M. John Harrison, "The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again" (2020)

It's not every novel that has a metrically flawless iambic pentameter for its title. Indeed it's not, we can be honest, every writer who could carry-off that kind of thing, without (that is) tripping our pretentiousness alarms. But Harrison is not every writer. Harrison is a law unto himself, and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is a novel so good all the usual reviewerish superlatives barely seem superlative enough.

Half of the novel is set in a run-down bit of West London (down near the river, Teddington-way: East Sheen, Barnes Bridge, that neck of the woods. I lived for a time in Wandsworth, then Putney, and then moved to Staines; I know the area in-between pretty well, and MJH gets it absolutely spot-on). The other half is set in west England, near the Welsh border overlooking the Severn. In the former location lives one of the novel’s deuteragonists: Shaw, a fiftysomething single man, recovering, or not really recovering, from some kind of mid-life breakdown. He rents a scuzzy little room in a house ‘south and west of Hammersmith bridge’ and works for a strange fellow called Tim he met in a pub one time. Tim runs a odd mini-company out of a run-down barge on the river, from where he sends Shaw off on various puzzling errands, sometimes delivering peculiar packages of things or collecting other things, visiting and filming a medium (who turns out to be Tim’s sister) or attending the trial of an old man who caused a breach of the peace after, he claims, seeing strange green aquatic creatures germinating in toilet bowls.

Shaw has an on-off relationship with Victoria, who sometimes stays over in his shonky rented room but spends most of the novel in the west country where her mother had gone to live, and where she died. This is Bristol [or maybe not; see comments below], although Harrison never names the town. Victoria has inherited her Mum’s house and she spends many weeks doing it up, mending the roof, replacing the electrics and so on. During this time she befriends (although friendship in the usual sense of the word is really not the currency of their relationship) a waitress at a nearby café called Pearl. Renovating her mum’s house also introduces her to various elderly local workmen, odd, rheumy old geezers to a man. Pearl claims to have been close to Victoria’s mother—the two went swimming together, she says, in local pools and rivers—but the woman Pearl describes sounds nothing at all like the mother Victoria knew. Various things, baffling, menacing, are hinted at without quite being spelled-out.

All this depends upon, works or doesn't, according to how effectively the novel is able to maintain its particular mood: an eeriness or uncanniness that persists without collapsing into either sheer bafflement or else into the crassness of formulaic weird or oddball gubbins. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again manages this balancing act perfectly. The dialogue is full of non-sequiturs, people talking apparently at cross-purpose. With a different writer this could become a gimmick, and irksome, but Harrison manages it flawlessly. The characters are opaque only after the manner that real people in the real word are opaque. Sentence after perfectly-pitched sentence describes urban decay, the kipple of early 21st-century life, strange non-spaces and, always, water: it’s always raining, or flooding, the land is always sodden, something is always bubbling up from underneath.

Victoria crossed the river and walked further than she had expected. She had packed no lunch. Later, half a mile down the hillside in fine blowing rain she thought she saw a woman walking ahead of her, making her way quickly between dark, glossy rhododendrons towards a house at the edge of fields. She was wearing a flower print and high heels. White gloves. By the time Victoria got there she had vanished inside, if she had ever been there at all. The grey four-square walls were home to yellow lichens. Coughing could be heard from an upper room. The small, sodden garden featured: one child’s swing, an empty pond, a fire pit full of charred beer cans and M&S prosecco bottles. Over in one corner rotting apples were strewn beneath a well-grown holly. [113]

This is just out-of-kilter enough (high heels worn to walk across the fields; a holly tree apparently shedding apples) to add bite to its phantasmic air of incompleteness.

It’s quite the trick, technically, to balance so much closely observed, almost hyper-realist specificity of description against such a sustained atmosphere of haunting uncertainty. Real places, realistically-evoked people, a bedrock of unnerving unreality. There’s a Sebaldian vibe to much of this (more Sebald than Ballard, I think) although of course MJH was doing this kind of thing before WGS ever put out a book.

Something is going on, although I won’t spoil what, here. The workman renovating Victoria’s house keep offering her copies of Kingsley’s Water Babies. The novel’s title is taken from Kingsley’s Thoughts in a Gravel Pit (prose, despite the title’s metrical regularity). Lewis Carroll hovers behind much of the unheimlich-ness too: the pond where Pearl likes to swim is called ‘the pool of tears’, and Victoria’s queenly name speaks to some incomprehensible game of existential-chess game going on somewhere, outwith the ken of the two main characters. The Kingsley and Carroll intertexts were both catnip to me, I must say; cleverly and unobtrusively woven throughout, delightful to a specialist in Victorian literature. Though of course you'd expect what Harrison does with Water Babies’s Darwinian allegory of Christian redemption to be rather more Quatermassian than it is Kingsleyan. Soon after arriving in Bristol, Victoria is wandering about, looking for Marks and Sparks. She climbs the old packhorse stair off the main street, where ‘the rock was poisoned with oxides, thick with cobwebs’, to where ‘she could see the backs of the houses and shops on the high street’:

Suddenly warm soapy water poured down the stairs, around her feet and away, only three inches deep but strong and turbulent, with foam … It had a smell she couldn’t account for, faint and chemical, perhaps some kind of cleaning fluid. The object that washed down with it, slithering then sticking to the cobbles, then slithering again, was translucent and tinged faintly with green; otherwise it looked like a still-born kitten.

Victoria put her hand over her mouth.

‘Well I don’t know!’ she heard someone shout from a window high in the backs of the buildings. [55]

This object with its ‘foetal look’ (‘it wasn’t a mammal, perhaps not even a fish’) makes her shudder. ‘“How horrible,” she said aloud, looking up at the sky again.’ When she returns later in the day it has gone.

***

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is a Brexit novel, I think; an oblique state-of-the-nation book, and extremely penetrating as such. The Severn is described as a river flowing towards the sea with a counterflow running through its depth. Late in the novel the café has been changed into ‘Shropshire Fish Supplies’ and filled with aquaria. Peering through the glass, Victoria sees how each tank contains a model drowned village or landscape. One includes a miniature waterfall. ‘Victoria pointed. “That waterfall?” she said. “It’s made of plastic. Doesn’t it give you such an uncomfortable feeling? Water flowing under water?” She felt herself shiver.’ What was it David Byrne sang, contorting himself in his cheap revivalist-preacher suit and tie?

Water dissolving and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Under the water, carry the water …

... going on to hoot echoingly on the next word of the song's lyric ‘remove’. And you may find yourself. Like I said: it’s catnip to me, all this.

It’s also a novel about writing, although not in any self-regarding way. None of the characters are writers, although Tim runs a Fortean-style blog called The Water House reporting unusual events all around the country. But from Shropshire Victoria writes regular emails back to Shaw, who only reads them intermittently, and who never replies. This sense of the writerly disconnection, of putting words out there and having no idea whether anyone is connecting with them, understanding them, even registering that they exist—that’s, certainly not catnip, but intensely relatable to me, as a writer. Shaw is sent to Wolverhampton by Tim on yet another puzzling errand. On the train he can’t help but hear ‘a couple talking in the seat behind his.’

With a little inadvertent sigh of pleasure the woman said, “There must be some meaning to these clouds.”

They were complex, layered, torn about by winds, bathed in a dull metallic light; but the man next to her wasn’t interested. “Where’s Michael? Where’s Michael?” he kept saying into his phone, his voice too quiet and too close to Shaw’s ear to be comfortable. “Don’t forget now. Don’t forget!” All with a kind of hidden urgency, as if fearing surveillance—“Where’s Michael?” [162]

Where, indeed, is Michael? A treacherous business, the attempt to locate the author in his own book, not any less treacherous if undertaken by the author himself. Those potentially meaningful, Hamletian clouds lead us, I think deliberately, back to the life aquatic. You see, don’t you, yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? By the mass, and it is like a camel, indeed. I think it is like a weasel. It is backed like a weasel. Or like a whale? Very like a whale. Something watery in the idiom and medium. Something watery in existence, when you hit a certain age, and life has eroded the solider sureties. Something big and far below the surface, something oceanic, rising up. Deep waters, here.