The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again: Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2020

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Their world around London and the Midlands, is a run-down character in its own right, sodden with rains but also seeming to be on the verge of returning to some primal watery state. 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. Two years ago I had the pleasure of reading a range of innovative fiction from UK/Irish small independent presses as part of the Republic of Consciousness Prize. Her guide is Pearl, a waitress at a local diner, who turns out to be part of a web of relationships that once included Victoria’s mother. She and the land around the town itself near the River Severn begin to reveal many secrets.

Harrison keeps the reader at a distance and his cards close, the narrative in turn is slippery and out of the reader's reach. Elements are at the corner of one's eye, fading away when given attention. Haze envelops the lands sunk in murk, now thrumming to rise. I love books which make me work, which don't serve everything on a plate, are never fully graspable. But this was too evasive for my taste. Yet, the writing's lush, the atmosphere uncannily alluring. It will work for others.

The judges on the shortlist

present: You Should Come with Me Now, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again and Wish I Were Here [ edit ] There is a lot to admire in the book – particularly its simultaneous air of a book where the author knows precisely what is going on and the reader has really very little idea at all but always feels on the verge of making sense of things. Which of course leads the reader very much in the situation of the two main protagonists.

co-winner of the 2002 James Tiptree, Jr. Award; British SF Award nominee, 2002; [41] Arthur C. Clarke Award nominee, 2003 [42] John Harrison, M. (23 November 2017). You Should Come with Me Now: Stories of Ghosts. Comma Press. ISBN 9781910974346. The first book, The Pastel City (1971), presents a civilization in decline where medieval social patterns clash with the advanced technology and super-scientific energy weapons that the citizens of the city know how to use but have forgotten how to engineer. The more complex second novel is A Storm of Wings (1982). It is set eighty years later than The Pastel City. and stylistically it is denser and more elaborate. A race of intelligent insects is invading Earth as human interest in survival wanes. Harrison brilliantly depicts the workings of civilization on the verge of collapse and the heroic efforts of individuals to help it sustain itself a little longer. A third novel, entitled In Viriconium (1982) (US title: The Floating Gods), was nominated for the Guardian Fiction Prize during 1982. It is a moody portrait of artistic subcultures in a city beset by a mysterious plague.Slippery and dreamlike, a profoundly and eerily disquieting experience . . . future critics will find in his writing a distinct, clear-eyed vision of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century life 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. Beautifully written, utterly compelling, and like much of Harrison's works, there are scenes of such sublime strangeness that they linger in the mind long after the novel is over. As such it is another triumph from one of our finest writers, and essential reading for 2020 Meanwhile Victoria has left London having inherited her mother's house in Shropshire, near to the cradle of the industrial revolution. But the local water table is rising, and the eccentric locals circulate clandestine copies of The Water Babies:

The impression of wisdom radiates from the feeblest of their jokes. You look covertly at your watch even as you think, “How delightful!”Since 1991, Harrison has reviewed fiction and nonfiction for The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, the Times Literary Supplement and The New York Times.

They were trying to decide what to do with Tim Swann if they caught him. By then there were twenty or thirty of them, milling about the metalled pathway by the old tennis courts. Their voices, assertive yet not entirely confident on one side, polite and fluting on the other, rose and fell in the cooling air. Widely acclaimed for his science fiction and fantasy, Harrison has been described by Robert Macfarlane as “a writer to whom the question of genre is an irrelevance”. Reviewing The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again in the Guardian, Olivia Laing called Harrison the “missing evolutionary link between William Burroughs and Virginia Woolf, bringing together new blooms of language, gathering up advertising copy and internet lingo and arranging them in startling hybrid forms”. Since his crisis it was true of all Shaw’s own encounters with people that he lagged behind the leading edge. Events seemed to happen too fast and too completely for him — either that, or nothing seemed to be happening to him at all. Before it he had been a normal human being. Now he saw himself as only partially connected to the stream of events. 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.On one level it can be seen as a pro-Brexit, pro England-ex-London book: what after all does the title represent except for (quite literally) levelling up? And there is nothing wrong with that – in fact in a literary world which is almost entirely left wing, anti-Brexit, liberal, secular etc – a different voice is welcome. But the author is more left wing, more anti business than even most of his contemporaries I think.