TeaThree years ago, in a greasy spoon on the edge of downtown London, M. John Harrison – Mike to his friends – told me about a novel he was working on. Rather than describing its plot or characters, he talked purely about the challenge that the book presented to him as a writer. He said, through this he wanted to take things forward as far as possible.
Now that book, The End of Everything – his 13th novel – is about to be published. It describes a disintegrated Britain in which the Igeti – monstrously sized, extremely powerful and strange lifeforms that look like powdered, slow-motion explosions – rule the country and possibly the world. Or do they? In its unwillingness to tell its characters more than they know, which isn’t very much, the novel is more alien evasion than invasion.
No one knows where iGetty came from. Perhaps the astral plane, or “off the internet”. Their purpose is equally unclear. The remaining authorities treat them with hostility, sending ineffective waves of bombers and attack helicopters, but may also engage in “spiritual tourism and gentrification” similar to income-seeking colonization. “If we met a real alien, where they lived, we wouldn’t have a clue what they thought, or why they did something, or whether they thought they were doing something,” says Harrison, sitting on the sunny terrace of a riverside pub in Barnes, south-west London. Science fiction often flaunts that idea, he says, but “never delivers that feeling to the reader”.
Harrison is a slim, wiry man of 80, with a full beard and long hair that is bright white. His skin tone is walnut – unusual for writers – of someone who has spent most of his life outdoors. His facial expressions appear stern in photographs but in person he is often laughing, and the eagerness with which he talks about meeting the demands of the new book underlines how much he is enjoying himself.
This was not always the case. In 1998, a year after Harrison published the bleak toxic waste-themed dystopia Signs of Life, Iain Banks took him out for a night of drinking in Soho with the aim of convincing him to return to the pure sci-fi realms where his career had begun. Harrison admits, “I always remember what Ian said to me, which was that I don’t have enough fun on the page. That was hurtful.” The next day, he began writing notes for Light, the first volume of his Kefahuchi Tracts trilogy. Not a space opera as suggested by Banks, but a parody of it, as there is nothing straightforward with Harrison. “Nothing,” he agreed happily.
Harrison was born in Rugby, Warwickshire in 1945. He had a difficult relationship with his father, an engineer, who died when Harrison was 13. He took a lot of leave from school, spending part of each day in the local library. “The best thing about libraries then was that there weren’t so many dust jackets,” he told me. “I’d pick up a book, read the first two pages, think, ‘Oh wow, this is weird’, and it would be Robbe-Grillet, and it would open a door to the anti-novel. Or it would be Ballard, or some other sci-fi book. You never knew what you were going to get.”
When Harrison began writing as a teenager in the 1950s, the genres of fantasy and sci-fi were supported by several monthly magazines. In 1966, one of them accepted one of his stories. He moved to London and began writing obsessively throughout the night. He met Michael Moorcock, then editor of New Worlds magazine, and became a regular contributor. He says, “I had to be in New Worlds, because that was Ballard’s main medium for short stories at the time. It was the peak of my interest in them as a combination of a surrealist and a fantasist. Especially in the short story form. And that’s what I wanted to be. I really wanted to be that.”
On his blog, Harrison describes The End of Everything as the kind of book that would have been serialized in New Worlds around 1967. I’m not sure he would have accepted it. “I think it might have been too much even for them,” he agrees. “I wanted it to have the flavor of the novel I would have produced if I had had any technique, skill or talent, a book that looks like science-fiction on the surface but then, as you read it, grows more profound. That’s what I wanted. My heroes could do that. And now, 60 years later, I can do that, too.”
He laughs when he says it, but it took a long time for Harrison to get to a place where he’s happy with both his work and its reception. The 1970s saw him in tension against the genre conventions of science-fiction and fantasy, which he tried to undermine in The Centauri Device (a book he now dislikes) and his Viriconium sequence. A breakthrough came when he resolved to write a short story without allowing himself to plan in advance or keep notes. The New Rays “is about Katherine Mansfield. And it is for Katherine Mansfield.” He admired what he and Virginia Woolf had done with fragmented narrative in the 1910s and 20s (Eliot’s The Waste Land was also formative) but he did not know how to approach this way of working. “The only techniques I had were the exact opposite of what I needed. They were the techniques of genre fiction: creating a narrative, making a summary, following the summary, explaining the reasons, following the reasons. And none of that would work.”
By the time The New Rays was published in 1982, Harrison had left London and moved to “the wilds outside Huddersfield” to pursue a passionate interest in rock climbing. The next two decades, which saw the publication of the novels Climbers (1989), The Course of the Heart (1992) and Signs of Life (1997), were the most intensely creative of his life. “I let it wash over me,” he writes now. “And as a result, I produced several short stories and three novels that had real depth and density of observation, and a deep, dense sense of place.”
That’s an understatement when it comes to The Climbers, which is not only one of Harrison’s masterpieces but one of the best English novels of the last 50 years. The book follows a group of mountaineering enthusiasts, men and women, around the Peak District who, like many of Harrison’s protagonists, are not connected with the wider world. Despite the strong enthusiasm of Robert MacFarlane and Olivia Lang, among others, it is still criminally vague.
As we passed from pub to pub, walking down quiet Barnes streets, Harrison recalls the moment when the book became possible. While walking through a mine outside Sheffield at sunset one day, “I noticed the way the sun was relative to the jagged top of the mine; from my perspective, the shadows looked like the turned pages of a book. I stopped and wrote that down in one of my notebooks. I suddenly thought, I can do this. I’m the person to do that. It was really strange. The thing that had prevented me from writing fiction about my experience, or even Even non-fiction, it was that I didn’t really think I was the person to do that. I didn’t think I had the authority and then I wrote that sentence, looked at it and thought, ‘Yeah, I can do that.’ It was amazing,” he says, sounding as surprised today as he was in that shadowy Yorkshire mine decades ago. “You’re looking for that your whole life.”
Harrison, “absolutely determined to stop apologizing for not being a SF writer”, now began to produce work in which he was completely confident. But he had – and still has – an uneasy relationship with his creativity. “It was like discovering a different voice inside you,” he explains. “And it was better than me. I’m going to tell you this,” he says, lowering his voice, as if this other presence can hear us. “He knows more than me, he’s more mature than me, he’s a better writer than me, and he has a lot of contempt for me. But every once in a while he’ll see something and think, yes, this is OK, and he’ll step in and take over and create something like Climbers.”
Sometimes, Harrison says, he feels like an impostor. “There are two of us and one of us knows that’s the real me, and it’s not me.” Then, thankfully, he laughs, giving off the eerie feeling of slipping into one of his own novels, where terrible things unfold in the most pedestrian of surroundings: a pizza express, a drab provincial courtroom, or a pub in Barnes after the lunch-time rush.
After feeling that he was too old to continue climbing (and perhaps because some people in that community were “offended by the frankness of the picture”) and moving back to London, in 2012 Harrison found himself suddenly filled with anger at a publishing party in Covent Garden. “I went out,” he says, “and the rain was pouring down and I went back to 1968: same road, same rain, same feeling of failure, same feeling of not being able to keep up with the industry.” He remembers thinking: “I’ve wasted 30 years of my life in London and I can’t go any further. I’ve learned all this stuff and I can do all this stuff and it’s still not recognised.” The solution, he thought, was “to be even more uncompromising in the provinces”.
He moved to Shropshire with his partner, editor and writer Cath Phillips, and began writing The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again. That book won the Goldsmiths Prize in 2020. Frances Wilson, chair of the judges (of whom I was one), called it “a literary masterpiece”. Harrison remembers the ceremony, which was an online event due to COVID restrictions. “I felt very relieved. I had a drink or two and fell asleep. I rested for the first time in almost 40 years. I thought: ‘I’ve won a fair prize. I can sleep now.'”
The quality of work of most writers published in the 70s and 80s declines. With Sunken Land and The End of Everything and his “anti-memoir” Wish I Was Here, Harrison has produced some of his finest work. One reason climbing is such an ideal subject is that it is driven by problems, and climbers see rock faces as sequences of problems.
The problem presented by The End of Everything, which he talked about in That Smooth Spoon in 2023, was how to leave so much out while exploring how “humans are working with broken epistemologies to try to understand the world we’ve created and the puzzles of reality,” he explains, “as, say, quantum mechanics, are no longer real mysteries. The real mystery is that we have What did we do with it, why did we do it, and what epistemology did we use to commit this act of barbarity.
Conveying confusion without sacrificing readability is Harrison’s recurring problem, one he has faced “for 30 or 40 years. You have to be very careful with explanations,” he says, sounding almost sad. “If you help the reader too much, you lose that ambiguity. You have to commit.” The end of everything is the result of that commitment, which is thrilling to experience because, not in spite of, it is the resistance to revelation.
The book is astonishing in its inventiveness – not only in Harrison’s creation of a post-invasion world of half-abandoned seaside towns, crashed planes and rebuilt polytunnels, but also in the level of detail of moments to which you want to return, sometimes to understand, sometimes simply to re-experience their strange power: “neat arcs of brand new stars” revealed after the arrival of the iGetty; The “rich wave of objects” – foreign debris – his characters discover from the sea. It’s also a continuation of a late-night Soho conversation from nearly 30 years ago. “I thought: OK, here you go, Ian,” says Harrison. “I’m having fun but I will also make a commitment. This will be what will be written without any compromise.”
And if the title sounds ominously final, we shouldn’t pay attention. “I have two or three short stories,” he says cheerfully, “very esoteric ones.” Then onto the next problem? He laughs. “Yeah, what’s the next problem? What impossible thing can I try now?”
