"The Course of the heart" by M John Harrison

 We can be fairly certain that Yaxley persuaded three Cambridge students - Pam Stuyvesant, Lucas Medlar and the unnamed first person narrator - to do something, perhaps a ceremonal magic rite - which someone opened a portal between this world and another; and that Pam and Lucas have been haunted by the consequences ever since. But this novel is a masterpiece of obliqueness so we can be sure of nothing. What are we to make of the moment when Lucas calls the narrator "a mere priest" when we have been repeatedly told (by the narrator himself) that he is a publisher.

Playing around with what the reader knows, and what they can only guess, with the epistemology of certainty, is a Harrison trademark, also to the fore in his Booker shortlisted The End of Everything and his Goldsmith's Prize winning The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again.

As a writer who is sometimes criticised for explaining too much (the heritage of having been a teacher, a profession in which clarity is important, especially when teaching science), I feel I have a lot to learn from Harrison. On the other hand, some critics say that the primary sin is to confuse the reader and I was frequently confused by this book (though not as much as by TEoE). I guess the secret is to achieve the perfect balance which will maximally arouse the reader's curiosity. Certainly, I was eager to learn whatever I could from this novel, though in the end, I still had many questions.

Nevertheless, there is a great deal of magic to be found in this book, starting with some spell-bindingly original descriptions:

• “I was drenched in the rough, dusty, aromatic smells of dock-leaves and marigolds.” (Prologue: Pleroma)
• “I could close my eyes and visualize precisely the curves at the base of her spine where it seemed to hold its breath before it arched out into the smooth, heavy muscles of her behind.” ” (Prologue: Pleroma) The narrator seems to have a thing about transitions of the flesh, about another woman he writes: “I touched the place where the nape of her neck made its soft but powerful transition into the muscles of her freckled upper back.” (2.6: the Facsimile)
• “It was an old cat ... and when I picked it up it was just lots of bones and heat that weighed nothing.” (1.1: Misprision of Dreams)
• “Sheets of newspaper fluttering around the upper floors of an office block like butterflies courting a flower.” (1.1: Misprision of Dreams)
• “From one window you could see the sodden facade of Museum Street, bright green deposits on the ledges, stucco scrolls and garlands grey with pigeon down.” (1.1: Misprision of Dreams)
• “Every conversation, every echo of a voice or a footstep or a rustle of clothes, was gathered up into its high ceilings in a kind of undifferentiated rumble and sigh - the blurred and melted remains of meaning - which made you feel as if your parents had abandoned you in a derelict swimming bath.” (1.2: N’Aimez Que Moi)
• “My head felt like an empty cinema.” (3.13: Fatalité Intérieure)
• “The surf of interference.” (3.14: Burnt Rose)
• “Carnforth is less a town than a kind of late efflorescence of the old A6 as it hinges away from Morecambe Bay.” (3.15: Every Web Remained Unbroken)

As for the mystery, I suppose it was inevitable. If you are writing about magic - at least for a grown-up readership - you can't really spell out the hocus-pocus. The essence of magic is mystery as the essence of conjuring is misdirection and therefore Harrison's novelistic techniques perfectly match his subject.

And reading about a fantasy version of mediaeval central European history, juxtaposed with the brutal realism of a women undergoing cancer treatment, gave some light relief to what would otherwise have been grim.

Selected quotes:

• “Queens, dancers, Courtesans, romantic individuals determined to batter themselves to death like huge rawboned moths inside the Japanese lamps of their own neuroses.” (Prologue: Pleroma)
• 
  
• “What if evolution were ideological after all? ... with aesthetic goals?” (1.1: Misprision of Dreams)
• “Things look so bright and energetic in the shops ... but as soon as you get them home, they're just seemed crude.” (1.2: N’Aimez Que Moi)
• “Years of hiding had made them adept at manipulating each other's silences.” (1.4: Dark Rapture)
• “He's barking up the wrong tree - you could learn more from a pair of little girls' shoes left in a ditch.” (1.4: Dark Rapture)
• “This Platonic reversal, the suggestion that ours is not perhaps after all the shadow but the thing - the Pleroma, not its imperfect index.” (2.8: On the White Downs)
• “The hospital was a maze, with every exit marked ‘Oncology’.” (3.10: It Always Happens To Someone Else)
• “Where Pam saw melancholia, fear, bewilderment (in some archaic sense of that word which implied lost bearings, night, tangled woods), Lucas saw only a failure of imagination.” (3.10: It Always Happens To Someone Else)

October 2026; 265 pages 
First published by Gollancz in 1992
My paperback edition was issued by Serpent's Tail in 2025

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Some novels by M John Harrison

• The Viriconium sequence:
• The Pastel City (1971)
• A Storm of Wings (1980)
• In Viriconium (1982) Nominated for the Guardian Fiction Prize
• The Committed Men (1971)
• The Centauri Device (1975)
• Climbers (1989) Winner of the Boardman Trasker Prize
• The Course of the Heart (1992)
• Signs of Life (1996)
• The Kefahuchi Tract sequence
• Light (2002)
• Nova Swing (2006) 
• Empty Space (2012)
• The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020) winner of the 2020 Goldsmith's Prize
• The End of Everything (2026) shortlisted for the 2026 Booker.