Book Review – You Should Come With Me Now by M. John Harrison

You Should Come With Me Now is M. John Harrison’s latest collection of weird tales from Comma Press, who kindly provided me with a copy for review.  Harrison stands alone, in my mind at least, as the only author I can think of who started in science fiction, transformed into a literary author, and then transformed back. More importantly, he’s one of the greatest British authors of the post-war period. I’ve been reading him for close to twenty years now, since I discovered his Viriconium series in the Millennium Fantasy Masterworks series circa 2000. Even then he was straddling genres, as he also had The Centauri Device in the Science Fiction Masterworks. I liked those, but I loved his literary novels and especially Climbers best of all. Harrison returned to SF with Light and its sequels Nova Swing and Empty Space (this last volume is one of the more baroque and difficult texts I’ve encountered in any genre). There were short fiction collections along the way in The Ice Monkey and Travel Arrangements. Harrison has been at it for all of fifty years, and on the basis of the current volume he hasn’t lost the knack for creating unsettling tales that are at once exotic and homely.

These stories are uncompromising, however. Many are filled with strange architecture, strange oddments and stranger motivations. No one is ever particularly happy in an M. John Harrison story and there’s rarely anything like a happy ending on offer. This isn’t a criticism, more a warning: don’t expect any answers. Some of these stories are set in the land of Autotelia, which seems to exist partly in our world (you can fly there from London). Others remind me of the earlier Viriconium stories. There are a number of flash fiction stories on offer, none of which I bonded with particularly, as well as pieces that remind me of J. G. Ballard’s ‘condensed novels’ in The Atrocity Exhibition (the final imaginary review in ‘Imaginary Reviews’ is of ‘The Last Fish’, which is more than a little Ballardian). My favourite pieces tended to be those that were longer and more human, some of which are set in entirely in our world. This is my way of saying that I still prefer the M. John Harrison of Climbers to that of Empty Space.

‘Cicisbeo’ is an engaging domestic story of a kind that Harrison has been writing for decades, a sort of low-key love triangle that reminds me of Graham Greene’s ‘The Destructors’. In ‘Yummie’, a man wakes from heart surgery to find that he’s being shadowed by a creature that offers obscure advice and no one else can see. ‘Dog People’ is an off-beat romance of the strangest variety, featuring the aggressive Myra, the ugliest woman our protagonist has ever seen (it doesn’t take long for them to start fucking, however). My favourite story was ‘Entertaining Angels Unawares’, written in the mode of M. John Harrison’s I like best, in a similar vein to The Course of the Heart and Signs of Life. Here you’ll find a dilapidated church undergoing renovation, a persistent dream of chopping people’s heads off with an enormous sword (‘biggest fucker you’ve ever seen’) and gobbo (‘a kind of grout made from mud and goat-hair’). Many of the varied offerings in You Should Come With Me Now are too elliptical for dullards like myself to fully comprehend, but it’s a book of magic and perverse humour nonetheless.

2014 in Review: My Top Ten Reads

2014 has been a watershed year for me in terms of the quantity of books I’ve read: for the first time since I started recording these things in 2008, I’ve hit 100 books completed for the year. Most people are fairly astounded when I tell them I read this many books in a year, but I do favour shorter novels and it probably only averages out to about one hour of reading per day across the whole year. That’s an hour that many other people would spend watching television, say. It’s not that I don’t waste time on trivial pursuits — I certainly do — but my commitment to hunting, buying and reading books is such that I always have an immediate to-read list of 10-15 titles.

I tend to be an ‘author reader’, by which I mean that once I decide that I particularly like the work of a certain author, I will hunt down every book by this author and hopefully read every word. It doesn’t always work out this way; at times I decide that I’m not so interested in a certain writer after all, and end up with a pile of their books that I no longer want to read. In 2014, I read three or more books by the likes of Pat Barker, Larry Brown, Mikhail Bulgakov, Michael Chabon, M John Harrison, Haruki Murakami, Peter Temple and Alan Warner. Most of these writers would normally be classified as authors of literary fiction or crime, and that’s a fair representation of where my reading interests now lie. I read a number of young adult novels as part of my job as an English teacher, some of them multiple times, which rather pads out my overall figures. My author of the year would have to be Mikhail Bulgakov. Until this year, I hadn’t read a word of him and now I’ve read his entire published prose output.

2014 may have been a watershed year in terms of quantity, but what about the quality? According to my Goodreads star ratings (which I have completed very assiduously this year), 21 books gained a five star rating. Of these, I have chosen my top ten reads for the year, limiting myself to just one book per author. Here are the ten in no particular order. All come highly recommended from me. Clicking on the covers will take you to the listing for the book on Goodreads.

Union Street by Pat Barker

I’ve now read almost all of Barker, with the exception of her novel Double Vision which I can’t seem to get into. This novel, her first, is the very best of her non-WWI output. Grim, dark and extraordinary powerful.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

In truth I possibly enjoyed A Country Doctor’s Notebook even more than this, but this is the magnum opus and the place where pretty much everyone starts with Bulgakov. I don’t regret giving this devilish satire of Stalin’s Russia my attention.

My Summer of Love by Helen Cross

A friend recommended this and I’m glad she did. I thought this was far superior to Cross’ second novel, The Secrets She Keeps. I loved the writing in this one and the plot had a couple of real kickers to it, too.

An Iron Rose by Peter Temple

Peter Temple is the Australian master of crime fiction and this is one of his very best, maybe the best of them all.

The Dark Road by Ma Jian

Ma Jian is my favourite Chinese writer and I’ve been waiting patiently for some years for a follow-up to Beijing Coma. Well, it was worth the wait. Not for the faint-hearted, the squeamish, or those inclined to depression. It’s that dark.

The Sopranos by Alan Warner

I’ve read a lot of Warner this year, probably two-thirds of his opus, but this one had me laughing the hardest and it’s not often that happens when I read. The sequel, The Stars in the Bright Sky, is a pale imitation.

Dirty Work by Larry Brown

I have mixed feelings about Brown but I have nothing but praise for this, his first novel. The book consists of two profoundly injured Vietnam War veterans chewing the fat, but it’s fat well worth chewing. Here’s a book with heart.

I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down by William Gay

I love country noir fiction: Harry Crews, Daniel Woodrell, Donald Ray Pollock, Larry Brown, Larry Watson and Cormac McCarthy all write it and write it well, but in my opinion none of them does it better than Gay does in this exquisite volume of short fiction. I’d go so far as to say this is my number one book for the year.

The Master of Petersburg by J. M. Coetzee

I like Coetzee: he’s an enormously skillful writer but at times I find him overly dry and that put me off him for a couple of years. The Master of Petersburg isn’t dry and I think it’s even better than his most famous novel, Disgrace. The Russian setting helps, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that Coetzee is the greatest living writer in the English language.

He Died With His Eyes Open by Derek Raymond

In general I’ve liked but not loved the Factory novels, but this one, the first, is very good indeed. I happened to read this after books 2, 3 and 4 and in a way I’m glad that I did, because it was all downhill (admittedly at a gentle slope) from here.

Nova Swing by M. John Harrison

Now this was a surprise. I loved Harrison in my younger years, especially his sumptuous Climbers, but he’s started writing SF again and in general I haven’t warmed to it. I despised Light when it first came out and thus this has sat unloved on my bookshelf for close to ten years, which is a pity as I enjoyed it immensely when I finally got around to it. The same couldn’t be said for the final volume in the Kefahuchi Tract series, Empty Space, which I found close to unreadable.

It’s M. John Harrison Appreciation Week

Things that never happen: I loved the work of M. John Harrison when I was in my early twenties. Some of the Viriconium stuff I found a bit tedious, but I delighted in his final novel in this series, In Viriconium, as well as his literary novels The Course of the Heart and Signs of Life. But my favourite of them all was his least fantastical novel of all, Climbers, which may have been the book that turned me from a reader of speculative into one of realistic fiction.

I was working in the now-defunct Supernova Books in Perth in 2002 when a review copy of his brand-new SF novel Light came in. I read it immediately, but hated it intensely. What exactly it was that I loathed about the book so much I no longer recall with much clarity.  I’m yet to re-read it to find out if my opinion on it has changed.

Twelve years passed, and in that period the only M. John Harrison I read was Climbers, for the third or fourth time, in 2008. I picked up a copy of Nova Swing, his sequel to Light, at around that time, but I didn’t immediately read and then I mislaid my copy somehow. I finally bought a replacement about two years ago, and there it sat unloved until Friday just gone.

Now, this is not to say that I think Nova Swing is the best thing going around, but I read it in two days and found it very enjoyable indeed, and exquisitely written. Either it’s different in some crucial way than its predecessor or I’m different in some crucial way to the person I was in 2002. I don’t read very much SF at all these days, but I will make an exception for Harrison the same way I’ll make an exception for Vandermeer (and yet Vandermeer’s new novel, Authority, has already been castigated to the back burner, unread).

I enjoyed Nova Swing so much that I immediately started re-reading The Course of the Heart, which I finished in less than a day (it was a wet weekend). This one I liked somewhat less than I remembered it, but I’ve just now finished re-reading Signs of Life, which I like somewhat more than I did way back when. So after a twelve year hiatus, I can say I’ve read three M. John Harrison novels in the past four days.

It could have been four novels in five or six days, had it not been for the fourteen books by other authors that just arrived from Better World Books today. I’ve got my eye on giving Light another try, and I’ve ordered a new copy of the third novel in this series, Empty Space, which came out in 2012.

Harrison is close to seventy now. He was the youngest punk of the British New Wave and now he’s a grand old man of SF. He deserves it; he clearly loves the genre a lot more than me, and he can write better than almost anyone. He’s an infuriating writer at times, obsessed with ill women, vomiting, ill women vomiting and all manner of bizarre phantasmagoria, but he’s a gem.

Book Review – Climbers by M. John Harrison

Let me try to explain why I think M. John Harrison’s “Climbers” is one of the greatest novels of the last twenty years. Harrison has had a strange career: from science fiction to mainstream and back again; and he transformed himself from a bad writer into an outstanding one. After writing some run of the mill science fiction and high fantasy (“The Centauri Device,” “The Pastel City,” and to a lesser extent “A Storm of Wings”), Harrison produced the best piece in his ‘Viriconium’ saga, a short novel called “In Viriconium.” After that, his next novel was “Climbers,” which I assert to be not only Harrison’s best novel but one of the best novels you or I are ever likely to read.

What’s it about? Rock climbing in the north of England in the early eighties. Am I interested in rock climbing? No. Does it matter? Not at all. Harrison’s genius is that he has found a way to compress mundane existence into an amazingly rich reading experience. The key word here is compression. There isn’t a loose sentence or paragraph in “Climbers”; it’s as taut and lean as a climber on a bare rock face. Somehow, Harrison manages to turn everyday life into something worth reading about. After reading “Climbers” for the fourth or perhaps fifth time, I’m still not entirely sure how he does it. And the results are extraordinary.

The prose in “Climbers” is exquisite. Harrison has a way of describing things in exact detail without getting bogged down in insignificance. The language is as precise and emotionless as a scalpel cutting through flesh. Harrison has a gift for describing environments and states of mind. We are introduced to a range of colourful characters, who enliven what might otherwise have been a sterile novel: Normal, the dithering ex-employee of High Adventure; Sankey, the aging climbing icon, eccentric and parsimonius; Gaz, the young butcher; Mick, the gloomy steeplejack, and each of them is memorable.

The novel’s narrator Mike (which is the author’s first name), is ‘recovering’ from a failed marriage, a flight which takes him to the north of England and the world of rock climbing. That’s about all you can say for the plot of “Climbers,” incidentally. If there is a narrative in the normal sense at all, then it is one that skips backward and forward in time repeatedly. I liken the effect to the process of remembering, with its alinear movement along lines of association, not chronology. In theory, the novel moves forward in time from ‘Winter,’ through ‘Spring,’ ‘Summer’ and ‘Fall’ (the last of which is rendered in American terminology for a specific reason), but in reality, we are moving backward and sideways in time as well. This is a book that demands careful reading.

There are shades of J.G. Ballard here, in the way that the novel’s narrator seeks to find the magic of the everyday, to somehow travel through reality. An important early passage serves to highlight this point:

“When I was a child I always felt as if I was on the verge of discovering something. I thought that if I was patient things would show more of themselves than other people could see. […] After that, appearances had for me a kind of perilous promise, an allure, an immanence.” (p 18 )

Hypnotised by the ghostly reflections in a window of people in a cafeteria, onto the backdrop of a rainy day, the eight year-old Mike walks straight into a plate glass window. And this is what “Climbers” is about: a failed attempt to travel through reality to somewhere more magical and more real.

Harrison uses an effective but sometimes startling technique I have decided to dub the ‘imaginative leap,’ in which the narrator’s imagination enters the secret worlds of other characters, such as when Sankey stops to speak to a young retarded boy. Harrison seems to be saying that existence is about the actual specific details that are in front of your face every moment of your life, precisely the things we normally tune out in pursuit of whatever we think we are doing or achieving. This results in some astonishingly specific passages that cannot be seen to be representative of anything other than themselves. And yet the author makes extensive use of metaphor in the course of his narrative.

As I’ve already said, nothing much happens in “Climbers,” and yet there’s never a dull moment. We get a handful of climbing stories (and a lot of climbing terminology to boot), as well as stories about the various characters Mike meets. Interspersed with this is a narrative about Mike’s earlier marriage to a woman called Pauline, whose two year-old daughter Nina lives with her grandmother. The material appears to have been arranged in chaotic, even bewildering fashion, and yet there’s an inner logic to everything here. As Mike says:

“How many times, coming back after a hard day like that, has there seemed to be something utterly significant in the curve of a cooling tower, or the way a field between two factories, reddened in the evening light, rises to meet the locks on a disused canal? Motorway bridges, smoke, spires, glow in the sun: it is a kind of psychic illumination.” (p 58-9)

The climax of “Climbers,” if there is one at all, is Sankey’s death from a fall on an easy climb. His mysterious death reminds me of nothing if not Paul Baumer’s demise at the end of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” in that he dies alone from something seemingly innocuous. But this is an inscrutable book, and I can appreciate why some readers might not see the point of it at all. To demonstrate just how inscrutable this book can be, consider Nina’s accident. The child falls through a glass coffee table, and a shard of glass stabs her in the small of the back. This has already happened at some unspecified time in the past. Mike retells how he spent time at the hospital with Pauline and the child’s grandmother, and that Pauline insisted on not waiting for news of Nina’s condition at the hospital. When Mike confronts her about this, she rebuffs him. The next sentence says, “We went back to London by train a few days later.” (p. 90) The reader, already accustomed to the way this novel jumps around, puts the incident out of mind, only to read these words much later in the book:

“‘Nina was never that spoiled,’ she [Pauline] maintained, ‘though I daresay my mother would have liked her to be.’ She went on to describe a dream of her own – ‘I had this while Nina was still alive” – in which she had seen the little girl standing alone in a corner of an empty room, pulling faces at nothing.” (p 169)

Shortly after this, the narrative moves on to something else. So are we to assume that Nina died from her injuries? Surely this would merit a mention earlier? This infuriates me for some reason (possibly because I have a two year-old daughter myself), but it is symptomatic of how this novel works. Incidents are partially recalled, only to be interrupted be other events, and then picked up again later. Overall, I would say that this technique works extremely well.

There’s something very odd about Mike’s behaviour in “Climbers.” He is friendly and yet detached, observant but often preoccupied. It’s an eerie novel, actually, and one that partially eludes my understanding. But this is a truly brilliant novel, and Harrison is a brilliant writer, as writers such as China Mieville, Iain Banks, Clive Barker, Jonathan Carroll and Graham Joyce have observed. “Climbers” may not be Harrison’s most well-known novel, nor his most successful (the book was out of print until it was reissued in 2004), but I have read them all, and I say that it is his best.