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3.31 AVERAGE
3.31 AVERAGE
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Loveable characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I've not read anything by Harrison before, so I was expecting the SF/alternative reality to be a bit more upfront.
Still, I enjoyed the clear detail of the sense of place along the Thames and along the Severn; contrasted with the mysterious and barely glimpsed narrative of other beings.
Still, I enjoyed the clear detail of the sense of place along the Thames and along the Severn; contrasted with the mysterious and barely glimpsed narrative of other beings.
This was a weird one. Did I have any clue as to what was going on? No. Did I, somehow, still enjoy reading it? I think so.
challenging
funny
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
What?
This book is sold as being brilliantly unsettling. Perhaps it is but in my case I found it to be somewhat dull and so it only came off as mildly unsettling at best. It's dullness stems from the fact that it justs jumps from one scene to another with not much to keep you interested. And when an interesting scene does make an appearance, I was left with only the thoughts of "Oh something is finally happening", but the then the scene ends and moves on to the next one before I could even muster up any excitement.
M.John Harrison does everything his own way. He puts his initial in first position (which makes sense when you think about it). He subverts genre codes by ignoring all of them within the same novel. He uses a whole verse as a book title. M. John Harrison loves giving book reviewers a hard time. I hope he has a laugh when he reads them – just picturing them having to type “The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again” ten times must be quite fun.
Reading M. John Harrison has always been a puzzling game to which there are many rules and to which there are none. The clues are innumerable, the line between meaningful and contingent is blurred and the depth of meanings is constantly re-evaluated. Take the title, for instance. The title, also mentioned in the opening quotes, is from Through the Gravel Pit by Charles Kingsley, an author better known for the children’s novel The Water Babies. Of The Water Babies we are given numerous glimpses and in numerous fashions: a copy of the book is seen on someone’s shelf; an aspect of the novel is being discussed; tiny, ghost-like creatures are hallucinated for us by the characters. We are surrounded by it in ungraspable (2) fashion.
Behind its pure, elegant style, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is, more than any other of Harrison’s novels, secret, introverted, reluctant to open to the reader. What happens happens away from the surface, away from the words we read. We need to use all its clues to break through the raw facts. First, we need to find them. And when we find the clues, the novel still doesn’t reveal itself like Kundera’s would. Harrison is not Kundera. Kundera is serious, Harrison is playful. Kundera is a first degree musician, Harrison is a satirist. He mocks. The first degree is unknown to him. He was born in the second degree. This short post offers no explanation to the book. It only suggests some reading angles, which came to me as I was groping my way through it.
The first angle I found on the author’s blog. On September 6th, 2019, Harrison posts a short note that says: “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 that their class is complicit in it. Reader, you might well recognise this situation!” The post, of course, refers to Brexit, to the securitarian (1) and nationalistic undercurrent that drove the vote. The social class of our two lovers is the lower-middle class, a class excluded from what is happening, a class which endures without understanding, a class lost in its absurd existence, whose craving for meaning makes it the perfect prey to conspiracy theories.
But at the very moment when he hands us this clue, Harrison undermines it. The same blog entry states that a writer should never reveal his purpose. “Just distill a little story out of it”, is the advice he received from an avant-garde novelist. From there on, we suspect that Harrison, with his dilection for satire and genre subversion, built The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again as something else, something more, than a Romeo and Juliet for Brexit times.
The second angle I already mentioned. It lies in the repeated allusions to The Water Babies. We have to pay attention to the themes exposed in Kingsley’s novel: social classes of course (also a favorite of Harrison’s), how Britain treats its poor (a common theme to both books), how humans redeem and reinvent themselves through repentance and death. A product of the Victorian era, it is also crammed with racist and antisemitic references. It really is in the satiric manner of Harrison to use a controversial cultural monument to put our own times into perspective, with their drift towards either stinking right-wing xenophobia or unconcerned left-wing antisemitism. Last but not least Kingsley was a fervent admirer of Charles Darwin and an advocate of The Origin Of Species. The evolutionary theme is unclear in The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, but the presence of a second sapient species is at its core.
But, beside these, The Water Babies ends with a wonderful warning: this novel is only a fairy tale, do not believe anything you will read in it even when it is true. The warning is reversible. Believe everything in it especially if untrue for such is the power of mimesis, to create a picture of reality yet to come. Once again, we are on shifting sands.
The third angle is Harrison’s general disregard for escapism literature (3). The way he subverts science-fiction leaves the readers of the genre nonplussed. I managed to exchange a few words with Leigh Blackmore, who published studies of Harrison’s earlier work. The older Harrison gets, Blackmore writes, the fainter the links between his works and genre codes. “The fantastic element is so subtle as to be almost subliminal”. In The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again, the fantastic subplot is so tenuous as to be entirely hidden to the main characters: new creatures (or is it a new form of humanity?) appear along and in British rivers, but they are seen only from afar, glanced at in passing, blocked from full view by an unfortunate obstacle. The reader can only suspect that Tim and his sister are from another world, another species. These “Water Babies” leave transient traces, tiny murky ghosts washed away by the stream. When, at some point, an adult specimen is unearthed from a garden pond in the suburb of a small town near the Welsh border, we cannot even see it, we are blinded by the back of the workers who came here to dig it up and steal it away. Harrison tells without showing, places at the core of his novel something that we cannot see. His characters live in a universe which borders on fantastic and science-fiction and they don’t realize it. Only the careful reader suspects that their universe might not be ours. However, he can never gain certainty of it: who is to say that these fleeting creatures are not refugees from our world, our wars, our misery?
That is the very experience Harrison gives to his readers: we are never certain of what we read, never certain that we have, at last, entered the core of the plot, never certain of what a particular scene is about, never certain of what is going on – but we cannot help building meaning and explanations for it. The dreamlike, hallucinatory aspect of The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again has developed tentacularily (2) since such works as Nova Swing, to the point of pervading the whole novel. Whereas Nova Swing characters lived in and out of the Kefahuchi Tract abnormality, the characters in The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again (4) live in it, were born in it, have never known anything but it. Most puzzling is the fact that their world is our world, their time is our time, their social class and frame of reference is our frame of reference. In theory, we are not in the SF genre, nor in the fantastic genre. We are at their fringe, which happens to look very much like our everyday lives.
Near my parents house, in Northern France, there is a wood. It is not a very big wood. I used to play in it when I was a kid. I know it like the back of my hand, I cannot possibly get lost in it. On one occasion I happened to cross it, in the night, in the fog. This is the strangest of feelings. I knew there was nothing there but familiar trees, I knew nothing could possibly happen. As well as I knew that, behind the thin veil of fog through which the moonlight bounced, an ocean of unknown life forms were lurking, that it would take but a second for any of them to spread their arms and tear the veil, from which all hell would break lose. And that is how it is, to read M.John Harrison’s fiction: you don’t know if you are bored or terrified; you are together a grown man walking home in a familiar landscape, and a child treading on the thinnest of ice above dark horrors.
(1) I am very please to introduce this neologism from the French, which is crying to make its way into the English dictionary.
(2) These two slightly less so…
(3) “I think it’s undignified to read for the purposesof escape. After you grow up, you should start reading forother purposes. You should have a more complicatedrelationship with fiction than simple entrancement. If youread for escape you will never try to change your life, oranyone else’s” – M. John Harrison, interview with Cheryl Morgan, in Leigh Blackmore: “Undoing the Mechanisms: Genre Expectation, Subversion and Anti-Consolation in the Kefahuchi Tract Novels of M. John Harrison” (2008, now available on academia.edu)
(4) Well well well… Looks like I managed to type The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again only nine times (5)! Suck it, M. John Harrison!
(5) Yes, OK, I know…
Reading M. John Harrison has always been a puzzling game to which there are many rules and to which there are none. The clues are innumerable, the line between meaningful and contingent is blurred and the depth of meanings is constantly re-evaluated. Take the title, for instance. The title, also mentioned in the opening quotes, is from Through the Gravel Pit by Charles Kingsley, an author better known for the children’s novel The Water Babies. Of The Water Babies we are given numerous glimpses and in numerous fashions: a copy of the book is seen on someone’s shelf; an aspect of the novel is being discussed; tiny, ghost-like creatures are hallucinated for us by the characters. We are surrounded by it in ungraspable (2) fashion.
Behind its pure, elegant style, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is, more than any other of Harrison’s novels, secret, introverted, reluctant to open to the reader. What happens happens away from the surface, away from the words we read. We need to use all its clues to break through the raw facts. First, we need to find them. And when we find the clues, the novel still doesn’t reveal itself like Kundera’s would. Harrison is not Kundera. Kundera is serious, Harrison is playful. Kundera is a first degree musician, Harrison is a satirist. He mocks. The first degree is unknown to him. He was born in the second degree. This short post offers no explanation to the book. It only suggests some reading angles, which came to me as I was groping my way through it.
The first angle I found on the author’s blog. On September 6th, 2019, Harrison posts a short note that says: “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 that their class is complicit in it. Reader, you might well recognise this situation!” The post, of course, refers to Brexit, to the securitarian (1) and nationalistic undercurrent that drove the vote. The social class of our two lovers is the lower-middle class, a class excluded from what is happening, a class which endures without understanding, a class lost in its absurd existence, whose craving for meaning makes it the perfect prey to conspiracy theories.
But at the very moment when he hands us this clue, Harrison undermines it. The same blog entry states that a writer should never reveal his purpose. “Just distill a little story out of it”, is the advice he received from an avant-garde novelist. From there on, we suspect that Harrison, with his dilection for satire and genre subversion, built The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again as something else, something more, than a Romeo and Juliet for Brexit times.
The second angle I already mentioned. It lies in the repeated allusions to The Water Babies. We have to pay attention to the themes exposed in Kingsley’s novel: social classes of course (also a favorite of Harrison’s), how Britain treats its poor (a common theme to both books), how humans redeem and reinvent themselves through repentance and death. A product of the Victorian era, it is also crammed with racist and antisemitic references. It really is in the satiric manner of Harrison to use a controversial cultural monument to put our own times into perspective, with their drift towards either stinking right-wing xenophobia or unconcerned left-wing antisemitism. Last but not least Kingsley was a fervent admirer of Charles Darwin and an advocate of The Origin Of Species. The evolutionary theme is unclear in The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, but the presence of a second sapient species is at its core.
But, beside these, The Water Babies ends with a wonderful warning: this novel is only a fairy tale, do not believe anything you will read in it even when it is true. The warning is reversible. Believe everything in it especially if untrue for such is the power of mimesis, to create a picture of reality yet to come. Once again, we are on shifting sands.
The third angle is Harrison’s general disregard for escapism literature (3). The way he subverts science-fiction leaves the readers of the genre nonplussed. I managed to exchange a few words with Leigh Blackmore, who published studies of Harrison’s earlier work. The older Harrison gets, Blackmore writes, the fainter the links between his works and genre codes. “The fantastic element is so subtle as to be almost subliminal”. In The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again, the fantastic subplot is so tenuous as to be entirely hidden to the main characters: new creatures (or is it a new form of humanity?) appear along and in British rivers, but they are seen only from afar, glanced at in passing, blocked from full view by an unfortunate obstacle. The reader can only suspect that Tim and his sister are from another world, another species. These “Water Babies” leave transient traces, tiny murky ghosts washed away by the stream. When, at some point, an adult specimen is unearthed from a garden pond in the suburb of a small town near the Welsh border, we cannot even see it, we are blinded by the back of the workers who came here to dig it up and steal it away. Harrison tells without showing, places at the core of his novel something that we cannot see. His characters live in a universe which borders on fantastic and science-fiction and they don’t realize it. Only the careful reader suspects that their universe might not be ours. However, he can never gain certainty of it: who is to say that these fleeting creatures are not refugees from our world, our wars, our misery?
That is the very experience Harrison gives to his readers: we are never certain of what we read, never certain that we have, at last, entered the core of the plot, never certain of what a particular scene is about, never certain of what is going on – but we cannot help building meaning and explanations for it. The dreamlike, hallucinatory aspect of The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again has developed tentacularily (2) since such works as Nova Swing, to the point of pervading the whole novel. Whereas Nova Swing characters lived in and out of the Kefahuchi Tract abnormality, the characters in The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again (4) live in it, were born in it, have never known anything but it. Most puzzling is the fact that their world is our world, their time is our time, their social class and frame of reference is our frame of reference. In theory, we are not in the SF genre, nor in the fantastic genre. We are at their fringe, which happens to look very much like our everyday lives.
Near my parents house, in Northern France, there is a wood. It is not a very big wood. I used to play in it when I was a kid. I know it like the back of my hand, I cannot possibly get lost in it. On one occasion I happened to cross it, in the night, in the fog. This is the strangest of feelings. I knew there was nothing there but familiar trees, I knew nothing could possibly happen. As well as I knew that, behind the thin veil of fog through which the moonlight bounced, an ocean of unknown life forms were lurking, that it would take but a second for any of them to spread their arms and tear the veil, from which all hell would break lose. And that is how it is, to read M.John Harrison’s fiction: you don’t know if you are bored or terrified; you are together a grown man walking home in a familiar landscape, and a child treading on the thinnest of ice above dark horrors.
(1) I am very please to introduce this neologism from the French, which is crying to make its way into the English dictionary.
(2) These two slightly less so…
(3) “I think it’s undignified to read for the purposesof escape. After you grow up, you should start reading forother purposes. You should have a more complicatedrelationship with fiction than simple entrancement. If youread for escape you will never try to change your life, oranyone else’s” – M. John Harrison, interview with Cheryl Morgan, in Leigh Blackmore: “Undoing the Mechanisms: Genre Expectation, Subversion and Anti-Consolation in the Kefahuchi Tract Novels of M. John Harrison” (2008, now available on academia.edu)
(4) Well well well… Looks like I managed to type The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again only nine times (5)! Suck it, M. John Harrison!
(5) Yes, OK, I know…
I'm a little unsure on this. It is slow and meandering and quite early on splits into two, only tangentially related plots/characters. It slips in and out of fantasy of a sort yet is grounded in sharply realistic milieus and characters. Perhaps one should call it a misty book, and certainly as fluid and watery as its themes.
Clever, terrifying and surprisingly moving. An uncanny realness.
Took a swing on this one... it didn't really connect with me. Some really well-composed passages but not much to sink into plotwise. Wish I liked it more - just didn't get much of anything from it.
a very disconcerting and watery book that sets out place very well and made me feel properly horrible. just wish it had a bit more of a plot.
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No