Yet the predominant thought still remains that, despite all that complexity, the often hilarious, Pinteresque dialogue, the tantalising sense of some overarching grand narrative message, it really might just be about people who are terminally unhappy. Although when there’s so many of them, and their own behaviour so often inexplicable to themselves, you might conclude that England really is, as Hilary Mantel and the Queen, amongst others, have suggested, subject to dark forces.

In Don DeLillo’s The Names, another novel concerned with a mysterious cult, the archaeologist Owen Brademas remarks, “If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating, to work in the margins. You are the ghoul of literature.” M. John Harrison is certainly the ghoul we need at this moment as those fringe cultic energies he’s always narrated with such elliptical grandeur become more and more mainstream. This lifelong eschewal of genre classification is evident in Settling the World, a new selection of short stories spanning the course of his career published by Comma Press. It runs the gamut of all the bookshop categories: science fiction, fantasy, literary fiction. Some even seem to create new genres altogether. ‘Running Down’ can only be described as ‘geological horror’.

2020 Winner: The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison

Harrison's first short story collection The Machine in Shaft Ten (1975) collects many (but not all) of his early short tales, from such sources as New Worlds Quarterly, New Worlds Monthly, New Writings in SF, Transatlantic Review and others. "The Lamia and Lord Cromis" is an early Viriconium tale. The moody "London Melancholy" features a ruined future London haunted by winged people. None of the stories, with the exception of "Running Down", (a psychological horror tale about a man who is literally a walking disaster area), have been reprinted in his subsequent short story collections. "The Bringer with the Window" features Dr Grishkin, a character also appearing in The Centauri Device, seemingly in Harrison's recurring fictional city of Viriconium. The novel open with Shaw, in his 50s, living in a bedsit in the area between East Sheen and Little Chelsea, and undergoing a crisis of sorts.

Reading M. John Harrison’s The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again was a pleasure from beginning to end. It’s an unusually rich novel: intelligent, thoughtful, both emotionally credible and emotionally perfect. The Sunken Land. . . holds multiple facets for this reader, with each facet enjoyable on its own: weird characters; head-scratching relationships; contemporary settings and life skewered; and a sometimes fantastical plot line threaded with The Water-Babies, Charles Kingsley’s nineteenth century British children’s classic. The Sunken Land. . .’s facets work in concert to magnify each other, yet a strength of The Sunken Land. . . is how this reader could choose which facets to focus on while paying less attention to others. First novel of the Viriconium sequence. London: NEL, 1971 (pbk, first edition); New York: Avon Books, 1971; New York: Doubleday, 1972 (first hc edition). These editions dedicated to Maurice & Lynette Collier and Linda & John Lutter. Reprint: London: Unwin, 1987 (dedicated to Dave Holmes). But too often (and particularly when describing people – I felt the language was impressive but the comparison simply did not represent anything I could recognise. Meanwhile, Victoria is up in the Midlands, renovating her dead mother’s house, trying to make new friends. But what, exactly, happened to her mother? Why has the local waitress disappeared into a shallow pool in a field behind the house? And why is the town so obsessed with that old Victorian morality tale, The Water Babies? In fact, the faeries had turned him into a water-baby. A water-baby? You never heard of a water-baby. Perhaps not. That is the very reason why this story was written. There are a great many things in the world which you never heard of; and a great many more which nobody ever heard of; and a great many things, too, which nobody will ever hear of. . .”If you want a very brief summation of what The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is about, underneath all the sifted and elegantly scrutinised psycho-geographic sediment and mythological layering, the frankly inadequate answer might be: unhappy people manifesting a nation’s woes. But to really do justice to a book this daring and multi-faceted, you’ll need to accept the fact that, like other wonderfully free-ranging, plot-allergic literary discursions, and featuring countless allusions and influences – Ballard, BS Johnson, Ann Quin, Alasdair Gray, Iain Sinclair, Muriel Spark and Fritz Leiber all seem to be in there somewhere – its elusive and often maddeningly-turbid nature is part of both its message and its considerable charm, at least for those willing to throw the map away and submit to orientation via instinct and ambience.

In The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, we witness the triumphant flowering of Harrison’s late style, in which the point is not the story but the accretion of circumstance. If Harrison’s 12th novel is “about” anything, it is about the crisis — not just Shaw’s but our own, our nation’s, the planet’s, a state of brokenness and wrong-thinking that seems to preclude the idea of acting, or even of wanting. The novel’s colors are the dense beige of mudflats, the corroded, outmoded green of a faded Polaroid. Victoria, Shaw’s occasional partner, a kindred spirit in many ways, is a lovably cynical, unhappily-lost eccentric. The main difference between the two seems to be how comparatively tethered they are. Shaw finds most people an olfactory, auditory nightmare made flesh: of the people he at first lives amongst – he will later find ‘nice people’ to live with, the suggestion not that they are especially nice but that he’s clinging onto conventional life, determined to make a virtue of it – he notices (and is rankled by) every lingering trace of their passing, every reverberating, maddening echo of their movement. Yet he’s drawn to them, needs them, loathes the fact but is consigned to it. One of his assignments is to visit a medium name Annie Swann, apparently Tim’s sister, (I say apparently because identities and relationships seem as fluid at times as the constant references to water) and record his sessions with her. Though the sessions amount to little more than her going into a trance and saying little or nothing afterward, she has a faithful following of mostly middle aged men. Shaw notes an empty space on the wall in Annie’s house that is the same size as Tim’s map, and possession of that map is a source of tension between the two.

The judges on the shortlist

All this just scratches the surface. There’s a lot more going on in this book. But then, when you read it, you realise there’s even more going on if only you could get a clear view of it. winner of the Boardman Tasker Prize. Harrison was the first writer to win this award with a work of fiction. Reissued in 2013 with an introduction by Robert Macfarlane. Shaw spends much of the novel in an excruciatingly ambivalent mood, both repelled and helplessly drawn to his fellow humans to get what he needs by way of camaraderie and companionship; he’s also often at a disgusted, or at least disquieted remove, sat alone in pubs at 11am, making awkward conversation with barmaids who rightly can’t seem to figure out what to make of him. A good ground rule for writing in any genre is: 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.

So will The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again, his first novel since 2012, be the one that catches the eye of the Booker judges? All these things are characteristic of Mr. Harrison’s writing, they are his finely honed semiotic tools, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t pushed the envelope a bit further: in "The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again" he undertook the risk of applying the approach he mostly uses in short stories, without adjusting it to the length of a novel, and thus leaving the readers to fight it or go along with it, and, consequentially, enjoy it. It's not his style I’m talking about – it is surprisingly relaxed, while maintaing its usual qualities of being elegant and sharp – but his ability to create a condensed and constant sense of wonder and anxiety, of nausea induced by depriving the readers of enough firm ground of cause and effect to stand on. In such stories there is no jumping board that would send you into the pleasant waters of an imagined world, the plank you stand on is floating on a liquid surface, true, but it’s rather questionable if it’s the sea or a lake: there’s no wind and waves, although something invisible is pushing you in the direction that you only hope is the shore. Pushed to the extreme, and put into skilled hands, it can work fantastically in a short story, but when expanded to the size of a novel, there’s always the risk of overwhelming the readers with oddness and confusing them too much (and for too long). The skilled hand, therefore, must achieve a fine balance between denying them the pleasure of feeling comfortable and letting them believe what they are used to believing, that a + b = c.

The author's own description ( https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2...) of the novel is as follows "The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again is a tale of starcrossed lovers so lonely and self-involved that they not only fail to maintain a relationship but also fail to notice a mysterious UK regime change, even though it’s more than possible their class is complicit in it." Harrison, M. John (2 April 2012). "the centauri device". The M John Harrison Blog . Retrieved 20 September 2017. Harrison won the Richard Evans Award during 1999 (named after the near-legendary figure of UK publishing) given to the author who has contributed significantly to the SF genre without concomitant commercial success. omnibus edition of the novels Signs of Life and The Course of the Heart. Its title gives a clue to the Jungian themes in Harrison's work.