The literary event of the year! A brilliant new novel by my favourite author.
In The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again, M. John Harrison taps into the weird and the uncanny in post-Brexit Britain. His relentless realist’s eye delineates the essence of this transformational contemporary moment; ungrounded, no centre, the collapse of certainty. His main protagonists, Victoria and Shaw, echo this state of loss and are themselves in troubled psychological states, both sifting through their unrecognisable pasts, a profound loss of direction and loss of meaning permeates their lives.
In impeccable prose that delineates reality down to the granular level, Harrison has a gift for elucidating the very feel of “the real world”. Tempered with this he has a poet’s eye for landscape and mood, especially expert at capturing subtle atmospheres created by the play of light.
The Guardian calls Harrison, “the missing evolutionary link between William Burroughs and Virginia Woolf, bringing together new blooms of language.” In relation to The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again, I would add the weird fiction of Arthur Machen and H.P. Lovecraft to that list, as the robust realism of the novel is punctured again and again by passages that depict the uncanny, unsettling troubled inner and outer psychological landscapes. There is a mystery at the heart of the novel, dark events only hinted at, a conspiracy alluded to. The fact that Harrison utilises the trappings and psychological effects of weird fiction and roots them in such a vivid and vital realism only adds to this novel’s deeply unsettling power.
KULCHUR KAT 