For more than half a century, M. John Harrison has been writing about decay and dispossession in a style that is at once restless and exacting. Often an audacious weaver of science fictions, he has also operated in a ruggedly realistic vein – though the distinction would probably strike him as bogus, a marketing position rather than useful framing.
The End of Everything occupies typical Harrison terrain, with notes of J.G. Ballard and David Lynch as well as more than a hint of Stanley Spencer’s paintings (think compost heaps and clutter). It picks up the thread of ‘The Crisis’, a short story in his 2017 collection You Should Come With Me Now, in which he imagined London’s Square Mile being taken over by iGhetti – which sounded as if they might be one of Apple’s less successful products but were in fact aliens, physically similar to stalks of rhubarb and able to ravage their surroundings.
Now these creatures have extended their influence across the country. Cities are almost empty; militias roam the hinterland, bored and richly equipped. Ash falls like snow. Floods alternate with droughts. Roadblocks proliferate. Air travel has become impossible and the middle classes, having sold off their houses at knock-down prices and flogged their SUVs, line the docks in ‘smart casual’ attire waiting to flee.
Harrison’s characters tend to be drifters and weary anarchists. Here the main ones are Phillip, a beachcomber, and his aunt Marnie, an artist who lives in the shadow of a crashed plane (and appeared in an earlier Harrison novel, 2012’s Empty Space, picturing the future as ‘a dreamy thing with pre-loaded contents’). They’re based near what is described as ‘one of the well-known seasonal waterside art towns of Kent’ – perhaps Whitstable or Margate.
‘Artefacts’ wash up on the shore every day. Phillip finds one that intrigues him: a precociously articulate monstrosity that whispers, squeals and won’t sleep. Its appearance is unstable: a ‘puddingy lump’ for a while, it is later more akin to a Henry Moore sculpture. All the time it’s developing new and often repellent human habits, such as eating cold mackerel stirred into porridge.
Phillip ferries the artefact around in his car, apparently unsure whether to sell it, nurture it, toss it back into the sea or let it make its own way there. In common with most of his peers, he has recurring ‘bad patches’, episodes when the fabric of existence deforms. These may be glitches in his thought process or glimpses of an alternative reality. Either way, they’re unsettling.
Marnie’s problems are mostly of a more practical nature: her teeth ache, her books have been warped by damp and when she goes for a snooze on her balcony a feral child pees on her. But she shares the sense that the contours of daily life have become hard to keep a grip on, as ‘events which had previously flowed in a dependable stream became sketchy and indeterminate’.
Besides being a bracing vision of environmental collapse and epistemological breakdown, The End of Everything could be interpreted as a post-Brexit cri de coeur. The words ‘How can you misplace a continent’, pointedly without a question mark, tumble through Marnie’s mind. Harrison has for years been depicting social and political fracture and Britain’s increasing incoherence, but here he feels uncharacteristically like a satirist, tilting at faux-bohemian pubs and the cult of the superficially virtuous yet frankly near-useless cotton tote bag. One of the novel’s pet subjects is the gentrification of coastal towns. Nothing works, and the kids are definitely not all right – but the sunsets and croissants are superb.
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