"The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again" by M John Harrison

What brilliant writing. Winner of the Goldsmith's Prize for 'fiction at its most novel' in 2020.

This was a fascinating book. Although it has been characterised as fantasy, because the author has written works of fantasy and scifi before, it is embedded so deeply in gritty reality that I think its genre is more magical realism. 

There is an element of fantasy in it. There are repeated references to water and both the major characters have experiences of strange green creatures associated with the water. This is flagged up in some folklore and urban myths, such as the tale of a seventy-year-old man who believed there were things alive in his toilet bowl: "Everywhere Patrick Reed passed water, green children grew." (Ch 5) with the suggestion that these creatures, like aphids, can photosynthesise.

The watery theme runs through the book. Every chapter has some reference to water, or fish, or something aqueous. Many of the characters have names that link to something aquatic, such as Pearl, or Reed, or Shaw {Shore}. The townsfolk where Victoria lives seem to be fascinated by The Water Babies. Shaw lives in Wharf Terrace and works on a barge. Victoria's favourite cafe turns into an aquarium shop. 

It shares a feeling that the characters a deeply embedded in their locations, much like the novels of John Burnside (for example Glister and The Devil's Footprints). In chapter three, Shaw, one of the two protagonists, tells Victoria, the other one, that he is "making his way dérive by dérive up the Brent river." I had to look up the meaning of 'dérive'. It is a French word, translated as drift, and refers to an unplanned journey through an urban landscape; it was coined in 1956 by an avant garde intellectual and can be used to analyse the 'psychogeography' of a situation. This, I think, is a clue to the book. The characters more or less meander through their urban environments, Shaw in riverside London, Victoria is a Midlands town on the Severn. Neither of them have definite directions, both are drifting. There is some sort of plot underlying it all, I think, but there seemed to me to be a number of loose ends and neither protagonist nor myself really understood what was going on. Nevertheless, I found it compelling reading.

In the sense that the characters wander through a landscape, it is very like Ulysses by James Joyce, or Hunger by Knut Hamsun, or Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and it made me wonder whether all stream-of-consciousness books are essentially dérives. But this novel is not stream of consciousness. It is told in the third person and it feels more like Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, another dérive with elements of fantasy, which in turn has been compared with Kafka.

The style of the prose, and this is definitely one of those books you read for the prose, reminded by of the work of Tony Hanania such as Homesick and Eros Island. It seems characterised by original descriptions and closely observed behaviours. One of the hallmarks is the non-sequitur: "The wind rose a little, bringing smells of fried food and the faint sounds of jackdaws keeping watch from the ruins of Geoffrey de Lacy's keep. To get some idea of its own strength, perhaps, it rustled about in the dry-cleaner's bag on Pearl's arm. She looked down absently and then away again." (Ch 7). That final sentence is unmoored from what went before and what comes after. In chapter 12, Shaw critiques the logic of Tim's beliefs and book: "None of it made any sense to Shaw. When he said so, Time nodded wisely, as if a careful academic point had been made. 'What haunts me is exactly that! In the end, is logic in any sense the right method to be applying here?' ... 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." (Ch 12) I felt that the author was being, to some extent, self-referential, mirroring this sort of prose to give his narrative an eerie sense of unreality whilst using descriptions to boost verisimilitude, creating a sense of contradiction.

Much of the dialogue has the feel of snippets of overheard conversation, squashed together. Of Victoria's emails, it is said: "They were less like emails than the sound of a cheerful but indistinct radio programme coming from an open window a little way down the street." (Ch 12) The dialogue is like that, less for communication than to flesh out the ambience of a situation. 

I loved it!

Selected quotes:

• "The tea had a metallic taste, as if it was dissolving a spoon." (Ch 2)
• "The woods were soft. Sluggish brooks dissected them at random. Beneath sphagnum and hart's tongue and crusts of dead leaves over black mud lay the contorted and paradoxical strata from which, for almost a thousand years, the local profits had been gouged." (Ch 7) This is a book founded on 'contorted and paradoxical strata'. 
• "Early afternoon had fixed the old man and his daughter like figures in a symbolic painting, the one hunched eternally over his meal, the debris of which had spread to the table around the plate; the other behind the counter, with her damp cloth, her still life of cupcakes under glass and her long-distance stare." (Ch 7)
• "His eyes were the oldest, most used-up part of him." (Ch 7)
• "The scaffolding had already come down, across a morning, pole after pole ringing on the bed of the waiting lorry like the parts of an experimental xylophone." (Ch 7)
• "They bustled out of their cars, slammed the doors, greeted each other in unison an octave apart: 'Orright?' The subsequent exchange often took place under the auspices of saying goodbye. Over before it began, it nevertheless seemed difficult to complete. No one was anxious to let anyone go." (Ch 8)
• "He was staring into the display window of an estate agent, one of the crocodile of a dozen or so that slithered its way up the high street from the river." (Ch 13). Why is it that estate agents always hunt in packs?
• "In repose their faces had the raw look of people who have become, too early in life, estate agents or wellness coordinators." (Ch 14)
• "It had started to rain. The quenched air outside the window smelled autumnal - rubbish bins, diesel particulates, something unidentifiable from the river." (Ch 15)
• "The air was dark and rain-stained." (Ch 16)
• "People assume they have a swim bladder ... some basic assumption - less about themselves than about their world - that keeps them, upright and afloat." (Ch 16)

Mesmerisingly well-written. April 2024; 254 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God