‘Places you Didn’t Think to Look for Yourself’ by M. John Harrison

“In the light falling horizontally along grey lapboards. In very fast light, as on any seafront… In Portsmouth. In real dejection, not just the kind we have now.”

Is this a story? Is it a poem? Is it a list? Can it be all of them? The first time I read this playful, one page piece of short fiction from M. John Harrison, it made me laugh out loud but also feel a bit sad. Oh Mike! In using what might be considered a neo-Oulipian constraint, Harrison manages to convey – without any plot in the conventional sense – a sense of character and an entire lifetime. M. John Harrison is a fabulous writer who excels in basically any form that he chooses to write in, but in his fragmentary short fiction he has great fun in creating new ways of telling stories. This collection is one of my favourites of his many excellent books.

First published in You Should Come With Me Now, Comma Press, 2018

‘Small Heirlooms’ by M. John Harrison

Kit returns to her dead brother’s house to tidy up his literary estate. He got around a bit in his day: extracts from his diaries pastiche Patrick Leigh Fermor’s pre-war adventures in eastern Europe wonderfully well. But it’s not her brother’s memoirs that haunt Kit so much as his attitude. There’s something solvent about it. Something corrosive. Kit’s brother seems capable of plucking despair out of thin air, though given his air was gritted with the smoke from Theresianstadt, he may not have had much of a choice. “We shouldn’t have to live our lives unless we can live in them, thoughtlessly, like the animals,” Kit wrote to him once, and by the story’s latter stages we are inclined to agree.

Right up until the last line, ‘Small Heirlooms’ reads as a complex meditation on the relationship between writing and memory.

“In bed she decided over and over again, ‘He poisoned his own memories, too.’”

This being an M. John Harrison story, you know some fiendishness is brewing. The story holds its insights floating in plain sight, all to be unlocked by that killer last line.

I read this story, which is really two stories held in some sort of stereoscopic suspension, again and again, and I said to myself, “I’m going to learn how to do that.”

Well. Nope. But still I travel hopefully.

First published in Other Edens, edited by Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock, Unwin Paperbacks, 1987, and collected in Travel Arrangements: short stories, Gollancz, London, 2000

‘Settling the World’ by M John Harrison

(e) Short story as sacred physical artefact:

Someone — I forget who; certainly not me — once said that Jeffrey Ford was the American M John Harrison. Which, like most such comparisons, sort of works and also almost entirely doesn’t. ‘Settling the World’ is a case in point. It has the wonky, left-field, yet entirely natural-seeming inventiveness of Ford’s early stories, mixed in with a sort of John-Buchan-meets-Saki archness, and topped off with something incurably bitter. But it’s Harrison’s preternatural precision that marks it as entirely his own.

“With the discovery of God on the far side of the Moon, and the subsequent gigantic and hazardous towing operation that brought Him back to start His reign anew, there began on Earth, as one might assume, a period of far-reaching change.”

As one might assume, indeed. Oxlade, our Departmental hero, an odd cross between Harry Palmer and Richard Hannay, is sent out to investigate goings-on along God’s Motorway, the mysterious miles-wide divine link-road that has formed ex nihilobetween the Thames Estuary and the industrial Midlands (Harrison does love to traumatise genre tropes, in this case the beloved Big Dumb Object of hard sci-fi). Oxlade’s nemesis, retired foreign spy Estrades, is also there, digging around and causing trouble. It’s all a bit of an old school cloak-and-dagger hoot with extra weirdness thrown in, until they get onto the Motorway itself and Estrades’s real plan is set in motion. It doesn’t go well. Trying to blow up the Umwelt of God never does, and even that is far from the end of Oxlade’s travails.

This is easily one of my favourite Harrison stories, even though, like the Poe, it’s a bit of an odd one out for him (it was originally written for an anthology of ‘utopian science fiction’ but Harrison really doesn’t do topias, whether u or dys; what he does do is something that stretches the grimy mundane and the gnarly weird directly across each other and as far as either will go without quite snapping; sometimes even further). But it’s also my favourite because it’s in my copy of The Ice Monkey that cost me £5.99 in the mid-90s and that the man himself signed, with great down-to-earth friendliness and aplomb, at a reading at The Horse Hospital in London in 2013. While, as per Oxlade, it’s almost never good to meet your God, it was, in this case, a sheer and genuine pleasure to meet my writing god.

The book itself is, of course, now in a hermetically sealed bulletproof glass case in a time-locked vault in Zürich.

First published in The New Improved Sun, Harper & Row, 1975. Collected in The Ice Monkey and Other Stories, Unwin, 1988, Things That Never Happen, Gollancz, 2004, and Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, Comma Press, 2020

‘Egnaro’ by M John Harrison

“Are you sure you’ve heard nothing about Egnaro?” he said. “The thing is,” he continued, before I could say anything, “that I’ve just about convinced myself a place like that exists.”

Confession: I’ve only read two of Harrison’s short stories, and none of his novels. It’s an oversight I intend to correct immediately. I’m currently working my way through Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s vast and extraordinary compendium, The Weird (over 1,000 pages of ‘strange and dark stories’ from 1908 to 2020, highly recommended) and came across the puzzle that is ‘Egnaro’ just three weeks ago. The best stories get under the skin. Three weeks. And now I can’t get it out of my head, which is a curious reflection of the central theme of the story. In which the narrator records an associate’s obsession with an idea, a notion which has possessed him but which he finds impossible to verify. Set in a run-down city centre with dingy Chinese restaurants, queasy custard puddings and struggling second hand-bookshops, nothing fantastical takes place. And yet there is the sense that some hidden power is at work and by the end everything has shifted. Let me say this, ‘Egnaro’ is insidious. At the finale, the narrator has himself become obsessed. And now I am too.

First published in Winter’s Tales #27, 1981. Collected in The Ice Monkey, Gollancz, 1983, and Things That Never Happened, Gollancz 2003

‘In Autotelia’ by M. John Harrison

For some reason, when I’m reading the work of M. John Harrison I have the German experimental rock band CAN playing along in my head. Recently, on his radio 6 show, Iggy Poppy described CAN as psychedelic picturesque and I think the same phrase can be easily applied to Mike works. It has the band’s expansive panoramas that are sometimes empty, sometimes full of some ether that can talk but nobody fully understands. Crumbling train lines shooting into the distance stand in for CAN’s repetitive beats and damp nettles for the profusion of white noise. And Damo Suzuki’s discordant mumbling and moaning? That will be everyone’s perpetual inner scream while they attempt to continue as normal while everything fades around them. ‘In Autotelia’ is a large landscape painting with the story and characters growing through the crack like lichen.

First published in Arc. the New Scientist Magazine, 1983, and collected in You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts, Comma Press 2017

‘Cisisbeo’ by M. John Harrison

Speaking of strange stories… M. John Harrison is a writer I’ve just recently caught onto, and while he’s most famous (in some circles, infamous) for his restless, kaleidoscopic approaches to fantasy (in his Viriconiumstories) and science fiction (his more recent Light trilogy) honed over the last 50-something years, I’ve fallen in love with his novels and stories in which the uncanny and numinous encroach on a “realist” milieu. The Course of the Heart is one of my favorite novels and his most recent work, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, is in a similar vein.

Harrison is extremely cagey about his process and the intentions of his writing, but if he could be said to have a thesis, it’s best articulated in a blog post from 2007, in which he expresses a distrust in traditional notions of writing and the demands of fiction (not to mention the ideological underpinnings of those things). “My feeling,” he writes, “is that the reader performs most of the act of writing. A book spends a very short time being written into existence; it spends the rest of its life being read into existence.” A writer who expressly attempts to guide or intermediate the relationship between reader and text, therefore, stifles something about it.

You might interpret this as an inquiry into how an author can write while knowing that he is dead, in the Barthesian sense, even as he writes. He intimates it as a kind of game: The writer “… present(s) a spread of more or less “possible” interpretations tied to the themes & meanings of the story.” The rest of the work of comprehension and interpretation is necessarily done by the reader.

It is, as you might imagine, a controversial way of writing. The work is purposefully enigmatic, carried by Harrison’s clear, psychologically incisive prose style and, in the case of his more overt genre work, a conceptual imagination that is practically assaultive in its depth and breadth.

‘Cicisbeo’ carries all the hallmarks of Harrison’s realist-adjacent fiction, which is to say that it exhibits his writerly preoccupations – romantic dysfunction, failures of will and communication, uncanny unreality borne from repression and emotional agitation. The story follows the narrator character as he navigates a tense relationship between his best friend Lizzie and her husband Tim. Lizzie is newly pregnant and Tim has retreated to live in their attic, decoupling from his family even as his daughter is born.

As Sunyi Dean points out on the Elder Sign podcast, Cicisbeo is an Italian term with no simple English equivalent, referring essentially to a man kept by a woman, the gender-swap equivalent of a mistress. The protagonist of the story has an unfulfilled desire for Lizzie that is unmistakably tinged with resentment. Lizzie, for her part, implores him ceaselessly to parlay with Tim on her behalf, and the awkwardness between the protagonist and Tim seems haunted by shared recognition of the former’s desire.

Harrison’s characters hear in fragments peppered into summary – orphan lines of dialogue, free of context and ominous in their uncertain meaning, are often overheard in his stories. Characters tend to talk past one another even in direct interface, often seeming to speak in asides to themselves, referencing comprehensions or opinions that they don’t fully share with each other or the reader. But the broad strokes of motivation seep through even so – the narrator becomes, over the course of the story, a bruise-pressing voyeur, Lizzie is self-pitying and manipulative, and Tim is avoidant and dissociative. An unhealthy dynamic is evident.

The story culminates in a brief, spectacular scene of surrealism, a weird and mysterious vista whose implications for the continuing lives of the characters – and even the past events of the story – are left open to interpretation. Something has happened, party to its own physics and its own logic, that may or may not be metaphor. A lot of weird fiction writers claim lineage from Kafka, but few can be judged as bold as the surrealist master. Harrison is one of them.

First published in Talk of the Town (Independent On Sunday), September 2003. Collected in You Should Come With Me Now, Comma Press 2017, and Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, Comma Press 2020. Text is reprinted on the Weird Fiction Review website here

‘Egnaro’ by M. John Harrison

This story centres around a shabby Manchester bookshop and two characters who become obsessed with a place that may or may not exist. Once you’ve read about Egnaro it’s easy to believe you might come across a clue to its existence in a crossword in an old magazine at the dentist’s, or half-catch a mention of it in an otherwise dull interview on daytime TV. “It is in the conversations not your own (so I learnt from Lucas) that you first hear of Egnaro. Egnaro reveals itself in minutiae, in that great and very real part of our lives when we are doing nothing important.” If you read the story you’ll always be looking for it too.

First published in Winter’s Tales #27, 1981. Collected in The Ice Monkey, Gollancz, 1983, and Things That Never Happened, Gollancz 2003

‘I Did It’ by M John Harrison

I was sitting in a bedsit in east London in 2001 when I was introduced to the work of M. John Harrison. The bedsit belonged to Julian Richards, who also took me to my first Forced Entertainment show. So, yes, reader: of course I married him.

Now, I could have chosen a dozen M. John Harrison stories for this anthology, but that would make me look like a stalker and might embarrass him. I have picked ‘I Did It’ because the last sentence of the opening paragraph is one of my favourite sentences in print. I’d like to own it and frame it beneath glass so no else can ever touch it. It is: “Axe in the face.” Even taken out of context like this, it thrills me. “Axe in the face.” Like crunching on cubes of ice when you are close to the equator. “Axe in the face.” Harrison’s ear for dialogue is so bang on it’s uncanny. His observations of white, middle-class Londoners – both men and women – are so sharp, they hurt. I’m still laughing as I read, yet again, the conversation between Alex and Nicola.

from Things that Never Happen, Night Shade Books, 2003. Originally published in A Book of Two Halves, editor Nicholas Royle, Gollancz, 1996

‘The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It and Be Changed by It’ by M John Harrison

‘The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It’ opens with what appears to be one of M John Harrison’s favourite images, that of a horse’s skull (“not a horse’s head: a skull, which looks nothing like a horse at all, but like an enormous curved shears, or a bone beak whose two halves meet only at the tip”), a disturbing recurring image in Viriconiumand a vital element of Light. The story of a man – the Ephebe – mapping out his life according to the Tarot, and of journeys taken on the horse of iron (i.e. the train) between places like Harrow and Kilburn High Road, or London St Pancras and Sheffield Central, its intoxicating blend of heady esoterica and the banality of British train travel continues to intrigue me; it’s a story I return to again and again, trying to fully decode it.

Published in Tarot Tales, ed.Rachel Pollack & Caitlin Matthews, Legend, 1989; collected in Things That Never Happen, Gollancz, 2004

‘Cicisbeo’ by M. John Harrison

I moved to London almost a year ago, not far from where this story is set as it happens, and for a few months I was flattened every day by this city’s sheer preposterousness, so I in a way I was primed for this very sad and very strange fabulation.

M. John Harrison is a proper treasure and the collection this is taken from is a proper gift. As with so much of what I admire the most, I have little of any use I want to say about it. This reviewof the collection by Patrick Langley does right by it, I think.

From You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts, Comma Press, 2017

‘The Crisis’ by M John Harrison

“You sit over a one-bar fire in a rented room.” Humblebrag time! I’ve met that M. John Harrison. I heard him quietly read this story during a wondrous evening of art, organized by somebody artistic in East London. It struck me as uncanny at the time, with its straightforward, serious-minded depiction of the homeless being deployed in a countermeasure against the incursion of alien invaders in the City of London. But like those invaders, Harrison’s story itself exists on more than one plane; and once you’ve glimpsed that, life is never the same again. I feel that this is a story that really has altered me. I was so proud, ludicrously proud, to have even a shred of involvement in seeing it published in the TLS last November.

from You Should Come with Me Now, Comma Press, 2017. Available to read here