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A review by thecommonswings
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison
5.0
It’s rare that you read quote after hyperbolic quote about a book and end up not only thinking they’re all pretty much accurate, but also exist because they’re evidence of readers trying to articulate what they’ve just read. But that’s the case with this astonishing novel. It’s almost impossible to express what’s it like and this is almost certainly intentional, because it needs to be experienced rather than described. It’s one of those rare pieces of art that can only be in the form it’s presented to you in. It can only be a novel and thank god it’s this novel by this writer
It toys with post Brexit malaise, conspiracy thriller (of a sort), cosmic horror, psychogeography, post modernism, fantasy, horror, realism… but it does so while deftly dodging being subsumed by any of those genres. It’s quite careful to provide you with about 80% of an explanation - of a sort - to the central mysteries, with lots of clever call backs and allusions, but these really act as a way of hiding the join in the narrative Moebius strip. It, to use the watery imagery the book is literally seeped in, glides and turns like eddies in the water, and the closer you get to the strands culminating in some way, the further it actually pushes the disorientation. You’re lost in the narrative
It’s so carefully written and beautifully put together. It’s very accessible but also wildly keen to keep you from reading it in any definitive way. It’s a book that wants to keep you at a distance from any meaning for as long as it possibly can. It’s also one of the best books I have ever read for creating a sort of feeling of true nightmarishness. Two sequences - again echoing each other somewhat - in a boarding house and across a graveyard are almost unspeakably menacing for the way it never fully articulates what you’re seeing and lets you fill in the truly disturbing details yourself. It’s an astonishing book, it truly is
It toys with post Brexit malaise, conspiracy thriller (of a sort), cosmic horror, psychogeography, post modernism, fantasy, horror, realism… but it does so while deftly dodging being subsumed by any of those genres. It’s quite careful to provide you with about 80% of an explanation - of a sort - to the central mysteries, with lots of clever call backs and allusions, but these really act as a way of hiding the join in the narrative Moebius strip. It, to use the watery imagery the book is literally seeped in, glides and turns like eddies in the water, and the closer you get to the strands culminating in some way, the further it actually pushes the disorientation. You’re lost in the narrative
It’s so carefully written and beautifully put together. It’s very accessible but also wildly keen to keep you from reading it in any definitive way. It’s a book that wants to keep you at a distance from any meaning for as long as it possibly can. It’s also one of the best books I have ever read for creating a sort of feeling of true nightmarishness. Two sequences - again echoing each other somewhat - in a boarding house and across a graveyard are almost unspeakably menacing for the way it never fully articulates what you’re seeing and lets you fill in the truly disturbing details yourself. It’s an astonishing book, it truly is