the m john harrison blog

Fiction often goes slowly in this part of the year so I’m down in Kent cat-sitting for a month, doing as much reviewing as I can get.

Reviewing is good for you because quietly deep-reading other people’s writing, when it’s of any worth (& sometimes when it isn’t), makes you think not about your own books but about your own life. Here’s a look at Mark Danielewski’s new one, a horse opera called Tom’s Crossing. Long, and long-awaited perhaps, but perhaps not as satisfying as House of Leaves. Next for the TLS I’m reading the grimly enjoyable Crux, by Gabriel Tallent: from hybrid cowboy adventures in Danielewski’s Utah to highball bouldering in Joshua Tree. Tallent’s West Coast existentialism, warm and icy at the same time, is making me think. (After that, for the Guardian, The Delusions by Jenni Fagan & Lucy Caldwell’s short story collection, Devotions.)

In other news The End of Everything should go out as an ARC soon. We’ve already had encouraging responses to it in bound manuscript. Plans for three short story projects and a possible novel are in hand: to encourage me to sort the wheat from the chaff in that direction, my Mastodon & BlueSky accounts are now on hiatus/closed. Comments still interdicted here, see post below.

It isn’t quite snowing. Later the cat stalks a magpie on the lawn. The other side of the french window I stalk the half-glimpsed possibilities of a novel, always sticking to rule number one. Take care of your core aims, make sure you know the difference between what you do and anything else that’s going on, and move along quietly to the next thing.

(By the way, haven’t read this but it looks both good & fun.)

As I get old and knackered, writing–or even thinking about writing–seems to require more time for the same amount of product. Other aspects of the trade crowd in. So in an attempt to give myself a little bit more space, the comments here will be closed at least until I decide how to face-lift the blog.

I’ll still post here about about work in progress, also publishing news that you won’t be able to get elsewhere. Not to mention the usual strange blend of book stuff & general sporadic upwelling from the tar pits of the unconscious. So do keep popping by, in case you miss something.

I’ve also disconnected from BlueSky and Mastodon.

Listen to this with your eyes closed. You’re walking along a rainy, empty street near the top of a hill somewhere in the dark. The bars & restaurants are closed for the night. You hear on the wind this exact music, with all its elevated banalities & glitches, playing intermittently from a crossroads up an even steeper sidestreet. When you get there, it’s stopped. You’re no longer sure where you are.

Also, check out John Lewis using what looks like his front room piano to “analyse” the opening & closing music from Bullseye: because it’s very funny.

Politics controls the spectacle by making itself the spectacle. We vote not for the winner, but for the tournament, the psychodrama of the struggle to win played out & analysed move by move in public. Politics, supported by its commentators with their insistent quacky voices, markets not its ideas or intentions but the minute-by-minute narrative of its own inner workings and techniques. It is like an advert that sells being an advert. Meanwhile, the material infrastructure of the country steadily falls apart. Actually, I am so fucked off by this I could spit.

I loathe Rudyard Kipling for the obvious reasons, yet I’ve read “They” four or five times since 2004, & I’m increasingly fascinated by Adam Nicholson’s narrative (in Perch Hill) of Kipling at Bateman’s. I’m trying to understand what I might be hearing–or what, at least, I might be trying to listen for–under the sentimentality & bad poetry.

You should never ignore a prompt like that, even–or especially–when you have no idea what it’s trying to tell you.

first published July 2008

A majority of my characters don’t start as made up or imagined. They aren’t even mine, since they’re based to a greater or lesser degree on irl notebook captures. Scenes (ie, the behaviours of characters), are more or less reported, more or less nonfictional, according to the type of fiction they’re part of. There are short stories which are pure autofiction except for an ambience given almost entirely by the delivery, or by a single, brief, carefully placed incident. Characterisation is an accumulation of scenes, as in life; it is revelatory, but only in the sense that what you’ve seen is all you’ll get. There’s no such thing as “out of character” behaviour. We only ever know the behaviour. Character “development” is equally cumulative. Characters never speak to me, literally or figuratively. I don’t “see” them, literally or figuratively, although I sometimes “see” a landscape or a room, with figures nearer or further away; or “remember” in close-up a physical event, such as being a passenger in a car or a customer in a shop. Relations with a character are carried out via the management of groups of words, sentences & paragraphs, and the general, long-term working through of the structures that emerge. The characters & most scenes may be real: the fiction they produce is exactly that, fiction. While I have a history of generalised childhood dissociation & alienation, I never had imaginary friends or hallucinated voices. I write ghosts & imaginary countries: but not “about” them. I don’t experience them or believe in them, even temporarily. They don’t charm me in that sense. They make metaphors. They’re vehicular & I want the reader to look for their subtextual passengers & payloads. While I don’t relate to a written character as real (any more than I make much of a distinction between the methods of fiction & nonfiction) that doesn’t mean I view them as unreal either. An opposition like that seems to me to be standardising, unsubtle & not descriptive of the relationships it’s hoping to describe. I don’t think an imagist is ever in favour of codified knowledge of people, things, structures or systems. An imagist looks for the fractures and fragments, the tacit meaning that lies in the fractures between the fragments. I would regret it if I thought that by making this note I had helped codify any of these relationships or produce any kind of standardising view of what is–even in the most mimetic of fiction–a fully intuitive, highly individual process, motivated by highly individual needs & purposes.

[& for more, see this podcast interview by Richard Lea.]

Bridgnorth to Bewdley: Thinly bedded sandstone in cuttings, by sidings full of beehives & willow. Views through woods to plough, then the Severn the colour of mud. The river is the central feature of the journey. Throughout, it will look thick and constrained, irritable despite the sunshine, in its broad valley. Road bridges you’ve driven under on the way to Stourbridge or Kidderminster, or think you have. The roofs of the Unicorn Inn at Hampton Loade, where chained-up milk churns on the platform anticipate a collection that will never happen. I was last on a compartmented train in the late 1960s, so I know how those churns feel: out of one’s time.

Every corner of a field we pass, every level crossing, every wooded corner in a wooded lane, seems to host one or two quiet, motionless men staring at the line. Rail voyeurs equipped with drones and expensive cameras, they’re waiting for the shot. We’re in First Class. C goes restlessly up and down the corridor, popping back every three or four minutes to report, transfixed by what used to be so ordinary. “Another train’s coming the other way!” The carriage is full of railway buffs, who smile forgivingly and, when she asks, tell her everything they know.

Later I sit on a platform waiting for the smelly, rattling two-coach diesel shuttle to Bewdley, and I want–with an intensity I don’t remember since childhood–a suit of workjacket cloth, faded by time & the sun to a perfect shade somewhere between mid blue and purple, given the soft but indesctructible feel of daily use. I don’t belong in this context, but at the moment, writing in the sunshine at Arley, I wish I did.

This post doesn’t have any interest in trains. It is not about trains, heritage railways or being on the line between Bridgnorth and Bewdley one sunny Friday morning in September. It’s not about comparing the experience of Heritage Rail with people who have had similar experiences.

Circle Line to Liverpool Street
Announcer: “The next station is Munchen Haus”. She can’t have said that, can she? But she follows it with Calendar Street, Tarhill and Oilgate, and I realise I have travelled backwards into a late 1990s UK urban fantasy novel, in which the streets resemble a bad pencil sketch.

Charing Cross to Hildenborough
Trains parked in lines. Trains parked in tight compact groups. A circular cemetery. Light flickers and races between the trees. The train races between the trees. You could take flight. You could take flight. You could be taken away, past even Orpington. Orpington itself now takes flight. It takes flight with its yellow railings and blue doors and grey stairways. People could be trudging up the grey Orpington stairways, while under the evening sun Orpington itself flows across the flat valley.

Sissinghurst
Gaze all you like at these kinds of buildings but without the necessary architectural languages you can’t begin to describe what you’re seeing. This failure is accompanied by sensations of shame and guilt that intensify as you age. I don’t know what I’m looking at in any sense–architecturally, historically, in terms of economics, occupation, lifestyles, materials technology and the layers of technique that every extension or roof repair or repurposing of a stable block has demanded. When you are neither Meades nor Pevsner, you have to make the best of the glaringly vacant space of your viewpoint; your illiteracy. In fact I wouldn’t want to do anything else. But the older I get the more I’m forced to admit slyly the difficulties of this position; & I regret that I never learned what I needed to.