The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

n.b. A ‘no star’ rating for books I review does not imply criticism—I rarely give ratings, as giving stars is an unhelpfully blunt instrument and all too often involves comparing apples with oranges.returnreturnOlivia Laing, in her 'Guardian' review in 2020, noted the “precise and estranging fluency” of Harrison’s writing. It is a perfect tool for depicting uncertain negotiation of uncertain worlds. returnreturnShaw, one of the main characters, starts the novel coming to (incomplete) rest after motion: he has had a breakdown, and has just moved house. He meets Victoria in the place where he has come, if not to rest, at least to a stop of sorts, and almost immediately she leaves, moving house in her turn. His mother has dementia, and takes pleasure in tearing up family photographs, destroying memories. Victoria’s mother has died and Victoria is moving north to Shropshire to live in the house her mother left behind. returnreturn'Sunken Land' is a story that has key absences: Shaw’s sense of distance from himself, Victoria’s deceased mother, the repeated failures to communicate. Shaw and Victoria seem barely to have come together before they separate. There are significant gaps in knowledge, too: the true business of the person who gives Shaw a job, the reason that copies of 'The Water Babies' keep turning up, what is the source of the voices Shaw can hear through his wall. returnreturnThis makes it sound as though 'Sunken Land' is about the uncanny, or weird experiences, and that does it the injustice of pinning it down, but weirdness is inherent in the novel like hair on an arm, giving it distinction; the novel would look odd without it, like a face without eyebrows. It is not about them, they are factors in and consequences of life. What is most memorable is not so much the strange occurrences and recurrences, the unsettling glimpses of disturbing things, but the maps of the characters’ diffident interactions with the world, both familiar and defamiliarized, maps that are built up with such subtlety, and with so unique a literary palette, that it is almost startling to stand back and see how immaculate and strong is the resulting fictional reality. returnreturnIn a 2017 interview with Heather Marshall, Harrison said that he looks for the ‘I don’t know why you did that’ moment at the endings of his own short stories, and there are plenty of these in 'Sunken Land' too, keeping the reader on their toes, keeping the prose too dynamic and complex to be burdened down by the shifting, often gloomy, atmosphere; it is a gloomy world, but the weirdness and Harrison’s remarkable prose make it almost rebelliously suffused with resilience.

I feel that I'm somehow supposed to give a good review because, y'know, M John Harrison. Amazing writer he may be but this novel left me with a feeling that I'd seen most of it before, probably in Iain Sinclair (question: did M John Harrison invent psychogeography? He may have done). Character lives a peripatetic life in Mortlake, SW London. And how peripatetic: walking to Kingston and round back to Barnes via Richmond Park is what he does for normal - that's around 18km depending on the route. So, over ten-mile walks he thinks nothing of. He also engages in joyless-sounding sex with two different women, falls in with a medium who seems at one point to have murdered her husband and he disposes of the body. This is not ok. If the husband had murdered -her-, this would now be a crime novel.
Victoria, the other principal char, is more interesting. She flees London and heads for Shropshire (MJH doesn't name the town but I'm presuming Bridgnorth as it's on the Severn gorge not far from Telford, although at one point a character gets a train to Shrewsbury). There she has a nice life but as is common with these characters dominated by others; she also (is it her) finds it all a bit Brexity. West Midlands (of which Shropshire is a part) is pure Brexit territory; I suspect Brexit happened while Harrison was writing this novel as it isn't mentioned until near the very end.
Is there some kind of correlation between West London and the West Midlands? I'm sure there is. Being in Hammersmith (by the Bridge or Brook Green) one day and in Birmingham the next is not unusual.
Then there's the Water Babies thing, and that gives TSLBTRA a whole new aspect. Starting with a drunk seeing green babies in a pub toilet and culminating in a character diving into her lawn like it was a swimming pool, Charles Kingsley's unpleasant and traumatising (well it was to me as a child) novel sits as a kind of background radiation to TSLBTRA. Translucent glowing children abound. People hand copies of that unpleasant book about.
A lot of it is about rivers really, and that isn't mentioned; a tale of two rivers, with Victoria by the Severn and Shaw by the Thames. Secret connections and influences are what MJH is all about. The book, unlike a river, just doesn't really go anywhere. The flaneux (my preferred spelling; neither male nor female, and 'eux' is a form of the French word for 'they') does not wander idly; but then again, the journey not the arrival matters. Finish lines not finish times (but there's still a line). Not all who are lost, wander.