The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again: Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2020

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In the novel’s second half, the focus switches to Victoria, who soon after meeting Shaw again travels north to settle the estate of her mother, who has recently died. The Midlands market town that was her mother’s last place of residence initially delights Victoria with its sense of community and its closeness to nature, yet it is not long before she begins to experience a mounting unease, the sense that the image presented by the town’s inhabitants is a facade, that she is being drawn into a web of secrets and allegiances that lie beyond her comprehension.

And Victoria also senses, as with Shaw, the presence of the others, those who may inhabit the sea as well as the land. First novel of the Viriconium sequence. London: NEL, 1971 (pbk, first edition); New York: Avon Books, 1971; New York: Doubleday, 1972 (first hc edition). These editions dedicated to Maurice & Lynette Collier and Linda & John Lutter. Reprint: London: Unwin, 1987 (dedicated to Dave Holmes). Harrison is a linguistic artist, constructing sentences that wrap and weave like a stream of consciousness without ever breaking focus...every sentence is a decadent bite of a new sensation The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again does have a plot — halting, obscure, questionable, and inconclusive though it is. But what dictates and defines this novel more than any amount of “what happens” is the texture of its language, and the eroded, deliquescent nature of the society depicted. The Sunken Land may well begin to rise again, but the shape it assumes when it does is unlikely to be familiar or pleasing. As in so much of Harrison’s writing, sense of place is crucial, yet as Victoria intuits, her surroundings, when exposed to scrutiny, reveal “none of the picturesque qualities you might expect,” and Harrison’s treatment of landscape in this novel stands as a deliberate deconstruction of traditional nature writing, an undermining of the concept of landscape as heritage.

Two years ago I had the pleasure of reading a range of innovative fiction from UK/Irish small independent presses as part of the Republic of Consciousness Prize. But perhaps some of this is the price to be paid for an open mind during perilous fluxed, epochal times. During one of his many respite-seeking forays around London, Shaw finds a furtive oddball pulling things out of the ground at a cemetery. Entirely in step with the rest of the novel, such an encounter is not only related as a matter-of-fact occurrence but is in fact the beginning of a book-long relationship, and even an employment opportunity. Shaw, happy enough to be pulling a wage from the placid confines of a barge at Tim’s behest, while largely ignoring the questionable conduct of his new boss, makes half-hearted attempts to find out what he can about exactly what it is he’s got himself involved in. He’s soon sent to various moribund locations – most of them Brexity, surely no coincidence – as a kind of unwitting sales rep. What he’s selling is never really clear to Shaw – as someone with niche and not-especially-fungible attributes, he’s just happy to have a job, for however long it lasts – though it’s ostensibly something to do with genetics. (In reality it’s an unfathomable collection of scraps and unsubstantiated assertions in line with Tim’s seemingly low-rent and stereotypically-shrill blog about the aforementioned water-creatures.) And the above rather scratches the surface of the local characters and incidents in this disconcerting, unsettling, wonderfully written novel. Harrison's early novels The Committed Men, The Pastel City and The Centauri Device have been reprinted several times. The lat-named was included in the SF Masterworks series.

Like most writers whose origin is in F/SF, I don't engage my own humanity sufficiently to earn a visible X on that literary map ... It doesn't help to be very good at something when the majority of readers, reviewers and literary editors ask of it with a kind of puzzled distaste, "Yes, but why would you do this?" This is a fact we all have to learn, not just radical geek proselytisers like Egan or Charles Stross. To win a worthwhile literary award, you have to write about people: after all, that's what we are. But I wouldn't mind having a Booker nomination some day. Who wouldn't.

The novel open with Shaw, in his 50s, living in a bedsit in the area between East Sheen and Little Chelsea, and undergoing a crisis of sorts.

A good ground rule for writing in any genre is: start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself. Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide – then write that. The evolution of Harrison’s prose can be traced across the stories, the steely, mannered prose typical of the British New Wave giving way to the warmer, more supple sentences that mark his late style. The philosophical concerns become more submerged. Instead of God being towed from the dark side of the moon to preside over a motorway in the title story from 1975, in later stories you can find yourself blindsided by an offhand metaphysical aperçu that can fundamentally alter the tenor of a piece. Harrison’s chameleon-like ability to inhabit any genre also fulfils a philosophical purpose. Rather than just mere showmanship for the sake of it, it is motivated by the belief that the metaphysics of a narrative are governed by their genre, a truth Harrison has deftly revealed across his many books which have always sought to dismantle the putative genres they are written in. The plasticity of genre is akin to the plasticity of the reality we all inhabit. The novel Signs of Life (1996) is a romantic thriller which explores concerns about genetics and biotechnology amidst the turmoil of what might be termed a three-way love affair between its central characters. Like reading Thomas Pynchon underwater, this is a book of alienation, atmosphere, half glimpsed revelation - and some of the most beautiful writing you'll ever encounter. Harrison won the Richard Evans Award during 1999 (named after the near-legendary figure of UK publishing) given to the author who has contributed significantly to the SF genre without concomitant commercial success.Victoria, Shaw’s occasional partner, a kindred spirit in many ways, is a lovably cynical, unhappily-lost eccentric. The main difference between the two seems to be how comparatively tethered they are. Shaw finds most people an olfactory, auditory nightmare made flesh: of the people he at first lives amongst – he will later find ‘nice people’ to live with, the suggestion not that they are especially nice but that he’s clinging onto conventional life, determined to make a virtue of it – he notices (and is rankled by) every lingering trace of their passing, every reverberating, maddening echo of their movement. Yet he’s drawn to them, needs them, loathes the fact but is consigned to it. Neither of these new refuges is exactly stable. Shaw hears voices through the wall and keeps glimpsing something disturbing in the toilet bowl. He encounters a man in a graveyard who offers him a job shifting merchandise around the Midlands, hours of train travel to desolate offices that have plainly failed to survive some recessionary event. We’re in Brexit Britain, but it’s infested with rumours of a new species, part human but green. In Shropshire, Victoria encounters a small, repulsive green creature that resembles a drowned kitten. Copies of The Water Babies keep appearing, that sentimental Victorian account of evolution and its reverse. It has a talismanic function for her mysterious new neighbours, one of whom vanishes into a shallow grassy pond, exactly like someone descending the steps at Oxford Circus tube. He seemed to bring a smell into the kitchen. She couldn’t quite smell it, but she knew it was there.”