THE SUNKEN LAND BEGINS TO RISE AGAIN

The Way We Live Now

M John Harrison’s deeply unsettling new novel.

RELEASED 25 JUNE 272 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author M John Harrison Publisher Gollancz

There are lives that play out in the margins of other people’s lives. These are dangling lives where things are left uncompleted, lives that pass largely unobserved because nobody much cares to focus on them, unremarkable lives of underachievement and outright failure. Those existing in such a way are the kind of alienated souls that M John Harrison examines in forensic detail in The Sunken Land…, his first new novel since he completed the Kefahuchi Tract sequence with Empty Space in 2012. At its heart lie two people negotiating a London that has ceased to be a home to them.

First, Harrison introduces us to Shaw, a man who’s had a breakdown but is tentatively trying to rebuild. He has a room of his own, at least while he pays his rent, a curious gig-economy job of sorts and even an on-off relationship with Victoria, a doctor’s daughter.

Turning to Victoria, whose life we also follow as the novel shifts perspective, she’s not so sure she wants to inhabit the capital any more. Much of the book follows her odyssey in the Midlands, to which she decamps to renovate her dead mother’s house. Here, she encounters a collection of strange characters, notably waitress Pearl, who behave in increasingly strange ways.

What’s really going on? Don’t expect any direct answers from Harrison. Instead, he offers recurring references to Charles Kingsley’s moralistic Victorian-era fairy tale The Water-Babies – the story of a young chimney sweep who falls into a river – an atmosphere pitched between dread and ennui, and the sense that significant events are taking place just out of sight – and that if Shaw and Victoria understood these events better, they’d understand why their own lives had become tinged with eldritch, haunted by half-seen ghosts and punctuated by the inexplicable.

This sense of obliqueness is intended. This is a novel about a lack of connection. Shaw and Victoria need each other, but can’t communicate with each other. Even when others speak hard truths to them – Shaw’s mother, in a home because of age and dementia, more than once advises her son to get on with life and stop being a “c**t” – neither wants to listen. Each has turned inward, which in turn means that neither can understand what’s happening in the wider world or how others see things – a metaphor for the way so many missed the possibility that Britons would vote for Brexit.

Harrison is in the bleakest of territory here, not passing direct comment on the failings of late-stage capitalism but nevertheless mapping its effects. “We’re all ashamed now,” Victoria tells Shaw in a scene where the two come closest to forging a true link. “But any gig is a gig.”

All of this is observed in the acutest detail as Harrison, never a showy writer, pares back sentences yet keeps the narrative moving forward – almost in the manner of the kind of airport thriller where the details help to build glamour and excitement. Here, though, the details have a kitchen-sink griminess, and resolution remains forever out of reach. A deeply unsettling fever dream of a novel.

Don’t expect direct answers from Harrison