When asked in a 2012 interview how he feels about being called a “writer’s writer,” M. John Harrison “describes the ‘practice crag’ found in almost every Peak District town or village”:
“It may not be much higher than this room,” he says, “but … there will always be some last great problem that nobody’s solved. The guy who will solve it may not be the best climber in Britain, but the best climber in Britain will turn up one day in the summer to watch the local guy who can do it. And I always wanted to be that local guy, as a writer.”
With his latest novel, The End of Everything, Harrison has certainly achieved this, and likely more.
The story that the novel tells, befitting the times and its title, is about a disaster, but no one seems to know what this disaster is. Between them, its two lead characters describe different ways of going missing from the human species. Phillip Tennent—who is “Tennent” in chapters centering his perspective and “Phillip” in those following his aunt, Marnie—leaves his beachcomber community, a stretch of cobbled-together shanties so vast its bonfires can be seen from orbit.
The beachcombers are held together in common pursuit of a “ticket” out and inland. At the start of the novel, Tennent has found his, a baby-shaped “biological gadget” referred to as an “artefact” (p. 35). No sooner does he pull it from the surf than he heads to Marnie’s house to retrieve his car. Though he used to talk with her often when he first moved to the coast from London—ground zero for an incursion by mysterious beings called “the iGhetti”—he’s now happy to use Marnie’s house as a garage and storage unit. “‘It’s sad to think,’ he remembered her saying … ‘that people have stopped making full use of you as a human being’” (p. 7).
As for Marnie, her life is more of an interior affair. She is an artist in her seventies who wants to live inside the light that falls on her staircase, but, failing that, to paint it or merely bask in it at times of maximum sublimity. When she is denied even this, the resulting act of outsized violence precipitates the ire of a kind of ersatz Neighborhood Watch, and she abandons her home to wander the coastal hinterland, a series of hollowed out art towns still inhabited only patchily by retirees and weekenders from the city whom the crisis hasn’t enfolded quite yet, or so it seems at first.
Throughout the book, Marnie’s memory loss combines with nostalgia to a nearly dreamlike extent, forming “a habitation, the place she [speaks] from” (p. 9). She isn’t sure how people in the past thought, she writes Tennent, but she imagines it’s better than now, a “liquid world” (p. 40) in which everyone engages in fruitless projects, moving back and forth on the same stretch of highway, burying things and digging them up again, fishing them out of the surf only to be told they should probably put them back, and waiting for things that never appear. In this aching sense of non-direction, of exhausted possibilities and spiritual abandonment, we can clearly see not the world of a near future under attack from the astral plane, but a refracted image of our own.
The most noticeable aspect of the novel’s story is that, despite having influenced life on a massive scale, nothing much is known about the apparently invading beings called “the iGhetti.” Except for Hampson, a mad scientist with his own personal SETI program, no one seems equipped to fill this explanatory void, which extends even to themselves. People’s “blunted … understanding of what had happened” left them “unsure of where—or perhaps even who—they were” (p. 7). The novel’s crisis is less an invasion than a suite of epistemic failures best conveyed by the line, “It had been a long time since anyone was able to make sense of anything” (p. 12).
The iGhetti leave more than just an epistemic chasm. Hallucinatory folds in reality called “bad patches” appear, some of them stationary and others roving “like fogs or showers of rain” (p. 30). The common response to a bad patch is to “avoid mentioning it,” in keeping with the narrative’s ethos that “Whether a person could rescue anything from their individual circumstances would now depend … on what they could ignore” (p. 28). Denial as a response to everything to do with the iGhetti positions them as a kind of collective unconscious, an amalgamation of all acts of self-deception—like an unpaid psychic debt built up over some appalling stretch of time. Tennent’s childhood encounter with a bad patch—the fall of an unmarked, phantasmal helicopter into the Thames—was formative. He stopped trusting other people when they didn’t find the event as exciting as he did, and he stopped trusting society as an enterprise when the invasion of which it was a fragment went largely unheeded: His faith that we as a species respond to such events with appropriate change shattered. “A month later, things are still the same; everyone else is right and you were wrong” (p. 31).
Coextensive with the pall of confusion created by the iGhetti, a sense of transience, absence, and negation suffuses the prose:
“There was nothing new … The house looked exhausted. There was no one to live in it anyway.” (p. 15)
“… out into the nowhere of the old customs zone… The roads were empty everywhere.” (p. 33)
Indeed, from the start, Tennent and the artefact are themselves already spectres, since Tennent plans to sell the artefact and move on to somewhere else. For his fellow beachcombers, he will dissolve into the objects he leaves behind. (Worth noting is that “Tennent” is close to “tenant,” a temporary resident, while the name Phillip means “fond of horses,” the horse’s skull being a symbol of death in Harrison’s work.) Likewise, Marnie, while watching an angry gathering of neighbors in front of her house, suddenly has a feeling of herself as nothing more than a story they are telling each other; afterward, she flees the neighborhood. There is a poignant kind of denial of themselves as fully human in this. Yet, Tennent’s and Marnie’s denials are just drops in a sea of self-evasion.
Another void brought on by the iGhetti is the loss of the European continent, obscured by a veil of mist that comes and goes. Scores of people who see no future in the UK board ferries for it and are never heard from again. One of them is Tennent’s on-and-off lover, Alice, who asks him to go with her. “There’s nothing wrong with the rest of the world,” she says. “It’s only this shithole” (p. 95). But Tennent turns her down, reiterating the lesson he learned in childhood: “There’s nothing out there.” Later, however, he himself suggests leaving for the continent, raising the question of whether he was protecting or denying himself with his earlier refusal. Tennent’s contradictory position—at once self-serving and self-undercutting—is part of a dialectic appearing in several forms throughout the book. “Projects” form another part, an example of which Marnie tells Tennent about:
Since you left London, enormous trucks have been moving loads of shingle up and down the same mile-long stretch of coast. They're supposed to be building a new border control facility, but it all seems so random. (p. 47)
Part of the little information we receive about the iGhetti is that they believe all projects “are inherently good. They are good because they are projects” (p. 16). But projects are future-oriented. Since the future proceeds from the present, and the present is seeped in delusion, they all run aground. The use of the word recalls Sartre’s “fundamental project,” the overarching course by which we, as individuals and collectively, choose who we will become. So the failure of projects means that we have given up on ourselves and the possibility of discovering who we are. In this way, “keep calm and carry on,” a mentality that is supposed to protect oneself and one’s community, actually undermines what makes us human, and life worth living, in the first place.
No knowledge, no future, and no way out. One would be forgiven for thinking so much absence would make for a listless read, yet, paradoxically, it generates a strong sense of presence and atmosphere:
Ash-light filled the room. It was a kind of light, he thought, that negated them both. It made everything remote from everything else. (p. 85)
There is comfort in this: The loneliness of a world emptying itself out and the pathos of collapse are hallmarks of disaster fiction, abandoned houses and empty streets welcome conventions like the “big dumb objects” of space opera. Yet, Harrison’s stories and the idea of comfort mix about as well as metallic sodium and water, and he never follows convention without flipping it: “A good ground rule for writing in any genre,” he says in the aforementioned interview, “is [to] start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself. … Ask what it’s afraid of, what it’s trying to hide—then write that.”
When several characters leave the story, Marnie is chauffeured inland by the artefact and Harrison fills this vacuum with a kind of chiral life, the existence of which was previously hinted at in images of plant species creeping and boundary zones shifting. Unevenly populated coastal towns in some halfway state towards decay crossfade into sunlit spaces and a sense of fullness that feels somehow off-putting—“the qualities of a ‘wrong’ UK” (p. 151). Negations and absences subside, and more positive, lively, and vibrant imagery takes their place; people appear who seem genuinely unaware that they are in a disaster story. We witness a kind of “spiritual … gentrification” of the book (p. 25). All the while, Marnie is getting fed alien fruit by her driver, losing physical strength, and being absorbed into an unnerving parody of family.
At an inflection point the other side of which we sense some peril awaits her, Marnie stands looking out the window of her room. Suddenly, absence and negation return, denying sight of what we now suspect are the architects of Marnie’s predicament:
The tractor was out there every night, sometimes with lights, sometimes without: you could never tell if the old man was aboard or not. At night, you never saw the dog. Even with the moon up like this, nothing much could be made out in the shadow of the woods. (p. 182)
Though there’s a creepiness to this, these negations feel like a familiar refuge. We welcome absence as a cocoon state from which further visual confrontation by, and knowledge of, the entities can be staved off. We don’t want to see them. The reader becomes complicit in the denial—the false comfort—we’ve been warned against throughout the book. This is one of the great conjuring tricks of the novel, the kind of effect that fiction exists for in the first place.
All of this is also communicated, bewilderingly, at an even smaller scale in the writing. The End of Everything seethes with paired antonyms: “in and out”; “up and down”; “backwards and forwards,” etc. It feels as if they appear on every other page of the novel. Beyond representing the directionless “projects” of a cowed humanity, these paired words disclose repetition as both a subject and a structural element of the book. Like a recurring hallucination of Hampson’s—in which a “clever little neon staircase” gradually unfurls beyond the limits of vision, where he can still sense it lingering for some time—the scale of repetition expands to encompass the entire story (p. 75). Actions as simple as “Marnie … [taking] up the bowl again” develop into her burying Tennent’s gun only to dig it up on the next page (p. 11). iGhetti-made buildings appear and last “a week or a month before toppling slowly away” (p. 27). So deeply ingrained is the book’s logic of repetition that when the artefact wanders off, Tennent looks for it along the coast roads, “assuming that [it] would try to make its way back to the sea” (p. 33).
Returns like these ramify into more abstract ones. In an old email to Tennent, Marnie tells him, “Don’t, whatever you do, do what I did with my life, and let your cleverness turn you into an observer” (p. 45). This echoes Tennent seeing that bad patch as a child, and is echoed again when he waits silently in line with Alice leading up to her departure for the lost continent—and yet again when he later becomes “a helpless passenger in his own car” (p. 194). It is as if everyone exists on some kind of endlessly nested, infernal circuit by which they are kept from changing or moving forward. “[Hampson] groaned. ‘I’m still in there,’ he said” (p. 109).
Humanity in Harrison's novel seems to be seeking not just a return of the lost object of desire (in this story’s case, a way of life), but also a spiritual fulfillment of the world and mankind’s promise. Perhaps if they can perfect repetition—enact an exact return with their anxious behavioral loops—then a door will open through which restoration, like a savior, can enter the world. At the very least, maybe they can freeze things the way they are, and stave off further unwanted distortions to their lives. Yet, things do change: mist “gathers and gathers, … moving a fraction closer every day”; plant life creeps forward; the artefact grows (p. 47). Both perfect repetition and a corollary restoration of the past are impossible, a disavowal of the world to which change is inherent.
A series of chapters, all called “the Sign,” offers an image that encapsulates this. It depicts a bad patch in which a vehicle driven by an old man crashes in front of Marnie. The scene repeats several times, in a cycle that advances little by little—in each iteration, initial paragraphs are shed and new ones added. It is not a repetition confined to this book: Some descriptive elements come from Harrison’s short story “The Horse of Iron …” (1989), and a previous novel, Light (2002), as well as others besides. The revisitation triggers nostalgia for those stories, but the reader is pulled from such memories—“the memorial benches” at the crash site are “uproot[ed]”—and pushed deeper into this one (p. 121). Like some schematic of subatomic particle collisions, a smaller loop briefly flares up, sputters, then whisks away inside the larger one: “The driver claps his hands to his face and claps his hands to his face. He claps his hands to his face.”
We all want to be rescued from repetition—the repetition of our jobs; of decrepit psychopaths in power; of failed relationships and failures within relationships; of the banal diversions of popular entertainment from the corporate defilement of all life. Yet we cocoon ourselves inside repetition to protect ourselves from change, not accepting that it will happen with or without us, and will likely have a worse outcome for our refusing to face it. Images like “the Sign” show us that it is impossible to ossify ourselves: We will decay inside our self-imposed loops, too (indeed, there is a chapter titled “disintegration loops”). Recalling how a defensive denial of the iGhetti’s influence in fact sabotages humanity’s ability to move forward, the drive to recuperate a prior way of life and ward off unwanted change through blind repetition likewise condemns us to a downward spiral.
In the same way that Tennent’s names offer clues to his disposition, they also condense the book’s stance on repetition and reveal a tension between the central characters. “Tennent,” of course, is nearly a palindrome, a word the letters of which read the same in both directions, reflecting that impossible desire to establish something perfectly repeatable as a kind of path backwards in time, or else as a static and protective eternal loop. But the “n” at the end tilts it toward the future: Throughout the book, Tennent is still looking for a way out. “Phillip” is also a near-palindrome, but this name, used when following Marnie's point of view, is weighted in front by its “h,” pushed toward the past. In one of his missives to her, Tennent tells Marnie, “You and I go over and over the past too much”—he wants to go forward while she wants to go back (p. 47).
“Tennent” and “Phillip” being used in different chapters also conveys a sense of two identities—one for himself and one for Marnie. This reflects how others experience us distinctly from how we experience ourselves: Like Tennent and Marnie, we are seemingly isolated from one another at some unbridgeable level. In one of his Viriconium stories, “The Explanations of the Ancient Airboatman” (1980), Harrison writes that:
Each sentient species perceives … [the material universe] in a different way, generating out of this perception its physical and metaphysical Umwelt: its little bubble or envelope of ‘reality.’ These perceptual systems are hermetic and admit of no alternative. (Viriconium, p. 244)
In a recent interview, he puts it more starkly: “The cat that eats a housefly has no concept of the universe that the housefly lives in. The housefly that’s eaten has no idea what a cat is.” Regarding the iGhetti, Hampson writes in his journal, “We know nothing about their actual intentions, or about any traceable line of causality between our actions and theirs. They may not even know we are here” (p. 80). Like the cat and the housefly, the gap between iGhetti and human Umwelten does not permit mutual understanding. Throughout the novel, however, this becomes secondary to how people embody this quandary relative to one another, as though the human Umwelt had splintered, and now everyone walks around in their own individual reality. It is stated more than once that “long before the iGhetti arrived, everyone was playing out a separate fantasy” (p. 74). Why, the reader wonders, is anyone concerned with understanding the iGhetti when they are failing to understand and interact with other human beings?
Nowhere else in the story is this impasse better represented than through speech. The novel signposts this in its first chapter:
Tennent met a woman on her way down. … They studied the horizon together for a moment, and she asked him what condition the sea was in down there that day.
“Eventually it’ll turn into speech,” Tennent said, without knowing why.
They both laughed. (p. 4)
This is only the first of several instances of characters responding with non sequiturs, needlessly repeating themselves, blurting out some kind of internal dialogue in what sounds like a private language, talking past one another, or pointedly not responding at all:
“I don’t know where all the snowflakes came from!” Marnie shouted after her. … The woman went on a little further … then turned back suddenly.
“Excuse me?” she said.
“Oh nothing,” said Marnie.
“Only I thought you might have implied something about my dog,” the woman said. “People often do. They’re offended by him for reasons not entirely clear …” (pp. 38-9)
Strange speech acts also become a kind of secret weapon in Harrison’s bag of tricks, one that lets him temper the melancholy that might otherwise smother the novel: There’s a lot of absurdist humor in people saying near-incomprehensible things, talking past one another, and generally acting out with main character energy. The artefact (who grows into “the driver”), especially, gets a lot of mileage:
When she suggested this, the driver only laughs and, taking its hands briefly off the wheel, waggles its strong fingers. “Jazz hands,” it says. “Jazz hands!” (p. 161)
The book’s fractious exchanges extend beyond speech, too, turning other, seemingly unrelated processes into failed or incomplete attempts at communication:
This she displayed as if the violin were in itself an explanation of something. (p. 22)
From these quiet, opaque forays, it brought back … items … [Marnie] couldn’t help interpreting … as a language. (p. 157)
It made her feel as though … she would open her mouth, gape, and some unassuming liquid would pour out. No boundaries would be transgressed by this vomit. It would be almost cultural … (p. 171)
The word “cultural” here is instructive. Culture plays a large role in the book, mostly confined to Marnie’s recollections, indicating its loss from society. Harrison, in the same interview, defines culture as that which “saves having to reinvent our relations with others every time we meet”:
It provides a suite of shared assumptions without which no social mechanism can actually operate. A culture is the ground rules … To go back to the cat and the housefly, the cat can’t know the culture of the fly.
To the extent that it entails an inability or unwillingness to share a set of “ground rules,” The End of Everything’s vision of a humanity in which each person lives out their individual fantasy means the end of culture. Hence a scene in which a violinist is trampled and her violin destroyed. Likewise, in a memory of Marnie’s studio—a place where she leaves brushes out for visitors “as if … they were painters too”—Tennent’s mother drops by, “look[s] around … dismissively,” and tells her, “No one will be doing this soon” (pp. 130-1).
The book’s uncanny valley of performing being a person, which gives “alienation” a wry new meaning, crescendos in its climax—one of the weirdest scenes Harrison has written, a hybrid of hilarity and horror that emerges as an effect of the dialogue running throughout something deeply unsettling. In this way, perhaps the most unsettling thing about The End of Everything is how the book leads us to retroactively doubt whether many of the characters we encountered are human beings or artefacts; we become participants in a skeptical worldview and are thereby confronted with our own individualist reveries.
Essentially, the paradoxically self-destructive attempts at self-preservation throughout the story have their origin in a kind of egoism, a refusal to accept that we affect and need other people. The contradiction embedded in the retreat into individual fantasy is that this isolation destroys culture, which is inherently communal; yet culture is largely responsible for our subjectivity—how we experience the world and generate our individual identities—in the first place. Recall that, at the start of the novel, Tennent and Marnie excise themselves from their respective communities, which sets them both on a path towards their own dissolution. From multiple angles of approach, The End of Everything wonders whether human beings can ever be made to occupy the same world as each other again, much less cooperate to make a better one.
In the end, this novel isn’t about our disaster, or even a disaster at all. It’s about how fraught, frightening, and lonely a project it is to make and shore up an identity—to say nothing of a life—while having no faith in other people (a category that in Harrison’s fiction also includes ourselves). “Faith,” here, works in both senses of “trust” and “belief in the existence of.” The only journal entry of Hampson’s that Marnie keeps and thinks about, tossing the rest into the ocean, is the one that decides that the iGhetti are not really present, but merely a mirage—refracted images from across some infinitely distant horizon of being. In the next sentence, he claims that we might be too. Hampson is a man who used his own parents’ entrails, while keeping them alive, to wire an antenna with which to talk to aliens rather than live with other people. After considering this journal entry, Marnie licks someone’s cremated remains off her hand like she did flour in one of the early chapters.
“The enigmas of reality,” Harrison says in another interview, “as in, say, quantum mechanics, aren’t the real mysteries any more. The real mysteries are what the fuck we’ve done to the world, why we did it, and what epistemology we used to perform this act of vandalism.” The answer, according to The End of Everything, is solipsism. How can the reader respond except by wanting to see others, and be seen by them, as actual, real, and fully human? The novel implies that, if we want to shake ourselves out of denial, snap our cycles of doomed repetition, and try to build a better world instead of wallowing in a fatalistic stupor, this is the only place to start.
All this said, and in keeping with the spirit of its content, it is impossible to adequately convey the totality of what Harrison has achieved with this book. It may be the most technically incredible work to date from a writer whose oeuvre is rightly held up as an exemplar of craft—to borrow Simon Ings’s formulation, it is one of the great novels of his or anyone’s career—and yet, its rigour takes nothing away from but only reinforces the emotional core of the story and how viscerally its images and ideas haunt.
At some point during my second read-through, I began to feel a little off-kilter, at times unnerved by how the energies of the book transferred beyond it. Beside the line “They looked tired but relieved, outfitted in smart casual as if for a day at the office” (p. 94), I had written in the margin, “like a monk freed,” but couldn’t understand why. It didn't help that I had used a light pencil to reduce distraction: Resembling so many of the faded, diminishing, and uncertain objects in the story, most of what I had written was now illegibly faint. Was this leakage from the book itself? The next line in the text: “Their anxieties were beginning to dissolve in the salt sunshine.”