The End of Everything by M. John Harrison

In my experience of reading M. John Harrison’s work (see my older posts), reality tends to wear thin, and even the most basic aspects of a conventional novel (such as coherence and meaning) are likely to be undermined. Which is a way of saying that any attempt I make to write up one of his books will be uncertain. But I’ll have a go anyway. Harrison’s previous novel, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020), depicted a society wrung out by austerity, with hints that a transformation was underway in the background, far beyond the knowledge of its protagonists (and readers). The End of Everything is not set in the same reality, but it feels like a companion piece to Sunken Land. In the new book, the world has been transformed, and we join it some time later. Convention might call it an alien invasion, but the entities known as the iGhetti are too abstract and unknowable for anyone to be sure of exactly what happened or why. In the Britain of this novel, government has receded, Europe…