/Irish small independent presses as part of the Republic of Consciousness Prize.

One of the most fascinating books I read was the collection You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts, by M. John Harrison. My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

The collection came with endorsements from Robert McFarlane, Olivia Laing, Will Eaves, Neil Gaiman and China Mieville ('that Harrison is not a Nobel Laureate proves the bankruptcy of the literary establishment').

It was a slightly uneven collection - some of the shorter pieces seemed to require more knowledge of the author's oeuvre than I had - but, at its best, quite brilliant.

I was equally drawn to the author's views on genre:

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.

in the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2...)

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 https://www.sfsite.com/12b/mjh142.htm

But that isn't delivered from the snobbish camp of a writer of self-proclaimed high-brow literary fiction. Indeed as a writer mostly associated with fantasy/science-fiction, mainstream literary recognition e.g. from awards has not come his away. Asked about a Booker nomination he responded:

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 ... 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?" This is a fact we all have to learn, not just radical geek proselytisers like Egan or Charles Stross. 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.

And in the story Imaginary Review from the collection, he neatly skewered the type of novel that can instead appeal to Booker judges:

This novelist’s characters are like himself. They speak in clever & rounded sentences. They have caught life in a linguistic net, & found some odd fish there, & now they are going to tell you about it: not really at length, but in the end at more length than you suspected in the beginning.

The impression of wisdom radiates from the feeblest of their jokes. You look covertly at your watch even as you think, “How delightful!”

It isn’t possible at this distance–the distance between writer & reader–to tell how much of the novel is “biographical”. If some of it is, there’s nothing we can do about it; if none of it is, well that’s a joke some decades old by now, & perhaps a little less joyful than it seemed in 1980. What is possible to say is that the acknowledgements page, written in the same tone as the book itself, is a very self-indulgent piece of work.

So will The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again, his first novel since 2012, be the one that catches the eye of the Booker judges?

The novel actually draws heavily for its inspiration on the piece Babies from Sand from the story collection.

The author's own description (https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2...) of the novel is as follows "The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again is a tale of starcrossed lovers so lonely and self-involved that they not only fail to maintain a relationship but also fail to notice a mysterious UK regime change, even though it’s more than possible their class is complicit in it."

The title comes from a quote, which also forms the epigraph, from Thoughts in a Gravel Pit by Charles Kingsley: "Gradually the sunken land begins to rise again, and falls perhaps again,and rises again after that." And Kingsley's most famous work, The Water Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby, is a key and explicit reference point for the novel.

The other epigraphs are from a truncated version of the KJV rendition of 1 Corinthians 15:51 "Behold, I show you a mystery: We shall not all sleep; but we shall all be changed in a moment" and Olivia Laing's To The River: "some things are drawn to water and behave differently when they are near it."

The novel open with Shaw, in his 50s, living in a bedsit in the area between East Sheen and Little Chelsea, and undergoing a crisis of sorts.

If all change is sea change, he thought on the train back to Mortlake, then he could describe his own crisis – whatever it had been – as distributed rather than catastrophic. Sea change precludes the single cause, is neither convulsive nor properly conclusive: perhaps, like anyone five fathoms down into their life, he had simply experienced a series of adjustments, of overgrowths and dissolvings - processes so slow they might still be going on, so that the things happening to him now were not so much an aftermath as the expanding edge of the disaster itself, lapping at recently unrecognisable coasts.

In a pub he meets Victoria, whose surname is either Norman or Nyman, at that point Shaw wasn’t sure which (and the narrator of the novel remains unsure using both), a doctor’s daughter already in her forties... the night they were introduced she was drinking heavily, obsessed with something her father had once told her about a sub-species of people born looking like fish.

Shaw finds a job of sorts with Tim who works from a barge (and oddly proves to also be the inhabitant of the room next door to Shaw), and his role largely consists of travelling around the country delivering sort of goods to various odd stores:

From then on he would make two or three trips a week to similar premises - bookstores, crystal shops, candle parlours, short-let niche operations selling a mix of pop cultural memorabilia and truther merchandise from two or three generations ago as which had flourished along the abandoned high streets of the post-2007 austerity, run by a network of shabby voters hoping to take advantage of tumbling rents. Their real obsession lay in the idea of commerce as a kind of politics, expression of a fundamental theology. They had bought the rhetoric without having the talent or the backing. The Internet was killing them. The speed of things was killing them. They were like old-fashioned commercial travellers, fading away in bars and single rooms, exchanging order books on windy corners as if it was still 1981 - denizens of futures that failed to take, whole worlds that never got past the economic turbulence and out into clear air, men and women in cheap business clothes washed up on rail platforms, weak-eyed with the brief energy of the defeated, exchanging obsolete tradecraft like Thatcherite spies.

Tim also has a blog The Water House and has written an accompanying book (which is one of the items Shaw sells to the shops):

Line by line it was as disorganised as The Water House itself. Stories reproduced from every type of science periodical appeared cheek-by-jowl with listicle and urban myth. These essentially unrelated objects were connected by grammatically correct means to produce apparently causal relationships. Perfectly sound pivots, such as 'however' or 'while it remains true that', connected propositions empty of any actual meaning, as if the writer had learned to mimic sentence structure without having any idea how to link it to its own content. It would be incorrect, Shaw thought, to describe the data as `cherry-picked', since that would imply an argument they had been chosen to fit. Instead, they were part of an endless list.

He also is asked by Tim to attend and report back on a court case, of a man accused of drunk and disorderly behaviour after he accosted passers-by in the local high street with a tale of seeing fish-like foetuses appearing from toilets, and to attend seances with a medium who may or may not be Tim's sister.

Shaw also visits his mother, in a care home with dementia, but with moments of penetrating lucidity about Shaw's own situation, and peculiarly attracted to a water print of Arnold Böcklin's Water Idyll:



Meanwhile Victoria has left London having inherited her mother's house in Shropshire, near to the cradle of the industrial revolution. But the local water table is rising, and the eccentric locals circulate clandestine copies of The Water Babies:

Nothing down there could really be said to flow. Nevertheless the groundwater rose and fell. It dripped and seeped. It percolated through the fractured beds beneath the coppices -through the demented, unpredictable, immeasurably fortunate geology, fuel for the industrial light and magic that had once changed the world: the iron money, the engine money, the steam and tontine money, the raw underground money hidden in unconformable strata, secret seams and voids, in jumbled shales, fireclays, tar, coal measures and thinly bedded limestone — to exit as seeps and springs above the heritage museums and leisure trails and decommissioned railways; while associated subsidence gnawed quietly away at the superficial architecture of the Gorge, peeling the narrow lanes slowly off its wooded slopes. The Gorge channelled the river, yet was in itself only a sponge, storing vast acquifers, drop by drop, in the decaying matrix of its own history. In town, meanwhile, the newer pavements displayed a tendency to shift and ripple; while at 92 High Street, the three-room basement, with its brick barrel vaulting and late-nineteenth century kitchen range, began to weep and smell.

And Victoria also senses, as with Shaw, the presence of the others, those who may inhabit the sea as well as the land.

Time held all this loosely but carefully in its hand. She was to understand, Victoria knew, that she was seeing a future. People had found fresh ways to live. Or perhaps it wasn't, as far as the Gorge was concerned, a future at all, only an intersection of possibilities. unconformable layers of time, myths from a geography long forgotten or not yet invented.

And the above rather scratches the surface of the local characters and incidents in this disconcerting, unsettling, wonderfully written novel.

But the Booker prize? Perhaps not given the author's view of genre and indeed on one of the judge's own books from a blog some years ago:

I’m reading Bonjour Tristesse and A Certain Smile, which I bought–along with a Lee Child thriller–on the way to Valencia. Not a patch on Colette’s Ripening Seed, but good. I wonder why I never read Francoise Sagan in the 60s. I think we were already bored with that bourgeois existentialism of hers. Meanwhile, Lee Child is as reliably Lee Child as ever; & Jack Reacher stands in exactly the same relationship to Westlake’s Parker as Sagan stands to Colette.

And indeed his previous story collection skewered not only the archetypal Booker book, but also the sort of novel beloved of said judge. To me this was Harlen Cohen - standard book blurb: "'Coben never, ever lets you down' Lee Child" - to a tee:

The contemporary investigator is loaded. He drives a Porsche & wears Versace overcoats. He is as big as he is charming, as cultured as he’s ripped & cut. He got his self-defense training from an ex-KGB agent. He has a connection to the CIA; or to a mysterious agency which has only twelve clients worldwide, & which can get him information about anything or anyone, any time he needs it. His family runs every part of the infrastructure of this major American city.

The contemporary investigator is PC, & even when he isn’t, even when he falls from grace a little the way every man can, well, his girlfriend is rich too, and equally well-connected, & she won’t take any male nonsense from him.

Recommended - and one that would make a good Goldsmith's contender

Other reviews:

https://fantasy-hive.co.uk/2020/07/th...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...

https://www.heraldscotland.com/arts_e...

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

OMFG this book.

So there's a man, emerging from a kind of loss of self, still only halfway out. There's a woman retreating to a safe place, but it turns out to be something else. There is a conspiracy community, or several. Anxiety: selfhood, brexit, climate change. There is transformation and renewal. And death and disappearance. And transformation. The islands are becoming boats and the boats are becoming islands.

Tense, nervy, spackled with correspondences and coincidences. Lock yourself away for a day and read it in one sitting.

[Sarah]

Pros: psychogeography (love!) and some beautiful passages
Cons: no semblance of a coherent plot and I had no idea what was happening 85% of the time

[Peter Boyle · Rating 1 out of 5]

A middle-aged man, recovering from a breakdown, takes a job from a strange fellow he meets down by a river. His occasional lover inherits a house in a village with some unusual locals. They both hear voices. And then there are rumours of a new species of human in England, green people that come from the water.

What does it all mean? I haven't the foggiest. I know there is an allegory about Brexit buried in here somewhere but I can't summon the energy to unravel it. Even though Harrison does a decent job of building an unsettling atmosphere, not a lot actually happens, and there is no sense of a coherent storyline. It just lurches from one peculiar scene to the next. I only read this novel because it won the Goldsmith's Prize, which rewards experimental writing. The story is certainly different, but I'm afraid I got absolutely nothing out of it.

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Vast feathery geysers erupted through the road. Prismatic colours flashed in all directions. The water collected in front of the ironmonger’s before racing away like a flood between the bungalows of Woolpit Road towards the river. Everyone was hurrying out of the nearby shops, smiling with a kind of delighted alarm. The children, and even some of the men, shouted and ran about, and had to be restrained. It seemed to her as if the whole town stood there for a moment, wondering if the world would end, or only take some simple, beautiful, amazing direction. Big or small, these events seemed all of a piece; they seemed to point to the same thing. But you couldn’t see what it might be.'


If you want a very brief summation of what The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is about, underneath all the sifted and elegantly scrutinised psycho-geographic sediment and mythological layering, the frankly inadequate answer might be: unhappy people manifesting a nation’s woes. But to really do justice to a book this daring and multi-faceted, you’ll need to accept the fact that, like other wonderfully free-ranging, plot-allergic literary discursions, and featuring countless allusions and influences – Ballard, BS Johnson, Ann Quin, Alasdair Gray, Iain Sinclair, Muriel Spark and Fritz Leiber all seem to be in there somewhere – its elusive and often maddeningly-turbid nature is part of both its message and its considerable charm, at least for those willing to throw the map away and submit to orientation via instinct and ambience.

Shaw is putting himself back together after a prolonged breakdown. He finds a room and tries to re-acclimate to the ‘normal human life’ that recently spat him out. You wonder how he’ll get on, and the early signs are not promising. The other people inhabiting his building are unpleasant, aloof and noisy. To distract himself he begins a relationship with Victoria, thus initiating another level of reintegration. It’s an intermittently successful arrangement but they’re perhaps too similar: neither are really cut out for sharing too much time or space with anyone else. There’s a growing sense that his breakdown was little more than a perfectly sound response to the state of ‘normal’ things, to which he is clearly incompatible. Beyond the supposed comforts of home and romance he latches onto other matters that threaten to disrupt his burgeoning delusion of normalcy. He’s too observant and too much of a weirdness lighting-rod to for too long keep off labyrinthine, downward-spiralling tracks. He sees too many things either as they are, or in a way that others, for reasons of self-preservation, have learned to ignore and disregard. As very much an outsider, interested in what lies beneath surfaces, his nature draws him away from the humdrum and the palatable to far murkier margins.

His journey seems to disjunctively parallel everything else: a country, about to collapse (yet again), undergoing seismic transformation. Houses and boats either abandoned, wrecked or in the slow process of disintegration. Time doing its slow and ultimately irremediable work.

There’s no real difference between how Shaw (who, along with Victoria, is one of two main dovetailing protagonists) deals with the idea – promulgated by a cabal of underground enthusiasts akin to something from a Pynchon or Eco novel – of a hitherto largely unbeknownst species of water being and how he deals, or fails to deal, with his fellow humans (some of whom – spoiler alert – are only masquerading as people). They’re simply an odd and largely indistinct mass of variably deranged souls enduring different stages of existence, corporeal or otherwise.

Victoria, Shaw’s occasional partner, a kindred spirit in many ways, is a lovably cynical, unhappily-lost eccentric. The main difference between the two seems to be how comparatively tethered they are. Shaw finds most people an olfactory, auditory nightmare made flesh: of the people he at first lives amongst – he will later find ‘nice people’ to live with, the suggestion not that they are especially nice but that he’s clinging onto conventional life, determined to make a virtue of it – he notices (and is rankled by) every lingering trace of their passing, every reverberating, maddening echo of their movement. Yet he’s drawn to them, needs them, loathes the fact but is consigned to it.
Shaw spends much of the novel in an excruciatingly ambivalent mood, both repelled and helplessly drawn to his fellow humans to get what he needs by way of camaraderie and companionship; he’s also often at a disgusted, or at least disquieted remove, sat alone in pubs at 11am, making awkward conversation with barmaids who rightly can’t seem to figure out what to make of him.

But perhaps some of this is the price to be paid for an open mind during perilous fluxed, epochal times. During one of his many respite-seeking forays around London, Shaw finds a furtive oddball pulling things out of the ground at a cemetery. Entirely in step with the rest of the novel, such an encounter is not only related as a matter-of-fact occurrence but is in fact the beginning of a book-long relationship, and even an employment opportunity. Shaw, happy enough to be pulling a wage from the placid confines of a barge at Tim’s behest, while largely ignoring the questionable conduct of his new boss, makes half-hearted attempts to find out what he can about exactly what it is he’s got himself involved in. He’s soon sent to various moribund locations – most of them Brexity, surely no coincidence – as a kind of unwitting sales rep. What he’s selling is never really clear to Shaw – as someone with niche and not-especially-fungible attributes, he’s just happy to have a job, for however long it lasts – though it’s ostensibly something to do with genetics. (In reality it’s an unfathomable collection of scraps and unsubstantiated assertions in line with Tim’s seemingly low-rent and stereotypically-shrill blog about the aforementioned water-creatures.)

Victoria, meanwhile, moves into the home she’s inherited from her dead mother, keeping in touch with Shaw by sending him characteristically unfocused, rhetorical emails he often doesn’t even bother to read. She wills this new chapter to begin, but there are problems. One seems to be that, as unfulfilling as her London life was, every moment in her mother’s former home is lived thrice: in the past, a past rendered more nostalgically feasible by the hour; in a present that’s beginning to pall and erode, as she fails to stamp her own presence on the rooms and as the locals, and the local ghosts, become increasingly erratic and disturbing; and in an indistinct future that has a habit of inspiring late-night tramps down to the water, where odd (though, worryingly, increasingly normalised) visions unveil. Less in thrall to life than Shaw (though whether Harrison considers her fate as proof of her strength or weakness is unclear) she has less need to lie to herself about it, and is not invested enough to avoid the pull of alternate realities.

On this note: there’s a sea-dwelling ghost that wanders the streets, loitering outside Victoria’s house, often at night, trying to lure her towards a similar sub-existence. Its creepy roving voice might suddenly bleat its warped plaintive (‘Voya!’, although it uses many misconstrued versions of her name, as though there’s some kind of warping signal – maybe vast stretches of time, a lapsed facility with language – that hampers communication) from beneath her window, before slowly dwindling off into the distance (a call that Victoria is doomed to heed again and again until there’s no way back). But – and here’s where the book so brilliantly drills its primary philosophy down into your subconscious while you’re otherwise busy enjoying the amusing and engaging cultures and subcultures (and sub-species) of English quotidian life – there’s really very little to distinguish the more-suggestively eldritch peculiarity of the unreal local element from the ‘real’ folk of the town, who seem to be amalgamations of certain types, and perhaps not entirely real themselves. There’s a character called ‘Tommie Jack’, a door-to-door salesman who’s clearly not what he seems and may well be dead, or perhaps living, or probably somewhere in-between. There’s a morbidly-obese bed-ridden trainer-obsessive who speaks in low, accommodating tones when Victoria accidentally barges into his dog-malodorous room; there are the other men in that particular shared house, who gather in strange, discomfiting portent in lightless rooms to watch sporting events, or engage in bizarre dance rituals; there’s Pearl, who befriends Victoria until finally entering another realm via a shallow, mysterious pool set amid the forest. Most people tend to use a thoughtlessly circumscribed vocabulary, reluctant to engage, happier using platitudes and clichéd placeholders. There’s a heaviness to things, a stupefied and eventually malignant atmosphere of congealed simultaneity.

There are so many ways to consider this marvellous and unique tract – and it does at times feel less like a novel and more like a tangential warning, quickly gathered together during perilous and fragile end-times, time-capsuled for interested future generations, this one soon inevitably passing down into the preliminary tiers of fossil-fate. (Don’t blame me for this doom-mongering: Harrison makes such an eventuality seem almost euphoric, just as he makes all kinds of other potentially nonsensical things seem entirely feasible and even worth anticipating.) Seen from variant angles The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again is about islands, both geographic and sentient; about how periods of time – as well as tectonic plates – smash together and form their own landscapes out of the stuff of life and post-life; about how history cultivates what follows and yet is ultimately secondary to even bigger forces; about vocation; inversion; heredity and the impossibility, for some, of family; it’s (yes) about Brexit, and how forces beyond the ken of citizens shape their fate, behaviour and movements. It’s about the unbridgeable distances between everything, from atoms to stars spreading further and further apart, and the desperate psychic manoeuvres put into play to close the gap. It takes a sledgehammer to the idea that memory is any consolation.

Yet the predominant thought still remains that, despite all that complexity, the often hilarious, Pinteresque dialogue, the tantalising sense of some overarching grand narrative message, it really might just be about people who are terminally unhappy. Although when there’s so many of them, and their own behaviour so often inexplicable to themselves, you might conclude that England really is, as Hilary Mantel and the Queen, amongst others, have suggested, subject to dark forces.

'They were trying to decide what to do with Tim Swann if they caught him. By then there were twenty or thirty of them, milling about the metalled pathway by the old tennis courts. Their voices, assertive yet not entirely confident on one side, polite and fluting on the other, rose and fell in the cooling air.

‘Really, the best thing …’

‘I’m sorry, but I think you’ll find …’

With simple, firm exchanges like this it seemed their differences could be resolved. But without warning, a third group appeared, oldish hard-favoured working men with Midlands accents, dressed in yellow site helmets and hi-vis wear. A fierce struggle broke out. Someone was pushed to the ground; someone else fell on top of them. Before long they were clawing inexpertly at one another’s cheeks, which stretched like plasticine and came away in lumps. Shaw felt dizzy when he saw that. He wasn’t sure what he was looking at. Arms rose and fell. For a moment, he thought he saw the taxi driver from Kinver. An astonishingly fat man toiled away in the middle of it all, treading on anyone unfortunate enough to have gone down, his feet like canal boats in brand-new Mizuno running shoes, while two dogs barked energetically around his legs. Smaller scuffles eddied away from the main mass, energetic at first then dispersing across the common towards the residential backwaters the other side of Rocks Lane. ‘Coom by, lads!’ a tenor voice called clearly. ‘Coom by now!’ Distance distorted the combatants’ faces further, magnifying their little deformities. The longer the struggle went on, the quieter it seemed to become, until it was like looking at an old woodcut, the aesthetic of which disconnects the modern viewer forever from the original meanings of the scene. Shaw was unable, somehow, to believe that anything bad was happening: it all seemed part and parcel of Tim Swann’s existence, along with a bag of wet fish or a voice overheard on a train to the Midlands, hard to parse yet somehow perfectly ordinary – even humdrum – in its own terms. He stood for a while at the edge of the woods, uncertain what to do next, watching gangs of two or three hunt one another across the open ground; then, because Tim showed no sign of reappearing, turned and went home. In the night, he was certain he heard them again, struggling quietly in the street outside. But when he looked, nobody was there, and it was just a fine drizzle glistening on the opposite pavement.'

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2020

For the last few years I have read all of the books on the Goldsmiths shortlist, but at the time it was announced last year the hardback of this book was rather expensive and I was trying to cut down my book spending. So although it went on to win, I decided to wait for the paperback, which is now available.

I have never read Harrison before, so I can't comment on how it fits into his oeuvre, but his fictional world is quite an intriguing one, which mixes the mundane with occasional supernatural elements. His British geography is subtly altered - much of the book takes place in a Shropshire town on the Severn which has elements of both Bridgnorth and Ironbridge but doesn't entirely fit either. The rest is set in London. His two main characters Shaw and Victoria are both outsiders, linked to each other by a tentative more off than on sexual relationship, and the characters they meet are all part of a complex web that neither of them really understands.

[Jerrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I enjoyed the writing, the characters, and the settings in this book, it was often hard to tell what was going on. It highlights a lot of modern-day angst (conspiracy theories, elder care responsibilities, economic and political uncertainty), but too much of the action in the book was murky at best. 2.5⭐️

[Darko Tuševljaković · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intelligent and eerie, masterfully crafted and inconspicuously relevant, the new M. John Harrison novel draws a lot from his previous work – from "Climbers" to his recent flash fiction, via "The Course of the Heart", "Signs of Life" and even the Kefahuchi Tract novels – subliming the already seen and now perfectly ripe elements of his prose into the essence of almost alchemical quality. Readers who have already tried the previous batches will recognize its taste, but even they are at risk of becoming properly dizzy from these unique literary fumes.

There are two protagonists, who are trying to find themselves and finally take hold of their lives, but it seems they’re way better at losing themselves in the world they occupy but fail to understand; there’s a great deal of urban landscape and countryside which almost pose as the additional protagonists of the novel, sometimes playing enemies, sometimes friends; there are strange and disturbing, even menacing events that cannot be (easily) explained; there are confusing, koanlike dialogues, pretending to clarify things, but really only making them murkier, and most of the time the membrane between the quotidian and the extraordinary, the aberrant, is semiporous, so that you, as well as the main characters of the novel, cannot tell for sure which is which.

All these things are characteristic of Mr. Harrison’s writing, they are his finely honed semiotic tools, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t pushed the envelope a bit further: in "The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again" he undertook the risk of applying the approach he mostly uses in short stories, without adjusting it to the length of a novel, and thus leaving the readers to fight it or go along with it, and, consequentially, enjoy it. It's not his style I’m talking about – it is surprisingly relaxed, while maintaing its usual qualities of being elegant and sharp – but his ability to create a condensed and constant sense of wonder and anxiety, of nausea induced by depriving the readers of enough firm ground of cause and effect to stand on. In such stories there is no jumping board that would send you into the pleasant waters of an imagined world, the plank you stand on is floating on a liquid surface, true, but it’s rather questionable if it’s the sea or a lake: there’s no wind and waves, although something invisible is pushing you in the direction that you only hope is the shore. Pushed to the extreme, and put into skilled hands, it can work fantastically in a short story, but when expanded to the size of a novel, there’s always the risk of overwhelming the readers with oddness and confusing them too much (and for too long). The skilled hand, therefore, must achieve a fine balance between denying them the pleasure of feeling comfortable and letting them believe what they are used to believing, that a + b = c.

In this novel, M. John Harrison does exactly that: he denies us solid ground more than in any of his previous novels, but at the same time, manages to keep our attention, and, among other things, demonstrates the possibility of enjoying a novel without waiting for the mystery to be fully unraveled, explained. Everything is episodic, anecdotal, full of details that seem unimportant (while the things that appear to be of importance remain obscure, even when meticulously depicted), full of protagonists’ petty insecurities and frustrations, and underneath all that a greater picture might lay, but we’re left only with its snippets – left to draw our own conclusions. We recognize the novel’s metaphors, but aren’t sure what they address. Or, better yet, there are many things they may be referring to. So maybe the trick is not to single out any of those references, maybe everything that appears to have some connection to the novel is actually connected to it. The novel’s vagueness is, then, its virtue, and although a twinpeaksesque approach like this one demands a careful and patient reader, for such a reader the reward is guaranteed.

M. John Harrison has a history of provoking us to consider the notion that in life, just like in art, there are no compasses and exact maps that would make the journey easier, provided that there is such a thing as “a journey“ at all, and the readers who don’t care to engage too much, who prefer answers over questions, should avoid this novel. For all the rest, the curious and the bold: this is your best summer isolation read.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

”In fact, the faeries had turned him into a water-baby. A water-baby? You never heard of a water-baby. Perhaps not. That is the very reason why this story was written. There are a great many things in the world which you never heard of; and a great many more which nobody ever heard of; and a great many things, too, which nobody will ever hear of. . .”
”No water babies, indeed? Why, wise men of old said that everything on earth had its double in the water; any you may see that that is, if not quite true, still quite as true as most other theories which you are likely to hear for many a day. There are land-babies — hen why not water-babies?”
—Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies, 1863

Reading M. John Harrison’s The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again was a pleasure from beginning to end. It’s an unusually rich novel: intelligent, thoughtful, both emotionally credible and emotionally perfect. The Sunken Land. . . holds multiple facets for this reader, with each facet enjoyable on its own: weird characters; head-scratching relationships; contemporary settings and life skewered; and a sometimes fantastical plot line threaded with The Water-Babies, Charles Kingsley’s nineteenth century British children’s classic. The Sunken Land. . .’s facets work in concert to magnify each other, yet a strength of The Sunken Land. . . is how this reader could choose which facets to focus on while paying less attention to others.

What worked best for me was Harrison’s reminding me, through his off-beat characters and through their head-scratching relationships, that ”There are a great many things in the world which you never heard of”. Harrison’s Shaw is arguably one of the best and most memorable characters in current fiction. ”[D]uring his fifties. . . [Shaw] went through a rough patch. . . His life had been, until then, perfectly normal. He had been determined on normality. Perhaps that had been the problem. Anyway, his life lost shape and five years were expended on nothing very much. They slid into themselves like the parts of a trick box and wouldn’t open again.” ”. . . [H]is life lost shape and five years were expended on nothing very much.” ”In fact, he was reasonably content. It was a relief not to have a life. He read. He visited his mother in the care home. He looked for a new IT gig, and when he couldn’t find one, he wandered the banks of the Thames. . .” According to Victoria Nyman, Shaw’s occasional lover and bemused friend, he has ”’forgotten what’s everything’s about.’ He wondered if he had. If he had, how would he know? What would be the epistemology of that?”.

Shaw’s elderly mother, riding out dementia in a care home, is another great Harrison creation, with a reproduction of Arnold Böcklin’s spectacularly creepy 1887 painting of Sea Idyll on the wall above her bed. Here she upbraids Shaw: ”’How old are you?’ his mother said. ‘Grow up.’ Shaw shrugged. ‘Don’t wait for your life to start. I was always waiting for my life to start. Everything that happened seemed like a good beginning, but it turned out to be the thing itself.” And here she instructs Shaw, ”’There’s less to everyone than meets the eye,’ she told Shaw as he left. ‘You were always a cunt, William.’” The relationship between Shaw and his mother seems dominated by Shaw’s theory that ”. . . while some families cling together, others have a more ballistic tradition. The latter soon can’t stand the sight of each other or forgive anything. Unable to manage conflict, the individual members fly apart, start new lives. But even those don’t hold. ‘They lose the ability, ‘ he said, ‘to contribute to any myth but their own.’”. Then there’s Victoria’s dead parents: ”Victoria’s father, who had taken up fishing in late life, dropped dead in a secluded car park on the bank of the River Severn, leaving the mother at a loss but at the same time inexplicably relieved. Relief saw her through the menopause. It saw her relocate to a small, not very picturesque town in Shropshire, where she acquired an iPhone and went home with strange men, drunk-texting crush after crush late at night late at night until she died of a peculiarly enlarged spleen and very high levels of the thyroid hormone T4.”.

Harrison’s skewering contemporary life is another joy of The Sunken Land. . . Shaw eats ”. . . an artisanal sandwich at the Jouissance Bistro & Well-Being Centre.” At ”. . . another lunchtime, for a change, he walked downstream to Strand-on-the-Green and ate a hamburger sitting outside a barge called the City Barge while middle-aged women in yoga pants by Liquido and Spiritual Gangster exercised their miniature dogs between him and the river. Shaw felt as if he was sick of all that side of things. The tide had turned. The water was beginning to slacken and churn.” Shaw observes that ”Coastal towns are suicide towns. . . : although it’s rarely an actual suicide that people commit in them, more a fading-away, an adjustment of values, the step change to a less energetic state.” Victoria writes a letter to Shaw: ”’It’s very Brexit up here. . . Eight pubs in a mile and deep surrounding woods. I always think of it as my Brocéliande, although the high streets seems to have been deforested as early as 1307.’” And Victoria emails Shaw: ”’It’s very English Heritage up here. I expect I’ve told you that before.’ As soon as you entered the woods, a dozen footpaths, signposted at the will of competing conservation bodies, went off busily in all directions, running precipitously into one another, stumbling over brand new stiles, toppling into an overgrown quarry and out the other side.”

What worked not as well for me was Harrison’s water-babies plot thread. I guess that readers brought up with or at least familiar with Kingsley’s The Water-Babies might find Harrison’s reimagining more natively understandable and more enjoyable.

4.5 stars, certainly among the most enjoyable and thought-provoking recent novels

[Héctor Genta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un libro strano. Non è tanto la trama – per quanto ricca – il centro del racconto, quanto l'atmosfera che Harrison sa creare, un clima di attesa, straniamento, confusione. Come confusi sono i due protagonisti, persone che arrivate alla mezza età realizzano di non aver costruito nulla e ora non sanno dove dirigere le loro vite. Uno, Shaw, accetta il primo impiego che gli capita ("non un vero lavoro, quello che ultimamente hanno tutti"), l'altra, Victoria ("piena ma anche sprovvista di aspettative"), abbandona Londra per la campagna delle Midlands.
Anime alla deriva perse in un'architettura urbana che sembra svilupparsi senza un piano preciso, quasi ad elevare la provvisorietà a sistema, entrambi saranno destinati ad incontrare sul loro percorso personaggi bizzarri, con parti oscure che aprono sul mistero ed entrambi affronteranno queste situazioni come esperienze normali, senza approfondire più di tanto, senza provare davvero a capire chi siano quegli uomini-pesce, creature atlantidee che fanno capolino dietro ogni loro incontro.
Toccherebbe a Shaw e Victoria il compito di tirare le reti che l'autore ha calato nel romanzo e portare alla luce il significato, ma loro non lo fanno e proprio in questa postura rinunciataria sta un degli aspetti importanti del libro. Viene da pensare che forse Shaw e Victoria siamo noi, abitanti di questi strani anni, incapaci di indagare la realtà che abbiamo davanti o forse troppo confusi per provare a farlo. Prigionieri nella nostra bolla, incapaci di condividere e aprirci all'altro, eppure condannati ad andare avanti ("gli sembrava sempre di non avere colto un messaggio d'importanza cardinale", scrive Harrison a proposito di Shaw. E più avanti, riferendosi ad un altro personaggio: "era un uomo in cerca di motivazioni: non le trovava mai eppure agiva).
Andare avanti, perché non si può fare altrimenti; così i personaggi di Harrison (noi) si rassegnano a fare i passeggeri di un autobus che non sanno dove conduca e da chi sia guidato, limitandosi a guardare ogni tanto fuori dal finestrino concedendosi qualche sospiro, a volte di rimpianto, spesso per abitudine.

[Blair · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5) Harrison is an inscrutable writer; it’s difficult to even know how to talk about The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again. ‘Murky’ seems an appropriate descriptor, considering all the waterlogged imagery. It’s a book but not really a story, a work that seems resistant to interpretation or, really, any of the features we would usually associate with a novel, even though its details are grindingly mundane. There’s a man who takes a vague sort of job from someone who runs a conspiracy-theory website, and a woman who moves into her late mother’s house and makes friends with a local waitress. At times it’s like Harrison has had a stab at rewriting one of Ali Smith’s Seasons Quartet – or perhaps all of them combined into one. It’s boring in a strangely comforting way, yet it resists becoming at all ‘relatable’ because of its oddness (inexplicable and frustrating behaviour, characters constantly talking at cross purposes, subplots that go nowhere). I liked it for reasons I can’t quite explain. Still, I felt this approach was more successful in the short fiction of You Should Come With Me Now than at novel length.

[Liviu · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book with a lot of promise that feels like it's left unfulfilled; eccentric characters, great prose and a mixture of weird and the banal, the novel sparkles for the first 50 or so pages but then it starts scattering and doesn't really come together again; definitely worth reading but I had very high expectations and those fell somewhat short.

[Jennifer · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wonderful book to read if you have trouble falling asleep. I failed to find a story line (was there one?) or, indeed, anything that made this book passingly interesting.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book because of its shortlisting for the 2020 Goldsmith’s Prize. It’s a story that follows two different characters, Shaw and Victoria. But the remarkable thing about the book is that the reader is quickly aware that there is a whole other storyline developing outside of Shaw and Victoria’s lives and, crucially, just outside of the reader’s perception. When, very early on in the book, we read

”He seemed to bring a smell into the kitchen. She couldn’t quite smell it, but she knew it was there.”

we get an inkling of the way the book is going to work. There will be things we know are there but which we can quite grasp hold of. Later, the book will say of another piece of writing:

”…as if the writer had learned to mimic sentence structure without having any idea how to link it to its own content.”

And there are times when reading this book when the reader can relate to this. Indeed, there are times when either Shaw of Victoria say something and have no idea why they said it.

”Does your father own a dog?” Victoria asked. She wasn’t sure why.”

All this makes for an unsettling read. We are following Shaw and Victoria, but we know that just outside of our “field of view” there’s a whole bunch of weirdness going on. We know we are in a Brexit environment (that’s not the weird part, although a lot of Brits might beg to differ) and we know Shaw and Victoria seem strangely unaware of upheavals across the country. But, weirder than that, there are rumours and potential sightings of a new life form emerging and it seems that the man who has given Shaw a sort of job might be involved. There’s a door on a boat that cannot be opened. There are rumours of conspiracy theories. The Victorian (surely the name of one of the protagonists is not coincidental) novel The Water Babies keeps intruding into the story as copies are passed around.

All this just scratches the surface. There’s a lot more going on in this book. But then, when you read it, you realise there’s even more going on if only you could get a clear view of it.

I liked the way this book makes the reader constantly feel that they are on the verge of discovering what it is all about. I liked that there are hints and possibilities that are glimpsed almost out of the corner of the reader’s eye. This is not a book to read if you prefer your novels to tie up loose ends.

This is a great book to read if, like me, you don’t mind navigating your way through a novel where it’s not clear what is going on and there’s a fair chance you will still feel that way when you finish the final page. A lot of the time, that’s my definition of a good book.

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not really a review, and I have marked it as such, as I didn't finish it. I dropped it around 25% cause I was just not feeling it and, to be honest, found it incredibly boring which is really a shame as it had all the hallmarks of books I love. It's as much about England and Brexit as it's about strange occurrences taking place around water bodies. Dereliction and decay permeate the text, the past trying to be present. The promise of regrowth and renewal is there, but hollow.

Harrison keeps the reader at a distance and his cards close, the narrative in turn is slippery and out of the reader's reach. Elements are at the corner of one's eye, fading away when given attention. Haze envelops the lands sunk in murk, now thrumming to rise. I love books which make me work, which don't serve everything on a plate, are never fully graspable. But this was too evasive for my taste. Yet, the writing's lush, the atmosphere uncannily alluring. It will work for others.




(I received a finished copy of the book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)

[Paul Dembina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nicely off kilter. Reminds me of an old short story of Harrison's called The Incalling where there is an external observer to mysterious goings on the observer is never privy to understanding. In this case 2 protagonists who are oblivious to clues surrounding them although not all the signs signify.

[inciminci · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book there are basically two stories intersecting; the story of Shaw, who goes through a sort of life crisis and whose life consists of not much but the visits to his mother who has dementia and lives in a care home. One day he meets Tim who gives him a job in which he needs to sit in front of a computer in a boat house and do stuff for Tim's blog, travel to seemingly random destinations and visit a medium on a regular basis. The second story is the story of Victoria, with whom Tim has a loose affair. She decides to buy a car and move to the country to get away from London, moving into the house of her late mother. There, she finds a truly bizarre community and her life among them is almost like a nightmarish David Lynch movie. And finally, there are many many water-related and aquatic elements everywhere, both in Shaw's and in Victoria's life.
I'm not really sure about this one, I definitely have to ponder on this story more. I read this for my book club and I can't wait to discuss it in April to see what the other people made of it. I have the feeling that it is a weird metaphor for a fairly recent and big event in the history of England, but I can't shake the feeling there's more to this book. What I surely found impressive though, is how even normal landscape descriptions become uncanny and even scary written from Harrison's pen, it is akin to an atmospheric horror movie, but in book form.

[Rebecca Alcazaze · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s never great when you finish a book and are still a bit puzzled as to what it was all about.

I mean, as someone who’s equally creeped out by the 1970s film version of The Water Babies, Kingsley’s original morality tale and the thought of living in a country that voted for Brexit, I can see why the novel is described as unsettling, but I hoped for more.

Gross wee, green, mucus-y, embryo podlets that haunt the water systems are so up my street that I should have loved this. Instead, the biggish standout (beyond the language and gorgeous writing) was the snobbery relating to tattoo studios that seems to haunt much literature - references to stuff like ‘ring-road landscapes of takeout and tattoo parlour’. I work in a tattoo studio so I’m biased, I can see that tattoo places do pop up in bleak spots but are they really as ubiquitous a takeaway places?

[Bart · Rating 4 out of 5]

(...)

But this is a review, so I have to tell you something about the beautiful, beautiful prose, which at times is maybe bit overdone as well. But that didn’t really bother me: it’s art’s prerogative. This novel is first and foremost about its sentences – just like Twin Peaks: The Return is about the scenes. Harrison’s prose consists of fragments of 2020 contemporary life, and an eye for plants and how the weather affects light. I also have to tell you about certain meta-parts, in which Harrison seems to opt out of knowing what the novel is all about himself. Parts which at times are maybe too involved with the novel itself, but then again, maybe necessary to reassure the reader: don’t be afraid if the ground is unstable, do trod on. And I also have to tell you something about how this novel at the same time is disjointed and one long, coherent dream of consciousness. I would not be surprised if Harrison carefully welded most of this together from scenes out of his flash fiction scrapbook. I also have to tell you this novel conveys meaning nonetheless, with enough sharp observations about our shared world and the human experience. I don’t think there was a page that didn’t intrigue me.

(...)

Full review on Weighing A Pig

[Oleksandr Zholud · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a weird story about strange lives of strange people. It was nominated for the 2020 British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Awards and because I nowadays enjoy SFF from the UK more than from the USA, I decided to give it a try. This is not my kind of book, but others can find it fascinating.

It starts in the Great Britain during Brexit as a story of middle-aged man, Shaw. He had a mother withy dementia, whom he regularly visits, only one of her rather large family, mostly to re-watch their multiple photo albums of people he doesn’t recall and to hear her accusations, when she says that he should do something with his life and always addresses him with any name but his own. He has an on-off lover Victoria, a doctor's daughter, who usually starts her contact with people by stating that she saw her first corpse at age thirteen. Her father once told her that there is a secret species of human-fish. Shaw gets a job from his new strange neighbor Tim, which consists of collecting some unspecified goods to send them to unspecified locations. Tim gives his other strange assignments, like to follow an (seemingly) unrelated court proceedings or to visit a medium.

Then we shift to Victoria, who move to the house of her deceased mother in Shropshire, where she meet a lot of strange people, including a father and a daughter in a local café, who seemingly knew her mother from a completely unexpected angle. People there actively read The Water Babies, which in some way is related to that men-fish…

There is a lot of rain and a lot of action is next to rivers or ponds, there is always a feeling that something about to happen, but doesn’t. The protagonists meet people we readers know about from another plotline but they don’t and these meetings like everything else lead nowhere. At one moment, Tim, who also has a kind of conspiracy theory site, gives Shaw printouts, which neatly summarize the style of the book:

The short version, perhaps two inches thick, turned out to be a download from the website, a sheaf of media reports, anecdotal observations and scientific abstracts touching on everything from the Turkish ‘mystery city’ of Göbekli Tepe to the sequence of uplift of the Hoh Xil Basin of the Central Tibetan Plateau; from ancient human migrations – tracked via mitochondrial haplogroup – to the Gnostic foundations of Stalinist science. Everything was either a truth or a mystery. Truths and mysteries ran together, hardening into unconformable layers of time and data. Body parts were washed up in Southampton, England. Someone had invented an app designed to identify unknown locations by matching them with ‘a library of sixty million images’. Two paragraphs from Wikipedia shed new light on metabolic by-products found deep in the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate. The first complete Neanderthal genome had proved to include DNA from at least one previously unknown human species; simultaneously, in Wiesbaden, Germany, a man of about forty was observed by passers-by to drag himself out of a canal then run straight out into heavy traffic on the nearby dual carriageway, where he was struck first by a black BMW E30 with UK registration plates then by a Peugeot painted Mediterranean blue.

The useless specificity of these last two facts seemed to sum up the whole collection, which was interleaved with Post-it notes – ‘What is the exact nature of our relations with the inland cities?’ – and personal memos, as if its curator’s need to find narrative in the density of events left him unable to make distinctions not just between different scientific regimes and types of evidence, but between his obsessions and his life – although the latter was often revealed as a weak secondary growth on the former.

As soon as Shaw had read a page or two, Tim began leaning over his shoulder to make cross-references. ‘Look at this’ – leafing forward excitedly through three or four pages – ‘and don’t miss this! Do you see how one conclusion makes it impossible to avoid the other? Do you see how elegant it is?’ None of it made any sense to Shaw. When he said so, Tim nodded wisely, as if a careful academic point had been made. ‘What haunts me is exactly that! In the end, is logic in any sense the right method to be applying here?’

[peg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading through the Goodreads list of books eligible for the upcoming GoldsmithsPrize, I was delighted to find this book by the sf/f writer M. John Harrison. I have read his trilogy beginning with LIGHT and while I wasn’t sure what I thought about it at the time, have thought about it many times since, especially the eerie surreal worldbuilding.

This novel has that same atmosphere, which I can only describe as “UNCANNY”. The main character, a middle-aged man named Shaw, seems to be going through some sort of mental crisis, which isn’t helped by all the weird characters he meets in this book, including his demented mother and a woman who holds surreal seances in her home.

I have noticed several unusual contemporary novels that have people living on boats, such as Daisy Johnson’s EVERYTHING UNDER, where mythic-seeming events take place on a houseboat on an Oxford canal. This book has many “watery” scenes too, as when Shaw walks onto an old unused barge at night and experiences some strange happenings.

I really look forward to reading this surreal novel again and know it will stick in my mind.
However it may be even too “mould breaking” for the Goldsmiths so I will give it even odds to make the prize list....a 5 on my 1-10 scale.

[Dries · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm a little surprised at my own rating if I'm honest, because for a solid two thirds of this book I didn't get the sense that I was hating what I was reading, but at some point it just dawned on me: I'm getting absolutely nothing out of this... I swear I did my absolute best to read this book attentively, and yet, having finished it, I still haven't the faintest idea what it's about; I think it was a story about conspiracy theories, Brexit, dementia and/or eldercare, and possibly something about ancient indescribable horrors rising up from the sea and/or river(s), but I couldn't even attempt to explain how all of it ties together (or if it even does tie together). I have no clue who any of the characters are, what their motives are, why they do what they do (or even what it is they do most of the time)... I often try to mention at least one positive thing in my negative reviews, usually something along the lines of "well at least it was competently written", but the writing feels like the primary offender in what makes The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again fall so utterly flat; there were occasional sprinkles throughout the novel where I thought things would finally start to get interesting, but every time those (already very sparse) seeds of interest would get nipped in the bud by a veritable deluge of boring nothingness that never seemed to go anywhere...

To be clear: I'm not saying M. John Harrison is a bad writer; this is only the first book by him I've read, so I'm willing to believe this just isn't his best work. What I will say is that I feel betrayed by the various authors (many of whom I really enjoy) who apparently heaped praise on this novel; China Miéville, how could you do this to me...

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite this novel winning the Goldsmith’s prize late in 2020, I have managed to avoid reading any reviews before reading.
I’m glad I did because I wouldn’t have liked anyone else to try and insert an interpretation for me. I might also have been put off by any attempt to assign it a genre.

This was just brilliant. It appealed and spoke directly to me in lots of ways, some of which would be meaningless to others. I loved its quirkiness. I’m glad I didn’t know M. John Harrison wrote science fiction, because that might have put me off, wrongly, in the first place and left me looking for some sci-fi in the plot. I don’t think it was there.

On one level, I loved this book because it took me to places I knew well two decades ago when I lived in West London. It took me along the Thames side where I used to go running, from Hammersmith to Barnes, on weekend walks along Turnham Green and into Chiswick, it took me to pubs along the river like the City Barge and the Bull’s Head in Strand on the Green, where I spent many Sunday lunchtimes. It took me through Barnes and on to Mortlake and Sheen. Then it also took me on train journeys through the Midland, and into places on the edge of the West Country, places following the River Severn north of Gloucester where they do actually say “Orright”.

One of the things I loved about this book was the subtle humour woven into the pages, so good that once or twice I just laughed out loud. Then, just as suddenly, you will be hit by a line or two of magical brilliance that makes you say ‘wow’.
A little bit of back story and then some quotes to show you what I mean. Two central character – a man called Shaw, who has recently had some sort of (unspecified) breakdown and is at a low ebb, and a women called Victoria, whom he meets in the pub where the two strike up a tentative relationship. She leaves London and sets up home in the West Midlands in her mother’s old house, while Shaw encounters a strange man called Tim who gives him a sort of job doing things that are never entirely clear on an old boat on the Thames. I would describe Tim as a subscriber to conspiracy theories, or more exactly, the writer and creator of them.

Shaw is well into his fifties, and has an aging mother in a home for those with dementia – not funny really, but adding a comic touch by her treatment of her son whose name she can never remember. Her back story sounds fascinating, with a string of failed relationships, and families, abandoned behind her, none of whom speak to each other any more and live as far away in the world as possible – Canada, USA and Australia.
As a result Shaw grew up with several fathers, one or two of which he kept in touch with, and one of which turns up as this wonderful flashback:

A retired teacher from Swansea had arrived one drizzly Saturday on the doorstep of the Maida Vale house-share where Shaw was at the time living in a nice double room with a woman called Jasmine. The teacher’s name was Keith and in his prime he had taught creative writing to maximum-security prisoners on the Isle of Wight. He was in his middle seventies now, and already drunk when Shaw answered the doorbell. Three o’clock in the afternoon, late November, fifteen years or more since Keith has been his father: Shaw had no idea how he had got the address. What Keith wanted was even harder to understand, though he had brought along a file of handwritten poems under the general title ‘Pleasing the Long-Dead Heart’. He ate dinner with them, watched TV, drank shiraz until he was paralytic, then Jasmine drove him to the station in her Austin Metro. In the car, he expanded further on his theory of the heart; put his hand on Jasmine’s knee; described Shaw as wet. If she ever needed a real man, he suggested, she should look him up.

Shaw is left puzzled by the encounter, but keeps the poems. Jasmine runs off with a tree surgeon. It is a gem of a cameo.

Up in the west country Victoria has been out driving, which she does absentmindedly at the best of times. These wonderful two lines describe her return home perfectly:

Evening arrived home before her. As she drove up the hill, the residue of sunset lay between the roofs and chimneys in predictably Munch-like smears of reds and oranges, like a poster in student lodgings long ago.

I love that. If you read carefully there are lots of references to art works in the book. The wall of the home where we meet Shaw’s mother is adorned with a changing selection – Grimshaw’s with their moonlit scenes and something by Arnold Böcklin called Sea Idyll which is enough to scare anyone to death, but links to hinted conspiracies.

Here is another little gem, thrown aside in a little flashback about Shaw’s mother:

Coastal towns are suicide towns, he thought: although it’s rarely an actual suicide that people commit in them, more a fading-away, an adjustment of values, the step change to a less energetic state.

That just takes me straight to some of those retirement towns around the coast of England where old people cluster on cold seats along the sea front, and where you are taken as a child to see aging relatives. Where there is nothing for young people to do.

Part of the joy of the book are all these little references and asides, even within the conspiracy theories of human links back to aquatic ancestors, strange river dwelling creatures and small brown nineteenth century medicine bottles. I think there is so much more going on and I may just have to read it all over again to be sure.

So I love the story, the oddness of it, I love the use of locations, I love the weirdness of some of the characters and the depressing places that Shaw ends up, from a squalid bedsit to a boat on the river with a mysterious locked room. All of it is wonderfully quirky and so beautifully written that when people walk into 18 inches of water and vanish, you hardly blink, it all seems so plausible.

[Jeroen · Rating 4 out of 5]

?

[John Banks · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

I read M. John Harrison's The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again because it was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths prize 2020 and then won it. A very deserving if slightly uneven winner.

There's much to admire here formally and in terms of just the share quality of writing. The book sets out focusing on the character Shaw, a man in his fifties who has lost his way in life somewhat and seems to inhabit a state of almost permanent, disquieting crisis ("His adult life had been, until then, perfectly normal. He had been determined on normality. Perhaps that had been the problem. Anyway, his life lost shape and five years were expended on nothing very much. They slid into themselves like the parts of a trick box and wouldn't open again").

He has washed up in a bedsit near the river in Hammersmith. Many of the characters encountered in the book seem to be almost collapsing and fading, even vanishing into this state of crisis. This fascinating characterization, carried so well by the language and imagery, is the particular strength of this work. I'm not sure if you can even really call this characterisation as is wonderfully disconcerting how Harrison manages to eerily have these characters be subsumed or absorbed by the landscapes and unfolding events around them in a kind of novelistic psychogeography that he's explored in other earlier works. There's definitely gothic genre tones here, but also a tinge of magical realism. Strange water creatures and haunting figures drift in and across these landscapes, especially the rivers. Shaw glimpses strange creatures in toilet bowls, hears voices emanating from walls.

Shaw takes up a job offered by a man he meets in a graveyard, that requires him to travel by train around the midlands on barely understandable business transactions. A kind of conspiracy theory / cult mystery starts to unfold around all of this involving green creatures (some kind of new species) and references to Kingsley's Water Babies.

Shaw's on and off again lover, Victoria. (a Drs daughter who also seems to exist in a state of semi-permanent disconnected crisis), visits him from time to time but then relocates to her dead mother's home in Shropshire. Further conspiracies and strange events unfold around her that she tries to communicate to Shaw in quite elliptical emails and messages. A lot of this is playing on themes of breakdowns of communication, connection, belonging and relationships. You can see where this is going: these various failures and communication collapses and conspiracies all find us in the territory of Brexit and its socio-economic and political failures. But the share inventive, extravagant exuberance in language and imagery with which Harrison pursues this makes it so much more than some extended metaphor for the painful, drawn out collapse and crisis we're seeing in the UK. Sure there's the collapse of certainty (a common theme in novels over past year or so) but in Harrison's hands the linguistic ingenuity and inventiveness makes it all sing.

A Guardian reviewer specifically mentions this passage (that I also adored when I hit it): “Landward, the crows were working out happily above St Mary Magdalen, loosening up in twos and threes, doing air-pocket work, breathing into their stalls and sideslips, wingsuiting around Richard Burton’s tented mausoleum.” There are just so many other examples of scintillating, apt sentences and passages like this.

There's a kind of Dickensian (Victorian) glee Harrison displays in describing these fractures and social breakdowns. But he often is also at his best when describing landscapes that loom and ooze into view, almost exerting themselves against these human follies. For example, when describing one of the landscapes that Victoria encounters:

"“the demented, unpredictable, immeasurably fortunate geology, fuel for the industrial light and magic that had once changed the world: the iron money, the engine money, the steam and tontine money, the raw underground money hidden in unconformable strata, secret seams and voids, in jumbled shales, fireclays, tar, coal measures and thinly bedded limestone – to exit as seeps and springs above the heritage museums and leisure trails and decommissioned railways; while associated subsidence gnawed quietly away at the superficial architecture of the Gorge.” How good is that!

Earlier in the book when describing the urban psychic landscape of the business Shaw becomes involved in:

"From then on he would make two or three trips a week to similar premises - bookstores, crystal shops, candle parlours, short-let niche operations selling a mix of pop-cultural memorabilia and truther merchandise from two or three generations ago - which had flourished along the abandoned high streets of post-2007austerity, run by a network of shabby voters hoping to take advantage of tumbling rents.Their real obsession lay in the idea of commerce as a kind of politics, expression of a fundamental ideology. They had bought the rhetoric without having the talent or the backing. The internet was killing them. The speed of things was killing them. They were like old fashioned commercial travellers, fading away in bars and single rooms, exchanging order books on windy corners as if it was still 1981 - denziens of futures that failed to take, whole worlds that never got past the economic turbulence and out into clear air, men and women in cheap business clothes, washed up on rail platforms, weak-eyed with the brief energy of the defeated, exchanging obsolete tradecraft like Thatcherite spies"

Describing a garden at the back of Victoria's house:

"Everything was tall, packed, dense, too entangled to walk through and quickly changing its nature from tended to untended. At the centre of this confusion the second lawn lay small and silent, like a woodland pool covered in flat green waterweed. The light fell in at steep angles between the surrounding houses. To one side a black and white cat sat next to some elegantly broken plant pots, licking its paws in the dusty resonant sunshine".

I could add so many other examples of splendid writing. I haven't even got to Harrison's descriptions of the river and its life, really a character it its own right and beautifully realised.

Harrison is also playing with and even frustrating the reader's efforts to finally determine what's going on with all these mysterious conspiracies and strange happenings. Shaw encountering one of these incidents: "Behind this stacking of limbs lay not so much an act of meaning as the entire possibility of meaning, contained in a single event. Something was implied. It could not fail to be revealed. It was both immanent and imminent. Shaw understood he had run foul of the dream language, in which structure and content are reliably the same thing."

On another occasion as Shaw tries to understand (or does he) the nature of the strange business operations:

'I don't even know what's going on,' Shaw said.
'Then why did you come?'
There was no answer to that.
'I feel as if you're hoping to attach your anxiety to someone else,' he said. 'I don't blame you, when people come into your house like this.' Then he heard himself add: 'I'm living without explanations, if you can understand that.'
..... 'Haven't you got any idea what's going on here?' Helen shouted after him. 'Don't you care? Just ask yourself why you came here!"
'I don't know', Shaw said, more to himself than her. 'I don't know why.'

Responding to one of Victoria's email:

"Shaw could make nothing of it. Nevertheless he felt compelled to write back. 'It seems ages since you came down here and we were together,' he started. Then, having erased that: 'Sorry not to be in touch.'
There was too much to tell. Where could he start? 'I feel a bit as if I've abandoned you. I feel as if i owe you an explanation.' Victoria would dismiss this, he knew, with a more or less wry laugh. Evidently they had abandoned each other. But he couldn't reconnect on his own, and without her help fell back on trying to explain himself. Soon he was writing, 'I've never rally known who I was' and after that it was as if he could never stop."

The only thing is, for a novel riffing on the failures of communication and identity and connection this novel is a damn fine contemporary example of the glorious qualities of connection and communication that contemporary literary fiction can achieve. Well deserved winner of Goldsmith's prize showcasing what can still be achieved with novelistic language and vision to tell us about ourselves and our times. In some ways this ambition is rather Victorian!

[Stephen Bacon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first came across the fiction of M John Harrison in the late 80s and early 90s, in the anthologies edited by Stephen Jones – the annual Best New Horror and his original Dark Terrors series. His writing, on the surface so straightforward and conventional, merely hints at things just out of sight, the weirdness is not in any way overt. And yet his skill is such that, as a reader, you can’t fail to pick up on the disturbing element of the narrative. He manages to conjure a dreamlike quality to his stories. You almost feel like you’re not fully aware of all the facts, like you’ve missed some part of the narrative. Although the sense of paranoia this evokes is not at all accidental…

Shaw lives in south west London. He’s recovering after suffering some kind of breakdown. He’s clearly distanced from everything, and has little contact with his surroundings other than his occasional visits to his aging mum, who has dementia and is being looked after in a care-home. One day he meets Victoria, the daughter of a doctor, who claims she saw her first corpse at the age of 13. He is offered a job by one of his neighbours, and spends his days on a barge doing menial jobs. Meanwhile Victoria journeys up to Shropshire to restore the property that her late mother left. There she encounters a strange set of characters and events, most of which cross over with Shaw’s experiences. It feels like there is a conspiracy taking place, one to which Shaw and Victoria (and us, as the reader) are on the outside.

The book is littered with references to water and fish, and is underscored with a hint of the numinous, although there is a strong suggestion that the events are rather outside the realms of human understanding. There are a couple of scenes that left me feeling unsettled and disturbed, and yet I couldn’t quite explain why. This is largely to do with Harrison’s skill as a writer, and it’s no surprise to see that The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again won the Goldsmiths Prize 2020. Each of his sentences offer something startling, or beautiful, or unsettling, sometimes at the same time.

I loved this book, but its unconventional narrative and lack of explanatory hand-holding, might not be for everyone. I couldn’t pretend to understand all of the motifs and metaphors, and there are no doubt some dots I probably failed to connect, but nevertheless this is an assured novel, brilliantly realised, and a major entry into the catalogue of the very best of weird fiction. Highly recommended.

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, this was one weird puppy! I think I’d describe it as the book equivalent of the David Lynch TV series Twin Peaks, that is, on the surface there’s some kind of normal narrative going on, but there’s so much bizarre stuff everywhere, usually without explanation, but it’s compelling and often beautiful and creates an atmosphere where everything is off-kilter and slippery and just out of reach of understanding. It’s the same kind of atmosphere here. This was impressive writing, brilliant in its ability to leave you scratching your head and thinking WTF? I’m still not sure I have any idea just what exactly went on. It has something to do with water—water, water everywhere—and people mysteriously disappearing, for instance walking into a pond and disappearing forever beneath the surface when the pond is nowhere more than knee deep. There’s a group of conspiracy theorists who are attempting to—hmmmm, not sure—chart occurrences? Who believe that, oh, about 1.5 million years ago, there was some kind of subspecies branching off from the human main line? This is all questions and no answers, but it is so skilfully written and weirdly readable. What a trippy ride!

[GONZA · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are some books that just make me angry, because no matter how well written and no matter how hard I try to read them slowly and carefully, they remain elusive. For example this novel, is one of those where, perhaps, I should build up in my mind all the story that is missing or have understood everything from some sibylline sentences, of which I probably did not grasp the concept.
The fact remains that I didn't understand what happened and it makes me crazy.

Ci sono dei libri che mi fanno proprio arrabbiare, perché per quanto scritti bene e per quanto io cerchi di leggerli lentamente ed attentamente, rimangono sfuggenti. Per esempio questo romanzo, é uno di quelli che forse dovrei costruire nella mia mente tutta la storia che manca oppure aver capito tutto da alcune frasi sibilline, di cui probabilmente non ho afferrato il concetto.
Resta il fatto che non ho capito cosa sia successo e la cosa mi fa infuriare.

[Dat-Dangk Vemucci · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very mysterious... Harrison has definitely vanished like one of his characters into a prose of limitless indeterminacy, total liminality - almost to the point of self-parody in places. The story is basically non-existent which might be a dealbreaker for lesser authors. Still, it is a testament to Harrisons endlessly inventive, intuitive style that this book is so readable despite not making a lick of sense. Few other authors can craft a sentence that at first offends with paradox or outright incoherence and then, on re-reading, rings perfectly true, prompts a cold shiver of recognition. Fewer authors still are seriously tackling the modalities of our world in crisis, where the slow breakdown of climate and biosphere increasingly form part of the normal backdrop of our mundane existence, the low hum of a sustained apocalypse while we shop for groceries after work.
Definitely demands more than one reading.