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A review by arirang
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison
4.0
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/2152087684
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:
in the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/jul/20/m-john-harrison-life-in-writing)
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:
And in the story Imaginary Review from the collection, he neatly skewered the type of novel that can instead appeal to Booker judges:
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 author's own description (https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2019/09/06/15897/) 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:
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:
Recommended - and one that would make a good Goldsmith's contender
Other reviews:
https://fantasy-hive.co.uk/2020/07/the-sunken-land-begins-to-rise-again-by-m-john-harrison-book-review/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/19/the-sunken-land-begins-to-rise-again-by-m-john-harrison-review-brilliantly-unsettling
https://www.heraldscotland.com/arts_ents/18549227.books-m-john-harrison-strange-unsettling-best/
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/2152087684
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/2012/jul/20/m-john-harrison-life-in-writing)
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 author's own description (https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2019/09/06/15897/) 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/the-sunken-land-begins-to-rise-again-by-m-john-harrison-book-review/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/19/the-sunken-land-begins-to-rise-again-by-m-john-harrison-review-brilliantly-unsettling
https://www.heraldscotland.com/arts_ents/18549227.books-m-john-harrison-strange-unsettling-best/