Blackwell’s on Bridge St Edinburgh, Thursday night. Nina Allan chairs; I say the words “explanatory collapse” a lot; a great night is thus ensured for all. Later we go to the Italian restaurant that used to be one of RLS’s favourite drinking holes, where I lose my favourite signing pen, Nina finds out that she’s won the Crime Writers’ Association Historical Dagger, and Jon Grimwood has the best hat.
Mary presents herself, by accident or otherwise, as having been a reserved child; as having already been an observer. She’s writing as a reserved woman who has decided to be as open as she possibly can, writing about a reserved child, one who was well able to collect and store thousands of accurate memories. While it all tumbles out, detail after detail, we nevertheless get the idea that we aren’t seeing everything. Sure enough, we aren’t. But how do we tell what’s real from what is not, when Mary admits she can’t either? She’s in therapy. She’s on Olanzopine and Aripiprazole. She’s open about that too…
—Read my review of Awake Awake by Fiona Mozley in today’s Guardian.
“[Phillip & Marnie’s] relationship is perfectly suited to Harrison’s disrupted reality — it’s familial, quasi-parental, again, almost recognisable as something we know well. But also utterly strange. This is the nature of Harrison’s material throughout — eerily accurate depictions of so much that might be recognisably ours — the faded seaside hotels, the country roads, the landscape, the English Channel, boat-loads of migrants, the movement of people from cities to suburbs — but all also definitively different, unsettled, violent, parodic — the remains of a society that has become unshackled from the institutions and certainties that propped it up. Both the smartest and perhaps most unsettling thing about the book is how quotidian, how humdrum these seismic shifts seem to be.”
A sight to see at Foyles, Charing Cross Road. Shimmery, & up for a month.
We had a great launch event on Thursday, co-hosted by LRB bookshop (see post below) and the adjacent pub. Thanks to everyone at Serpent’s Tail for giving me scope to write what I wanted, and leaning into the result. Special thanks to Will, Rowan, Libby, Mehar, Robert and Emily; and to Waterstones, Blackwells and Foyles for their determined campaigns. We’ve received excellent reviews in, among others, the Guardian, the TLS, the Observer, Quietus, Caught by the River and the Literary Review, by reviewers who weren’t content simply to pass the book off as sci-fi fun, weird for its own sake, or a late-life error, or something they just couldn’t vibe with. Excellent, in-depth, high resolution interviews too: Chris Power for the Guardian, Cristina Politano at Minor Lits.
It’s exciting but relaxing to feel that you’ve been understood. All these responses are easily available online. The pre-order figures, by the way, are to die for. Lots more to come. The mystery tour continues, at the South Bank on Wednesday.
Julia Armfield & me looking cool enough at the LRB Bookshop launch of The End of Everything, yesterday evening. I had, in fact, left my spectacles in the cellar. Even as we were speaking, Radio 4’s Front Row was giving the book an appreciative boost, identifying its deliberate inexplicability and grotesque comedy as positives in these inexplicable & blackly comic times…
After the reading at Blackwell’s Oxford yesterday evening.
Photo: Cath Phillips.
“The End of Everything, as its title suggests, is about everything. Unlike most novels with such ambitions, it ticks no hot-topic boxes and appears uninterested in our daily news feeds. It shows us a society that has long since forgotten Trump, social media and Middle Eastern genocides. And yet it burrows deep into our psyches – into the psyche of our civilisation – and exposes the terrifying insecurity of life right now.” — Read the rest of Michel Faber’s splendid review of The End of Everything in the Guardian today.
‘Explicable motive shades constantly into imagery: everyone in the text seems to be carrying their personal dead albatross or hunting their great whale. Plumes of smoke from the burning city rise “high into the air, drifting away like the fragments of an enormous collapsing message.”‘ Rereading The Drought for the Times today, paper & online. & more on The Drought in my introduction to this 2014 paperback reissue from HarperCollins.
the m john harrison blog 