M John Harrison’s prose has thrilled me since I was a teen. It has thrilled others, too, including Angela Carter, Deborah Levy and Robert Macfarlane, but snobbery about the genres in which he made his mark – science fiction and fantasy – has hindered the respect his achievement deserves. His rigorously realistic novel Climbers, published in 1989, looked as though it might change that, but subsequent work has remained genre-fluid and uncompromisingly peculiar.
In the 1970s and 80s, he wrote stories about Viriconium, a fabled city crumbling into decadence and anarchy. These swashbuckling yet sinister tales functioned as escapist adventures for readers who preferred a far-flung nightmare to the contemporary humdrum. But in the 21st century, the world we inhabit has become utterly fantastical and Harrison has no need to revisit Viriconium; his anarchic, disintegrated metropolis is London and The End of Everything is set in an unnamed town on the Kent coast.
It’s the near future, familiar yet estranged. There has been a catastrophe, but it’s already old news and, in any case, the news media seem to have collapsed. We gather that enigmatic alien entities called the iGhetti – first conjured in Harrison’s 2017 short story collection You Should Come With Me Now – invaded Britain some while back, provoking an ongoing war whose progress or purpose no one really understands. In the absence of any alternative, the citizens are doing their best to Keep Calm and Carry On.
The main characters are beachcomber Phillip Tennent and his elderly aunt Marnie. Phillip sells his lucrative finds on what we presume to be the hidden market, though how much of the legal economy still works is unclear. Marnie paints, and defends her terraced townhouse against predators and vandals. Police are never mentioned. Order, such as it is, is maintained through vestigial community cohesion and survival of the toughest. Marnie, whose tender, almost-romantic relationship with Phillip provides the book’s emotional through-line, earns our affection while shocking us with acts of pragmatic callousness.
Harrison, as always, interweaves precise descriptions with disquieting lacunae: “Lines of renovated cottages were still half occupied by people from the city trying to live their weekend lives. The cottages were easy to enter and a reliable source of paracetamol. Small birds flocked in the dense shrubbery of gardens run to seed.” Occasionally there’s an orienting reference to “the middle Thatcher period” or “the influenzas and Covids of his childhood”. But the story begins with Phillip fetching something from the tideline that’s beyond our ken – an “artefact” which everyone regards as an inanimate object, but which exhibits alarming signs of humanity.
What to do with this “biological gadget” dumped into the sea by the iGhetti? Phillip wants to sell it. Stashed in his vehicle, it stares at him with a half-formed face, growing back a severed hand, making infant attempts at speech. By the end of the book, it’s driving the car, and trying, in its soullessly artificial way, to be Marnie’s inseparable pal. In the interim, we learn that there are more of these artefacts around than we thought.
There’s no mention of AI in the narrative – the world wide web has evidently unravelled – yet these eerie non-humans that gamely insert themselves into the neighbourhood could be interpreted as LLMs made flesh. “It had learned to read in a day”, Marnie observes of her replicant companion, “and often practised by quoting from the ads in the thriving local freesheets. ‘The sky’s the limit … for Rhino Roofing!’” The AI hallucinations we currently see on our digital devices are thus embodied in a way that’s disturbing, hilarious and poignant. “Where did I come from?” the artefact asks Marnie. “Do you know?” To which Marnie, tortured by weariness, loss and encroaching dementia, can only answer: “What are you really? And what do you think of us?”
Sad reminders of a long-irrelevant morality bob up from time to time, such as when Marnie finds the artefact browsing for clothes in an abandoned Oxfam. “You should always be careful to leave the money,” she counsels it as it stuffs items into a bag, “even if there’s no one behind the till.”
As for Phillip, he nurtures hopeless dreams of sailing across the Channel to a better life in mainland Europe, musing bitterly that nobody knows how to make good use of the new world’s opportunities, “only to live a worse life of the kind we already had”.
All of which indicates that despite its SF elements, The End of Everything, as its title suggests, is about everything. Unlike most novels with such ambitions, it ticks no hot-topic boxes and appears uninterested in our daily news feeds. It shows us a society that has long since forgotten Trump, social media and Middle Eastern genocides. And yet it burrows deep into our psyches – into the psyche of our civilisation – and exposes the terrifying insecurity of life right now.
Caution: it won’t be for everyone. In my second-hand copy of Harrison’s 2020 Goldsmiths prize-winning novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, next to a bit where a character is “too depressed to try and tease out whatever meaning might be hidden in all this”, the previous owner has scribbled “SUMS UP THIS WHOLE BOOK!” Such a reader would be even more exasperated by The End of Everything, which turns the dial up several notches. Harrison still evokes painterly fugues of light and pungent smells, but they’re offset by a growing bleakness, and there’s less humour. Some of the dialogue feels like Harrison’s own metaphysical musings rather than characters’ speech. And of course there will always be readers who balk at SF, refusing to countenance that our lived reality is saturated with it, and that the time for earnestly realistic state-of-the-nation novels may have passed. Dreamlike and baffling, The End of Everything elucidates humanity’s disintegrating existence with strange clarity.
• Michel Faber’s novels include The Book of Strange New Things (Canongate). The End of Everything by M John Harrison is published by Serpent’s Tail (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
