The End of Everything

I bought this book in Glasgow when I was up there for the European Conference on the Fantastic, but I didn’t take it to Eurocon and Finncon with me, so it has taken a while to get round to it. Because I got it in a big Waterstones, it has a sticker on the front saying ‘Signed by the author’. Inside there is a squiggle. It might say ‘M John Harrison’, but it might not. Who can tell? The sticker doesn’t even promise that. It says the book is signed by ‘the author’, not Harrison. Is he The Author, or is that someone else?

The worlds of Harrison’s fiction are like signatures: vague, indistinct, liable to look like something else if you view them from a different angle. Or if you squint. From that point of view, the world of The End of Everything is the quintessential Harrison novel.

We are told that the book is set in England. In Kent, to be precise. More on geography later. But this Kent exists on the far side of an event horizon and we can never be quite sure what we are looking at.

The event in question is the arrival of the iGhetti. They are aliens. They seem to have entered our reality from another dimension rather than landing in flying saucers. No one quite knows what they look like. They have made their home in the Square Mile, the old City of London, the Financial District of a once powerful nation. The government is apparently engaged in a years-long relentless campaign of attacks with bombs and missiles to try to drive them back whence they came, but there is a suspicion that this military action is stuck in a time loop, the same failed attacks failing all over again, predictably. Is time actually looping in London, or does the government never learn from its mistakes?

The iGhetti are not new, by the way. They first appeared in a short story called ‘The Crisis’, which you can find in the collections, You Should Come With Me Now, and Settling the World. You can see Harrison experimenting with the ideas which became a novel in that story. In it he described the iGhetti as follows:

“They seemed like neither a thing nor a picture of a thing: they seemed to be extruded from a space that wasn’t quite in the world.”

What is clear is that Kent is now a focus for a very different sort of refugee crisis. Well-to-do middle class families are selling up everything they own and taking ship for The Continent. Is Europe still there? No one knows. All that we can be certain of is that no one who has left on the ships ever comes back. There is a sense that when someone says, ‘I am sailing tomorrow’, it is actually a euphemism for suicide.

Meanwhile, everyone else keeps calm and carries on.

Phillip Tennent is a beachcomber. In these days that is a potentially valuable occupation, because there are things in the sea. Of course no one knows exactly what they are, or what they can do. All of them are different. But amongst the beachcomber fraternity there is always the hope that one might find something of actual value, and be able to retire on the proceeds.

Phillip lives with his aunt, Marnie, who used to be an artist, and still thinks like one. She talks like one too. I think Harrison is probably satirising the London arts community with Marnie’s speech patterns, but who can tell?

Then, one day, Phillip finds The Artefact. It is quite amorphous when he fishes it out of the sea, but before long it has grown body parts and is learning human speech. He thinks he has struck it rich. Marnie thinks he should throw the thing back, because no good will come of messing with that sort of stuff. Marnie is, of course, correct.

As the lives of Phillip and Marnie unravel, we get to a point where there is a road trip. Harrison writes:

“They are travelling north, towards London, so the land is generally on the right, the sea on the left, but sometimes things are complex.”

They most certainly are. The characters are in Kent. If you drive north along the coast in Kent the sea is to the right. To have the sea to the left, you have to be traveling west. Has Harrison muddled his geography? Is this an unfortunate mistake by an editor? Is the story set in a mirror image of our world in which Kent is somehow in the south-west? Or have the iGhetti messed with the magnetic poles of Earth so that what was once travelling west is now travelling north? Feel free to choose your own explanation.

In reading this book it is inevitable that one will try to understand what Harrison is trying to tell us. What is the message? Harrison might argue that there isn’t one. The book will look different to each reader, after all. And differently to the same reader if you squint hard enough. Nevertheless, one does get the impression that the characters in the book are living in a world in which nothing is quite real any more, that this has been going on for some years now, that it started in the City of London, and that most people have muddled along and tried hard not to notice what was happening.

All of which seems to be true about Britain today.

Harrison has, for a long time, been concerned about what he sees as the damaging effects of fantasy on people’s lives. In The Course of the Heart, Pam Stuvestant makes herself deathly ill through her passion to escape into a fantasy world. Niall Harrison (no relation), in his review of The End of Everything for Locus, suggests that the book is about a world that has become saturated with fantasy, and has overdosed on it. Certainly there is a sense that on social media no one is real, we are all playing characters of some sort or another. Politicians have increasingly decided that the truth is irrelevant, it is how much people like the lies you tell them that is important. And human-made literature and art is being drowned in a tide of machine-generated slop.

In The Course of the Heart Harrison has a comment about amateur landscape painting. He writes:

“One or two of them showed the cottages and the breakwater of a fishing village in some less well- designed world than ours. There was a sunset of suety ochre bands. The boats with their crude triangular sails, you imagined, would shortly go out and fish for something more amorphous, less evolved, than haddock. Someone there would be looking out of a window, writing a letter, ‘We must not judge God by this. It’s just a study that didn’t come off’.”

The End of Everything seems to suggest that we are now living in the world of one of those paintings, but this time the ‘artist’ is an LLM.

The book has made it onto the long list for this year’s Booker Prize. I do hope that it makes the short list. I can’t wait to see what Marnie-like utterances get written about it.

Title: The End of Everything
By: M John Harrison
Publisher: Serpent's Tail
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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