Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.31 AVERAGE
3.31 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
mysterious
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
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 [b:The Water Babies|42573|The Water Babies|Charles Kingsley|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1400956374l/42573._SY75_.jpg|2918668], 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?’
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 [b:The Water Babies|42573|The Water Babies|Charles Kingsley|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1400956374l/42573._SY75_.jpg|2918668], 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?’
dark
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
dark
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
N/A
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Not quite sure what I've just read so won't give it a rating. At least half of it went straight above my head so I feairly slogged through this but realize it might not be the book's fault. Ennui horror just doesn't do it for me...
this book is so description heavy like bro y u creating an image in my mind. i can barely retain one sentence of imagery pls this is y i hate world building ion care gimme intrusive thots
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Not for everyone, but I thought it was magnificent.
Usually, when a book is not for everyone, that implies that it is shocking, that it throws something at the reader which they might not want to catch. This book is the opposite; it is polarising because it does very little, just sits there rather dully, and if you are to extract some enjoyment from it you will be the one putting in most of the work.
It’s a story about British people living in the UK, doing lots of noticeably British things: subsisting solely off beans on toast, cereal, and tea; getting into the local psychogeography (as the inner voice of one protagonist hilariously claims with seeming sincerity); wanting to get to know people without ever trying to or wanting to be known yourself. Ordinary mundanity abounds to such an extent that Harrison need only inject a homeopathic dose of the supernatural to make the story gripping (although the sense is maybe more of a desperate clinging on or clutching). And there’s something disconcerting about the very believable lack of interest the protagonists show in whatever these strange goings-on really are. Further, the protagonists as well as side characters come across as so odd (and yet, again, believably so) that their inner and outer lives are a match for any intrusion of the strange; the result, to me, is a reverse of the clichéd hallmark of magical realism in which reality balloons into fantasy, since here, fantasy is deflated in the direction of reality.
All of this is wrapped up in Harrison’s brilliant prose. He’s not going to smother you with adjectives or swaddle you in metaphor (although he can, and he might); instead, his writing, especially his dialogue, stands out for its subtlety. (Probably) meaningless conversations are overheard, while many of the conversations involving a protagonist (seemingly) lead nowhere. The effect of this is oneiric and therefore startlingly real. Landscape and urban descriptions are a delight too.
I was relieved that the ending was so perfect. Harrison dilutes and so concentrates the Weird in order to deconstruct the genre, and I’ll be hard pressed to find a better tale of the strange.
Edit: A description from Harrison's blog of this book (at least, I think it's about this book):
Edit: A description from Harrison's blog of this book (at least, I think it's about this book):
Genre: though the book would not be generically frameable, it might be described as a scumble of sci fi, the Weird and literary fiction. But though it would make reference to those genres, the book would not be influenced by or derived from them. It would be referential, or allusive. You would be able to think of that aspect of the book as commentary. It would be a book describable as meta, or having a terraced awareness of itself, or having its tongue in its cheek. It would be describable as invading, at will & when it felt like it, the territories of other genres or modes or registers. But it would not in any way belong to those genres, modes or registers.
The book would make equally teasing, equally conscious reference to psychogeography, landscape writing, heritage writing and hauntology, though none of those genres would be central to it either. If you were a reader who took everything at face value–or who made a bad faith pretence of taking everything at face value–and who preferred to confine each reading-act inside the frame of a single genre, you would probably do better to read something else.
The book would not be folk-horror.