fiction comma electric

in case i wasn't being clear -- and a recent conversation with Banzai Cat seems to indicate as much -- i have dropped all pretense towards 'critical' review on this blog. whatever i may say by way of 'comments' (such as this here set of so-called 'reviews'), until further notice, is purely reactionary; none of this from-the-hip 'criticism' (for lack of a better word) is meant to stand up to critical deconstruction, and if any of it does, i'll be more surprised -- if, i'm sure, more pleasantly so -- than anyone.

anyhoo, that out of the way...

today i picked up James Salter's A Sport and A Pastime, Iain Sinclair's White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, and The New Nature of the Catastrophe, ninth volume of The Tale of the Eternal Champion, the latter as a result of my crusade to track down and obtain every single piece of published fiction i can find by M. John Harrison (not to mention the fact that, yes, Jerry Cornelius is cool).

though i'm still wholly engrossed in Rupert Thomson's Death of a Murderer, i dipped into Catastrophe for M. John Harrison's 'The Ash Circus', which starts after the death of Jerry Cornelius, and, about which, this seems the best way to describe my feeble-minded reaction:

I read anyone who electrifies me or seems to be doing something I don't understand

-M. John Harrison, Disillusioned by the Actual, interview by Patrick Hudson, here, at The Zone.

(which also happens to go some way in leading me closer to a solution to certain investigations i have been conducting in my increasingly malcontent little headspace.)

a better way to celebrate Easter all by my lonesome, i can think of none.

cored

i turn the page and, suddenly, everything phosphoresces: all my insides wiped-out in a wash of substitute light, fallen from overexposure.

Everything is flat out here. No one drives themselves anymore.

M. John Harrison, Suicide Coast.

how can i help but feel this explains everything?

desperado

this past week: i've read a couple chapters of Justina Robson's Living Next-Door to the God of Love, about half of China Mieville's Un Lun Dun, a few pages of Geoff Ryman's The King's Last Song; spending more time than i should in various bookshops, i read bits of Geling Yan's The Uninvited, John Connely's The Book of Lost Things, Ryu Murakami's Piercings, David Mitchell's Ghostwritten and Black Swan Green, a sizable serving (yet barely a chunk) of Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. i enjoyed some of these more than others; either way, i willingly subjected myself to their diversion, but was diverted only for as long as each book was in my hands.

i scrabbled from book to book, churning with a kind of placid desperation.

i'm no longer the voracious reader i used to be; i suppose i do still read for a sort of escape after all, but i no longer find it as satisfying to be so passive. i find it more and more difficult to be drawn into worlds painted for me, constructed entirely from another's imagination.

reading about magic and literal wonders has become, for me, wearisome: words are symbols, Alan Moore reminds us, and are thus themselves magical; the use of words to describe magic and literal wonders in the direct terms of comfortable fantasy and science fiction seems to me not only trite, but disinheriting, even unnecessary, as though one cannot help but undercut the power of the other.

and yet i cannot do without that strangeness...the weirdness of some of the more estranged books in the 'modern lit' shelves just isn't the same thing.

so what can i do? Elizabeth Hand, M. John Harrison; they seem to be the only ones in my library capable of making that translation, of successfully transcribing real wonders with as little entropy as possible.

i'm afraid they're the only ones who really do it for me these days.

Cats

whenever M. John Harrison writes cats into his stories, the four-legged critters always steal the scene. always. whether perched on the shoulder of Michael Kearney in Light, refusing to get off Pam Stuyvesant's couch and window in The Course of the Heart, or streaming down the streets of Saudade in Nova Swing. real cats can't seem to help but be the most graceful metaphors, and this seems to suit Mr Harrison's particular slant on literature just fine.

so it was that i was totally enthralled by his 'straight epic fantasy' novel, The Wild Road, for, in case you didn't know, Gabriel King *is* M. John Harrison. did i just let the cat out of the bag?

sorry. couldn't resist.

only i never finished The Wild Road. strongly suspecting that Mabel - who fell in love with SF Said's Varjak Paw and who i seem to remember enjoyed the black cat's insouciance in Neil Gaiman's Coraline - would enjoy Tag's adventures as well, i left my copy with her when i left for Spore City. i got a copy of the sequel, The Golden Cat, and have been resisting the temptation to continue Tag's adventures, never mind the crucial abridgement of Road's latter half.

the Gabriel King books somehow manage to take Mr Harrison's skill with language, his sharp eye for metaphor and detail and his own understanding of nature both human and otherwise and employ them in something (for M. John Harrison) surprisingly straightforward: pure, unadulterated storytelling.

just one of the many reasons i can't wait to get back home.

unreviewed: M. John Harrison's Nova Swing and others

it's been awhile, and i've honestly lost the stamina to do a review, no matter how utterly blown-away impressed i was (and am, come to think of it) by the last book i read, M. John Harrison's Nova Swing. (well, technically, the last book i read was Victoria, the first novella in Paul Di Filippo's Steampunk Trilogy, but as it comes in an omnibus that includes the other two novellas, Hottentots and Walt and Emily, and as long as *i'm* making the rules for this thing, that dun don't count until i get through them other two. then, after all, there's Michael Moorcock's Mother London, which i started reading and vowed, to my chagrin, to finish within the next two years.)

among all the things i've been scrabbling through these past few months (finished or not) were, most notably: Simon Ings' The Weight of Numbers, Avram Davidson's Adventures in Unhistory and Gabriel King's The Wild Road; not quite notably: Jim Younger's High John the Conqueror; even less so Eva Hoffman's The Secret and Dean Alfar's Salamanca. i read all the shorts in the Digest of Philippine Genre Stories, and have opinions on each, and am sure i dipped a toe or two in a few other things.

that's all i'm saying for now.

except: while reviews are, indeed, forthcoming, i can't say this is a promise to review all the things i've enumerated here; however, having said all that hopefully will spur me on to them anyway. you never know.

i'm a right lazy bastard these days

M. John Harrison's Signs of Life: in the end...

if there were ever any doubts in my mind as to Mr Harrison's ability to deconstruct, demolish and degrade the most opaque, sturdy and 'dignified' (i use each of these words, particularly the last, in the loosest, most forgiving sense) of personalities, having produced his most apparently solid, full-spirited characters in Signs of Life, such doubts have been laid to rest, terminally and irresurrectibly, by the latter half of that book. though the book started out on an almost optimistic note, infused with the enthusiastic life-energy of love in its early, pre-terminal stages, the book soon enough goes dark; the stress of the book eventually begins to weigh on the apparently seamless surfaces of each character; fracture lines, old and new, begin to show; if i had not known how this book was to end before hand, the ending would most certainly have been forgone long before i reached the 'climax'.

Signs of Life is a stilted rhapsody full of eccentric but earthy melodies and odd rhythms generated by the tinkling of test-tubes, the clattering of a defective centrifuge and the diseased moaning of laboratory vermin (and, of course, Tom Waits' gravel-throated crooning); an earthquake-damaged mosaic, the most brilliantly-colored tiles falling first off the wall to shatter noiselessly on the ground, to be hidden by the grass, or to sink into the soggy earth; a collage of jarring images or a jar of collaged images, a narrative constructed from the fragments of a life, brought together by the search for meaning imposed by a tragically human perspective. in the end, M. John Harrison to my mind warns us of the dangers inherent in attempting to define ourselves with our dreams: whether we deny our dreams or cling to them, the effect is fatal; having no dreams, however, seems no better. what then, are we to make of the signs of life? what are we to make of ourselves, and how?

http://www.theedge.abelgratis.co.uk/harrisoniview.htm

M. John Harrison's Signs of Life: Ashton et al.

contrary to what my absence on this blog over the past few days may indicate, i have not been completely inactive here. in fact, my reading of M. John Harrison's Signs of Life continues to progress, albeit slowly. i have also made a digression or two, most notably through the first chapters of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy and Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. it's just been hard to wrap my head around what i want to say here.

right. Signs of Life. here goes...

i've fallen in love with the trio of characters at the heart of this book. i love Mr Harrison's characters in general (even the misanthropic Yaxley from The Course of the Heart and the morally despicable Michael Kearney and Seria Mau Genlicher from Light), but Mick 'China' Rose, Isobel Avens and Choe Ashton feel more solidly realized than anyone else in Mr Harrison's fiction. all his characters tend to be fractured personalities, informed with one form of desperation or another, but the distinction of these three is that they feel like they have a more active approach to life and living. Pam Stuyvesant, Lucas Medlar and the nameless narrator of The Course, for instance, all feel somewhat insubstantial in the way they seem to be knocking about their lives, like ghosts in the attic bouncing off walls and antique debris, searching for the light switch only to fall one by one down the open hatch to the equally unlit, if not quite as dark, flat below. the characters of Light, on the other hand, feel like warped reflections or ill-fitting fragments of each other, and while each has a distinct flavor of personality, there's something ghostly about the way the knock about as well, colliding and adhering to each other like something wet and sickish, despite the razor's edge of desperation (i really can't think of a better word for it) each character has.

the trio in Signs feel like hardier personalities, despite being no less 'victims' of the 'real world'. they are people we can cheer for, expressly raising our voices to goad them on through the story, their lives, despite the ultimately tragic end we come to expect, this being, after all, an M. John Harrison novel (this is not to over-generalize...Light, after all, had an optimistic ending, and the final reflection of The Course, to my mind at least, feels somewhat redemptive in its ultimate acceptance of humanity, of love). Isobel Avens is the 'obvious' dreamer. she is unabashedly an escapist; she finds Mick/China's lie about flying 'brilliant', delights in a dream of flying she has while with Mick/China. Mick/China fills the 'observer' role of the nameless narrator of The Course; is he, perhaps, an escapist, too, living vicariously through his ostensibly diametrically opposed friends? nonetheless, he feels more substantial and grounded than the painfully hopeless narrator of that other work. Choe Ashton is the sort of person one 'lives vicariously' through...one, however, wonders at the driving force behind Choe Ashton's daredevilry, creating an interesting dimension to the character.

I wasn't sure boredom was entirely the issue. Some form of exploration was taking place, as if Choe Ashton wanted to know the real limits of the world, not in the abstract but by experience. I grew used to identifying the common ground of these stories--the point at which they intersected--because there, I believed, I had found Choe's myth of himself, and it was that myth that energised him.

an apparently reasonable assumption for Mick/China to make, i might interject, a neat little package to wrap the whole personality that is Choe Ashton in; however, Mick/China follows this immediately with:

I was quite wrong. He was not going to let himself be seen so easily. But that didn't become plain until later.

these lines represent for me the trajectory Mr Harrison has launched all three characters on, and i admit finding myself intrigued, not only to find out where that arc might terminate, but by the shape of the arc itself.

M. John Harrison's Signs of Life: an introduction of sorts

it may only be because the copy of M. John Harrison's Signs of Life i own is the one in Anima (which publishes Signs together with The Course of the Heart), but i feel compelled to draw parallels and make comparisons between the two books. for instance: the first detail of Signs, the very first thing we are told, is the narrator's name. in fact, we learn, the narrator has two of them:

My name is Mick Rose, which is why a lot of people call me 'China'.

Mick's, or China's, depending on your preference, is a more amiable voice than that of the narrator of Course, whose name we *never learn* throughout that book's 200+ pages. there is a more familiar humor in Mick's voice; it seems, perhaps, more natural, more of the 'average joe'; more of the wakeful day than the dreaming night, one might say; more modern, more 'hip': Mick's voice makes him feel more grounded, less inclined to question his reality the way Course's narrator seemed predisposed to even in childhood:

When I was a tiny boy I often sat motionless in the garden, bathed in sunshine, hands flat on the rough brick of the garden path, waiting with a prolonged, almost painful expectation for whatever would happen, whatever event was contained by that moment, whatever revelation lay dormant in it. (The Course of the Heart, page 7.)

interesting counterpoint, yes? also rather obvious for certain aspects of this discussion: Abigail Nussbaum in an earlier review noted something to the effect of The Course of the Heart being a nongenre 'fantasy' and Signs of Life being a nongenre 'science fiction' story. if that is, in fact, the case, the way the two stories begin, the way they differ from the very first word and proceed from there, all these things make an interesting comment on the 'genres each story chooses to transcend', if i may put it that way.

these two stories, in that light, appear to be companion pieces, Mr Harrison's own commentary on the elements that are used to define the two genres and ultimately distinguish them from each other. the value of collecting the two stories into one volume appears to be based in part on the substance behind Ms Nussbaum's analysis and this subsequent comparison. the publishers of Anima, however, also make it clear that the decision to collect the two stories in one volume is based on something else:

When a writer like M. John Harrison looks at love, you know the results will be unusual and compelling, evocative and imaginative, dark, depressing and transcendent. Here in one volume are his two classic love stories...fantastical romances, quests, thrillers - and wholly M. John Harrison. (Anima, from the back of the book.)

clearly, there is a *thematic* intersection between the two stories, and this seems yet another good reason to look at the two stories as complementary, to examine one in light of the other. however, the differences, to my mind, also dictate something else, that must be just as important to the appreciation of either work: the two stories must be taken separately, on their own terms.

this seems a painfully obvious conclusion to make of any two works, but it is one i feel i must state: having read The Course of the Heart a long time ago, it continues to resonate in my mind as one of the most beautiful and interesting stories i have ever read; unfortunately, the resonance of that work now informs my reading of Signs of Life. (putting the stories together in one volume doesn't quite help.)

by stating that one obvious fact, i am attempting to exorcise those resonances; of course, it may not be possible (might even be wrong-headed, come to think of it), given that the presence of any one thing is supposed to deform the universe, and our previous experiences make impressions on how we perceive later experiences. but i would, at the very least, like to try.

Mr Harrison's skill as a writer, thankfully, makes it possible to succeed: though his writing in Signs shows the same sort of attention to detail, informed as it is with the same 'low latent inhibition' suggested by his writing elsewhere, Mick 'China' Rose has a particular voice that is able to incorporate that aesthetic in what appears to be a more 'practical' or, perhaps, more 'conventionally rational' mindset.

to put it another way, The Course of the Heart felt like it was still somewhere between Viriconium and the 'real world'...Mr Harrison's writing in Signs suggests it exists further on the other side of the spectrum. which pushes me harder, personally, to try to read Signs as a distinct entity, and not simply a 'companion' to Course.

M. John Harrison's Things That Never Happen: 'The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It' and 'Gifco'

this stands at the heart of it all:

http://www.mjohnharrison.com/archive/tointerview.htm

i had just been musing how, having read M. John Harrison's longer works, reading his short fiction at times felt like accidentally walking into rehearsals for some magic trick or other you'd seen before, catching bits of it through a backstage door propped open with a broom, from the wings or from the entrance to the theater while some stagehand, bouncer, receptionist or urchin from the street outside tries to distract you with irrelevant conversation--conversation that in retrospect suddenly becomes startlingly significant.

it's almost a kind of deja vu; only with print, you can always go back to it and more solidly make the connections. or can you?

i've already noted in previous installments how some of these stories can be found in altered form in Mr Harrison's longer works: The Quarry and The Great God Pan in The Course of the Heart most notably, and A Young Man's Journey to London. but there are other bits i failed to note, of which i can now only remember two: The Gift features, in passing, some parlour or other called 'Nueva Swing', a drycleaners or laundromat called 'New Venus'. Here in the next two tales, more connections can be found: The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It opens with what appears to be one of Mr Harrison's favorite images, that of a horse's skull (paraphrasing: 'not a horse's head, but its skull, which is nothing like the horse's head'), an image that repeats like a bad dream in Viriconium and is a vital element of Light, and 'You bloody piece of paper!' which i remember from The Course of the Heart; Gifco includes a dream sequence which makes its way into Light. this 'cut-and-paste' aesthetic makes me wonder whether i should feel cheated by Mr Harrison; but each fragment is blended so seemlessly with the rest of the text that it hardly seems to matter. or does it?

these last two stories feel like jigsaw puzzles of memory; episodic, messy and obscure, the meanings of everything shifting, imprecise: mutable, and in many ways obscure. the Ephebe of The Horse maps his life out using Tarot cards, and we find in the end only the beginning; Gifco's narrator, some Jack or other, reconstructs the fragments of his life and encounters the limitations of memory, how life becomes, in retrospect, something of an illusion. both stories leave me to ask whether finding the sense of it all is a futile endeavor, or the only thing that matters.

the next few stories, as i understand it, are also to be found in Signs of Life, which i've not yet read. should i press on? see the fragments before they slot into the whole? i wonder.

i expect i'll be going back to Signs of Life before i continue with Things That Never Happen. however, having seen the effect of watching the magic show before catching rehearsals, i wonder what the experience might be like turned around?

M. John Harrison's entire body of work, to my mind, begs to be read in its entirety, not stopping at mere fragments, but gobbling up every short story and novel the man has written, and will presumably write. the intersections (the source, at times, of the feeling of being 'cheated' by a writer who knows more about his own work than you do) appear to create a metafictional web that illustrates Mr Harrison's philosophy, or philosophies, and it seems a shame to begrudge yourself even one tiny piece of the entire puzzle.

i fear my mind too weak to completely comprehend what Mr Harrison is saying: perhaps, at the end of it all, the meaning will suddenly become clear, like a mountain vista at daybreak. perhaps not. for me, however, despite its difficulties and obscurities, and despite all of Mr Harrison's cautions against 'reading only for entertainment', i find it an utter joy to make the journey. much like life. perhaps that's the point.

perhaps not.

M. John Harrison's Things That Never Happen: Five more stories

reading M. John Harrison's stories can be a lot like reconstructing lives from the snatches of conversation you hear on the commute to and from work; as you sit in a restaurant waiting for your order, or for the waiter to hand you a menu; as you walk by the edge of a crowd gathered round some accident or other you cannot see. in Michael Moorcock's Mother London, David Mummery, Josef Kiss and Mary Gasalee are all gifted/cursed with hearing voices: this is, to the practical mind, obviously the manifestation of some psychiatric disorder, and they are treated accordingly. they are, in fact, 'hearing' the 'voice' of London, catching the run-together internal monologues of her citizenry. Mr Moorcock inserts fragments of 'London's rambling' into Mother London's narrative, creating a bizarre 'dialogue' where there isn't any, and a third party to the conversation when there is. these fragments, then, are like flourishes, garnishings that add an odd flavor to the work; Mr Harrison, on the other hand, constructs his narratives solely from these apparently random musings.

After all why should our goal be the reinstatement of an illusory 'exact' relationship between events and words? If you probe in the ashes you will never learn anything about the fire: by the time the ashes can be handled the meaning has passed on. (The Gift, p231)

it would appear, then, that Mr Harrison's stories play not in the ashes but in the fire, constructing vivid portraits of 'events' from the fractured landscape of images, ideas and people that crowd around any given instant. the result is something strange, fragmented and baroque, but ultimately familiar. if his characters are equally strange, fragmented and baroque, it is because we are merely eavesdropping upon them, catching snatches not only of their lives, but of the world they are integral to, being the sources of our perspectives. his characters are people and, like any of us, have merely stumbled into the world they were born (i.e., written) into: they distort their world by their mere existence in it, but are ultimately unable to shape it. Mr Harrison's approach, admittedly, makes them hard to empathize with; we may get to know these people well or not at all, but either way, while we may find some of them familiar, they are all ultimately strangers. somehow, to my mind, it also makes them more vivid, more 'real': more recognizable as 'people', and not simply 'plot devices' or even 'characters'.

The Quarry can also be found in modified form as the most affecting digression in Mr Harrison's novel The Course of the Heart; informed with rare optimism concerning human nature, the story exists in the interstices of perception and 'objective' reality. A Young Man's Journey to London is a re-working of A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium, another meditation on escapism, hope and desire made all the stranger for being made banal. Small Heirlooms is either an unusual 'ghost story' or a meditation on memories, our own and those of the people we think we know, how the two sets of memories relate and interact and again affect our perceptions. The Great God Pan again re-works (or was re-worked into) a fragment of The Course of the Heart. it also appears to be a reflection of (or on) Arthur Machen's story of the same name; Mr Harrison, however, focuses on the 'primal darkness' that is inherent in our own lack of understanding for our own nature as humans, rather than on an external 'power'. here, the darkness within, we find, manifesting in our senses (figurative, literal, or however else you mean the word), is no less alien than that without. and in The Gift, two people blunder through their lives, stumbling through their loneliness until the story ultimately brings them together in a bizarre 'metafictional' collision. slapstick isn't uncommon in Mr Harrison's work, but rather than being purely comical, in his stories there is something tragic about it, the awkwardness of the physical condition perhaps translating into (or translated from) something more deeply rooted in our inherent humanities.

the 're-worked' stories were a delight for me particularly as they allowed me to revisit key moments of M. John Harrison's longer works without having to re-read those books entirely; all these stories stand alone well, capturing enough of the longer works' spirit to be able to live and breathe on their own; at the same time, they seem to represent an underlying philosophy in Mr Harrison's fiction: that we are only ever privy to fragments, and can never really know the whole story.

M. John Harrison's Things That Never Happen: first seven stories

i find it utterly intimidating, doing any sort of review of Mr Harrison's work. Mr Harrison is the sort of writer who has very definite intentions for his stories, but isn't about to tell you what they are; in fact, he seems to delight in keeping everything as obscure as possible for the casual reader, in spite of (or, perhaps, because of) his almost overreaching insistence on descriptions of banality. Mr Harrison is the sort of writer who conveys the strange (perhaps numinous) in something as mundane as making a pot of coffee.

well, here goes. if Mr Harrison catches wind of this, i at least think i'm prepared for the mental thrashing that will no doubt follow, if he thinks any of this worth bothering with at all.

the first seven stories in his collection, Things That Never Happen, are brave examples of what a writer can do with fiction. Settling The World starts the book off on a strange note. obviously rooted in more thoughtful, if not at all 'hard' SF, Settling is anything but: it is a disturbing Chestertonian mystery that explores the nature of the divine, and unsettles the reader with the incomprehensible alienness of it. this is followed by Running Down, which takes an assumption of the ridiculous and explores and extends it to its very limits, invoking, from my limited experience, echoes of Clark Ashton Smith and Lovecraft and Machen, though the element of the 'alien' in this story is perhaps closer to the sort represented by Poe, if no less spectacular or literally 'cataclysmic' than that found in the works of the other three. The Incalling is an exploration of an all too human desperation (as are, in a way, all these stories thus far), and here we begin to see more clearly an inkling of Mr Harrison's take on escapism: what it does 'for' us and, ostensibly to us. The Ice Monkey is deeply rooted in the realities and complexities of human relationships, and is no less strange for it. Egnaro more blatantly examines escapism, and evokes images and rationalizations of geekdom that hit rather close to the mark for this reader. here is a cheekier take on the sort of material Borges explored with Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, a bit darker for being much more intimate. next, i must admit to floundering with Old Women, which explores, perhaps, the strangeness of 'old women' in the eyes of men, and yet in the end suggests a basic similarity between the sexes. i must admit to floundering because i do not truly understand what happens in this story, much less what it all means. the portrayal of 'old women', however, while being strange, seems spot on with reality: you've met one or two or all the women in this story in your life, i'll wager. this story was first published in Women's Journal, and i can't help but wonder what those readers thought of this story. finally, i closed the book arbitrarily (and temporarily) on The New Rays, which follows Old Women with a first person account of a woman who begins by seeking desperately for a cure, and ends with her wondering at our own desires and hopes and fears and how they affect who and what we are.

these stories tread the entire landscape of strange fiction without heeding the arbitrary ('fictional'?) boundaries of 'genre'; some of these stories have overt fantastical elements, and one, Egnaro, deals with such elements directly without exactly 'committing' to them. none of them, however, seek to 'escape reality'; instead, Mr Harrison seems to want to bury our imaginations in it, like seeds in fertile (if fetid) earth.

at the same time, none of these stories seem to commit to a single portrait of 'objective' reality either, except, perhaps, to say that the ultimate reality is that defined by the fact that humans are fragile, tiny things lost in an infinitely larger universe they can never hope to comprehend; that this is also, perhaps, the one thing that makes being human matter at all.

this is the first collection of short fiction i have ever found compulsively readable; my approach to short fiction collections has always been to dip into a story or two between longer works. Mr Harrison, however, has had my complete attention with the first seven stories of this book, and if i stop reading the book for now, it is only from a conscious decision to try to keep myself moving through the progressive accumulation of books that are currently acting as dust traps in stacks by my bed.

i don't think i'll be staying away for long.

M. John Harrison's Things That Never Happen

i totally love that the copy of M. John Harrison's Things That Never Happen i got *does not* have the introduction by China Mieville. now, me, i tend to be one of those freak book lovers who utterly dig all the ephemeral shit of a book--everything from prefaces to introductions, forewords, afterwords, footnotes, endnotes, acknowledgements, bibliographies, blurbs--i have a particular thing for blurbs, whether or not i agree with them, i don't quite know why--author's notes, appendices, those brief author (auto)biography thingies, notes on fonts--i don't necessarily read them all, but i do like having these 'other things' to browse through when i need to take a mental breath from the main content of a book.

M. John Harrison's fiction, however, best speaks for itself. i haven't read Mr Mieville's introduction, but no matter how much i respect Mr Mieville's talents as a writer and have no doubt that he has managed an intelligent, insightful and enlightening introduction to Mr Harrison's work, i have the feeling that any sort of introduction to this book would be a major disservice.

perhaps the best, most acceptable introduction to Mr Harrison's fiction in my mind is the one blurb, provided by Iain M. Banks, that is included with my particular copy of this book. printed on the back cover, Mr Banks says:

M. John Harrison is the only writer on Earth equally attuned to the essential strangeness both of quantum physics and the attritional banalities of modern urban life

now, i don't know if he really is the *only* writer on Earth equally attuned etc, etc, (in fact, i rather doubt that) but Mr Banks has pretty much summed up the wonder of Mr Harrison's work. but if i may add, what may possibly set Mr Harrison apart from other writers who deal with similar material (Mr Banks himself, for instance, has said much on the 'attritional banalities of modern urban life') is that Mr Harrison succeeds in communicating this 'essential strangeness' to my mind, even barring the strangeness of the actual subject matter of each story, by his distinctive prose alone.

possibly my favorite thing about Mr Harrison's prose is the way he deals with dialogue. the way each line flows with the rest of the text without losing the distinctive voice of the character speaking the line. the way each 'spoken' line grazes the main text, grazes the characters and rather than bouncing between them strikes them tangentially, wounding rather than impaling. the words therefore somehow manage to be both evanescent and razor-hard. characters talk 'at' rather than 'to' each other.

the grotesques from Mervyn Peake's Titus books perform similarly random feats of tangential conversation, but in those books the effect is jarring, like the noises and visions of a circus or carnival during its peak hours; in Mr Harrison's fiction, the voices seem to echo long after the people have left, the lights have gone down with the curtains, and the carnival has called it a night.