Maybe something ancient and atavistic has awoken, or perhaps a con has been perpetuated Maybe something ancient and atavistic has awoken, or perhaps a con has been perpetuated, a sleight of hand that passes off, leaving an ugly sense of being short-changed or cheated. Conspiracy theories proliferate on blogs. The creation of the green people allows Harrison to explore a mood of rumour and suspicion that feels painfully familiar. Lines of conversation leak or wash between Shaw’s world and Victoria’s. 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.Ī communication failure is clearly at work, an inability to grasp some new frequency.
Copies of The Water Babies keep appearing, that sentimental Victorian account of evolution and its reverse. In Shropshire, Victoria encounters a small, repulsive green creature that resembles a drowned kitten. We’re in Brexit Britain, but it’s infested with rumours of a new species, part human but green. 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. Shaw hears voices through the wall and keeps glimpsing something disturbing in the toilet bowl. Neither of these new refuges is exactly stable. Photograph: Kevin Nixon/Future/REX/Shutterstock the missing evolutionary link between William Burroughs and Virginia Woolf. Some kind of breach or fault line was being cautiously staked out, a post-industrial, late-capitalist collapse in credit and confidence so amorphous and inarticulable that it would vanish altogether if apprehended too directly. Harrison described this real, gritty world with the same precise and estranging fluency with which he has more often mapped galactic space, using the dense idiolect of climbing to make atmosphere and geology resonate on an emotional, interior level.
In 1989, the science fiction writer M John Harrison took this mood and drove it out of London, crash-landing in the Yorkshire hills with the magnificently unsettling Climbers, a novel about an unhappy exile named Mike struggling to keep his footing among a group of temerarious local climbers. Broadly psychogeographic in nature, they featured middle-aged men washed up on the outer reaches of the Thames, part of the detritus of a city ravaged by Thatcherism. T owards the end of the last century, there was a spate of haunted London novels, by Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd and Chris Petit among others.
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