Gollancz, 2004, 436pp, £8.99 0 575 07593 7

reviewed in Vector 239, January-February 2005

In a wholly inadequate blurb, the Times Literary Supplement is quoted on the cover of this book declaring that ‘Harrison is a visionary writer’; a partial truth, at best. Like many of Britain’s better writers, I am sure that Harrison was inspired by the mad genius of William Blake, but his aesthetic is entirely other, his refrain is the glory of decay, defeat and failure, the petty achievements that mark our going down, the mordant compromises we laud as victory. If Utopia is not a place but a process, if we humans could not stand the perfection of achieving utopia, then he might far better be described as a utopian writer. His characters are desiccated by their dreams, the whispered land of Egnaro or Viriconium or London whose promise is forever out of reach. The stories are peopled by men – in the earlier stories, at least, it is practically always men; the few women are hard and bitter, regarding the men with a sudden accusation the men cannot understand or cope with – whose loneliness drives them always to implicate some other in the disintegration of their dreams. These are tales of resentful acquaintance that masquerades as friendship.

They are not easy stories to read; they are not meant to be. They are tangential, allusive, inviting us in to some realm of undeserved disappointment whose psychogeography we cannot share and may never fully understand. God is a giant beetle situated at the end of a mist-bound motorway. Curious, half-forgotten rituals promise access to some undefined pleroma, but we see only an aftermath in which it is never clear whether the ritual was a success or not, or what, indeed, might compromise success. Egnaro is a place that is known only through mishearing and misreadings, but its chimerical figure clouds and colours the rain-washed streets of a Manchester that is, if anything, hyper-real. In ‘Old Women’ he describes artless, amateur paintings: ‘Curious failures of perspective led your eye into impossible positions behind or to the left of each scene, suggesting that the real world lies oblique to our own’ (p121). He is describing the curse and promise of his own fiction.

These stories are full of secrets that are ‘meaningless before you know it … and worthless when you do’ (‘Egnaro’, pp114-5). And yet, again and again his characters find themselves impelled by such secrets. This is not so much a quest for meaning – typically, Harrison’s characters have given up any notion that there might be such a thing as a meaning in life – but rather a desire for something drab and insubstantial that might still, paradoxically, lend substance to the world. The way to Viriconium – or ‘London’, as it has here become – is through the mirror in a Gents toilet in a Huddersfield café.

There is an urge to escape – the crags of northern England feature regularly as some sort of counterweight to the dispirited cities where so many of the stories fail to achieve their apotheosis – but never any real awareness of what to escape from, or where one might escape to. A daredevil rock climber, paralysed in a road accident, buys a high-powered motorbike he could never hope to ride. These are autumn stories, cold and rain-sodden, pregnant with death and the dark turning of the year. Even if a story is set in summer, as ‘Running Down’, for instance, the heat is stultifying and unnatural.

The twenty-four stories gathered here, in other words, provide an incomparable glimpse into the entropic mystery that is M. John Harrison’s fiction. But it is not a new glimpse, there is no story here that will be unfamiliar to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Harrison’s work. Rather this book gathers together all seven of the stories previously collected as The Ice Monkey (1983), and all 14 of the stories previously collected as Travel Arrangements (2000). Only three stories were not in either of these two collections: ‘A Young Man’s Journey to London’ which, as ‘A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium’, was first collected in Viriconium Nights (1985); ‘The Great God Pan’, which grew into The Course of the Heart (1992); and ‘Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring’, which grew into Signs of Life (1997). The truth is that, despite a back cover blurb which talks of Harrison inspiring readers on both sides of the Atlantic, he never really made an impact in America until Light (2002). This collection was originally put together by an American small press, Night Shade Books, in 2003 as an attempt to break him in the American market. Now republished by Harrison’s usual British publisher it has been shorn of all the introductions that might have provided valuable insights into this most enigmatic of writers, as well as a reason to buy a collection of already collected stories.

It is, perhaps, a failure of nerve that has so denuded this collection, but it is a really sad loss, and a wasted opportunity. With authorial or critical guidance we would have had a wonderful chance to see the changing patterns over the years in Harrison’s work. The odd specialist knowledge of plants and flowers displayed in the early stories is replaced (except in the beautiful and atypical ‘Seven Guesses of the Heart) by an odd specialist knowledge of fast cars. There is a similar transmigration in setting: Peckham and Barnes replacing Huddersfield and Stalybridge, while the wild places in ‘Anima’ and ‘Empty’ have now become symbolic more of loss than of escape. And the men, despite flexing their machismo in loud fast cars, have become passive and helpless in the face of such incomprehensible women as Isobel Avens. Harrison is a fascinating writer, not a visionary, he is too bleak and too humane for that, but still a writer with a distinct and moving vision. He is one of the essential writers of British fantastic literature; anyone who does not know his work cannot know what the genre is capable of, and for them this is a book they must have. But for everyone else this book can only serve as a reminder of stories we already know well, and the absent introductions represent a loss that may be apt, but is nevertheless deeply regrettable.