Book Notes: You Should Come With Me Now by M. John Harrison
Finished 8/28/20
A fantastic collection by a science/speculative fiction master.
M. John Harrison is a brave writer. That’s the best way I can describe him, though it probably sounds trite. He writes out of a tradition of science fiction and fantasy (indeed, he was present at one of its Big Bangs–New Worlds magazine), but refuses genre fiction’s longstanding commitment to foregrounding plot. Instead, Harrison is interested (obsessed?) with how people live with discomfort, or rather, make discomfort comfortable enough that they barely notice it. Sometimes that discomfort is otherworldy, and sometimes it is entirely mundane or even unplaceable. This is a daring and difficult thing to do, certainly to do well. It also takes him to some places that are both familiar for science fiction and entirely alien to it. For one thing, his characters are rich and weary, not the dark heroes or brilliant explorers of most science fiction. You can read their entire lives in the brief sentences he writes about them. For another, alienation and chilly modernity are lurking in the background of everything Harrison writes about. Human connection, friendship and solidarity are fleeting or nonexistent to Harrison’s protagonists and secondary characters. Any outrageous, supernatural, or impossible forces they encounter end up being just an exterior barrier, a pressure acting on them.
Harrison’s prose is striking and subtle. Every sentence delights and begs more questions, as Harrison uses ambiguity and uncertainty as modes of storytelling. He’s comfortable with uncertainty, or at least with leaving his readers uncertain. Sometimes, getting caught in the trap of genre, I found myself wondering whether I had missed the fantastical element, and would read stories again looking for a hidden ghost or alien or something else. But this says less about Harrison’s place in genre fiction and more about my need for the comfortable dictates of genre fiction.
This collection mixes some short stories with very short flash fiction–a paragraph or two. Like most short story collections, there were stories that grabbed me and others that didn’t, so your mileage may vary. Here are few that stuck with me:
“In Autotelia” is an absurdly simple story–a minor bureaucrat goes to work in the eponymous city which is perhaps metaphysically adjacent to London, spends a mundane day on the job, and then returns home to London. For other writers, such a story would likely take place off scene, replaced with more traditional investigations of this extradimensional city, populated by people who may or may not be human. But for Harrison, the city of Autotelia becomes a backdrop for exploring questions of immigration, neoliberal accounting, gender politics, and alienation. This sits with the best science fiction tradition of the future or the otherworldly holding up a mirror to us.
“Entertaining Angels Unawares” is a story about two men who repair the tower of a rural chapel. As the men work, they talk about their dreams, which grow increasingly violent and apocalyptic. The ending is strange and ambiguous, with the narrator abandoning his work partner to climb the church, and wander the gravestones of the churchyard. It’s unclear whether he’s possessed, crazy, or inspired by the murderous dreams of his partner.
“The Crisis” is perhaps one of the most straightforward pieces of fantastic fiction in the collection, where an area of London has become infected with supernatural force that transforms or repels all attempts to enter or subdue it. But for Harrison, such an invasion reflect London’s increasingly inhospitable housing situation, and the story, though strange and grotesque, seemed to me to be a commentary on the neoliberal city, with its exlcusion and privatization of public space, increasing and increasingly disposable vagrant popualtion, and a middle class somewhat blithely making accomodations to all of it.
Some of the stories are funny–“Psychoarchaeology” takes place in a future (present?) England where technology allows enthusiasts to hunt for dead and buried kings, from the comfort of their car and their fast food, echoing the furor and excitement around the re-discovery of Richard III.
I’m still enamoured of Harrison’s Viroconium cycle (and a Viroconium story, “Jack of Mercy’s” appears in this collection), and some of these stories sit with the best of that work, and as with Viroconium, deserve and reward repeat readings. This is great, subtle stuff, and well worth the time of anyone who enjoys fantastic (in all senses of the word) and engaging fiction.
