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

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the demented, unpredictable, immeasurably fortunate geology, fuel for the industrial light and magic that had once changed the world: the iron money, the engine money, the steam and tontine money, the raw underground money hidden in unconformable strata, secret seams and voids, in jumbled shales, fireclays, tar, coal measures and thinly bedded limestone – to exit as seeps and springs above the heritage museums and leisure trails and decommissioned railways; while associated subsidence gnawed quietly away at the superficial architecture of the Gorge

John Harrison, M. (15 April 2021). The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again. Orion Publishing Group, Limited. ISBN 9780575096363. Beginning with The Wild Road during 1996 and concluding with Nonesuch (2001), Harrison coauthored four associated fantasies about cats with Jane Johnson, under the joint pseudonym of "Gabriel King". [14] A Viriconium story adapted in collaboration with illustrator Ian Miller, based on short story of the same name They are a strange lot. They hardly communicate when spoken to. They gather in rooms in a boarding house where rooms and occupants shift around. They get together in groups to clog dance and frequently urge Victoria to read a nineteenth century children’s story called The Water Babies.

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. Our first entry into this waking dream is a fellow named Shaw. In his late fifties, Shaw is emerging from a strange kind of nervous breakdown, and trying to reassemble the fragments of his life. (We will encounter revelatory bits and piece of his past, especially during his achingly combative visits to his Alzheimer’s-ridden mother, but the exact lineaments of Shaw’s history will remain nebulous.) As a move towards stability, Shaw rents a room in a shabby lodging house. His next-door neighbor, never seen, is a source of strange noises and odd comings and goings. 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? Tim also has a blog The Water House and has written an accompanying book (which is one of the items Shaw sells to the shops): present: You Should Come with Me Now, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again and Wish I Were Here [ edit ]

And so it goes with Harrison’s newest, a disturbing tale of two hapless lives contoured by an enigmatic conspiracy. The impression of wisdom radiates from the feeblest of their jokes. You look covertly at your watch even as you think, “How delightful!” But M John Harrison’s masterpiece, composed of regular chapters in which regular sentences form regular paragraphs, is precisely about not noticing when things are out of the ordinary. Framed as a conventional narrative, it contains nothing conventional whatsoever. The novel’s inventiveness is embedded in its very DNA, and the resurfacing of a primeval genetic coding also happens to be its subject. 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.a b c Macfarlane, Robert (20 July 2012). "Robert Macfarlane: rereading Climbers by M. John Harrison". The Guardian. Guardian News and Media Limited . Retrieved 10 May 2013. 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).

Time held all this loosely but carefully in its hand. She was to understand, Victoria knew, that she was seeing a future. People had found fresh ways to live. Or perhaps it wasn't, as far as the Gorge was concerned, a future at all, only an intersection of possibilities. unconformable layers of time, myths from a geography long forgotten or not yet invented. 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 The short story "A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium" (1985, later retitled "A Young Man's Journey to London") is set in our world and concerns the idea of escape from it.

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

Like most writers whose origin is in F/SF, I don't engage my own humanity sufficiently to earn a visible X on that literary map ... It doesn't help to be very good at something when the majority of readers, reviewers and literary editors ask of it with a kind of puzzled distaste, "Yes, but why would you do this?" This is a fact we all have to learn, not just radical geek proselytisers like Egan or Charles Stross. To win a worthwhile literary award, you have to write about people: after all, that's what we are. But I wouldn't mind having a Booker nomination some day. Who wouldn't.

As Harrison’s Viriconium novels reveal the limits of fantasy by refusing a suspension of disbelief, the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy effectively destroys science fiction by pushing its tropes so hard and so far they begin to implode. Harrison’s real-world novels toy obsessively with the horror genre and with the atmosphere and personality of Weird fiction. One of the dominant themes of The Sunken Land is that of non-communication, the lacuna that is opened up when what is seen and felt and intuited is so alien and so terrible it is a prelude to madness. Shaw drifts along, always detached from his own life, at one point admitting that he is really in a panic and unable to do much to change himself. He visits his mother, suffering from dementia, in a care home, and she constantly urges him to get on with his life. She keeps calling him by different names, urges him to bring out albums of old photos and then tears them to pieces, as if she is saying there is nothing in the past to cling to. It is late in the novel before he finally experiences a liberating moment that brings him closer to new possibilities in his life.

The Judges

Harrison is a linguistic artist, constructing sentences that wrap and weave like a stream of consciousness without ever breaking focus...every sentence is a decadent bite of a new sensation A lot of literary fiction has become its own cliché and it's become very mannered. Of course there's a lot of appallingly bad pulp fiction but when this stuff finds something new and locates itself as part of the tradition it's as good as anything. There are some writers in that tradition in terms of their use of language who as prose stylists are the equal of anyone alive. I'm thinking of people like John Crowley, M John Harrison, Gene Wolfe." Marshall, Richard. "The Road to Perdido: An Interview with China Mieville". 3:AM Magazine . Retrieved 20 January 2020. Subsequent novels and short stories, such as The Course of the Heart (1991) and "Empty" (1993), were set between London and the Peak District. They have a lyrical style and a strong sense of place, and take their tension from characteristically conflicting veins of mysticism and realism.