M John Harrison

IdleRich

IdleRich
Just got one of his books called Anima. It's essentially two novelettes, the first of which is called The Course of the Heart. It's a beautifully written novel whose main theme is regret mixed with some off-stage occultism. The whole thing is tinged with melancholy and a kind of hovering menace which may be from the rituals which the protagonists appear to have taken part in, or may be due to the illness of one of the main characters, or then again it could simply arise from the grey washed-out England in which the whole story takes place. The book is bleak and at times nails characters and actions with a precision that could be called cruel... and yet there is something I can't quite grasp which redeems this slightly, albeit possibly just as a kind of great sadness.
I've looked up several reviews/explanations of the book and it seems that there are a number of interpretations although I can't really buy into the most radical ones I've read. I would be keen to know if anyone has read the book though and what their take is of if anyone has read any of his other stuff. I know Woops has read Light so maybe I'll check that later. At the moment I'm just this minute embarking on the second story in Anima.
 

blacktulip

Pregnant with mandrakes
My SF-loving friend rates him very highly. Been hearing his name more and more: sounds like one to check out!
 

droid

Well-known member
Not such a huge fan. Read some of his stuff years ago and liked it, but gave up on the 'light' trilogy.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
I'm a huge fan of Light, (bar the final line). I could talk your ear off about it, but maybe I'll spare you until you've read it. I can lend it to you if you want? I have had Anima sitting unread on my shelves for years. Like a lot of my favourite writers, I think Harrison writes incredible prose. He manages to evoke unseen, just-hinted-at feelings and moods, almost emotions that don't actually exist apart from as side products of his writing. I can't explain better than that. I would really like to read his book about climbing. I read a brilliant interview with him talking about the macho obsessiveness in the sport.

Light is in short, I think about fear and alienation, rather than speculative future forecast wizardry. But then again, I don't know if any SF is about that these days.
 
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DannyL

Wild Horses
Have just finished the first book of Anima after many years of it sitting around and am absolutely knocked for six, what a book. Does anyone fancy discussing? Do you still remember it Rich?
An opener - seems to have heavily gnostic themes. The Pleroma is a gnostic concept IIRC and so much of the novel seems to be about the imagination and the visionary set against the Black Iron Prison of grim mortality with inconvenient, dysfuctional bodies getting ill and pissing themselves. Love seems bound up with Pleroma as well - the transcendant, transporting ecstasy that makes life worth living.

Also - I have a bit of a penchant for fictional depictions of horrible black magicians (can't think why that would be) i.e figures like John Constantine and Yaxley is such a great, revolting, mad creation. One of the best I've read.

Harrison's writing style as well - he seems to illustrate emotion by not describing but hinting. A character states what'd normally be a set up for a response in so much other fictional dialogue, but he always seems to move the action on, and therefore kinda hints at the unsaid, the inbetweeness of the character's feeling. Really unuusal but very rich and evocative and leads to a pervasive sense of me as reader only half-understanding what's occurring.

Altogether brilliant. Now someone talk to me about it.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
Have just finished the first book of Anima after many years of it sitting around and am absolutely knocked for six, what a book. Does anyone fancy discussing? Do you still remember it Rich?
An opener - seems to have heavily gnostic themes. The Pleroma is a gnostic concept IIRC and so much of the novel seems to be about the imagination and the visionary set against the Black Iron Prison of grim mortality with inconvenient, dysfuctional bodies getting ill and pissing themselves. Love seems bound up with Pleroma as well - the transcendant, transporting ecstasy that makes life worth living.

Also - I have a bit of a penchant for fictional depictions of horrible black magicians (can't think why that would be) i.e figures like John Constantine and Yaxley is such a great, revolting, mad creation. One of the best I've read.

Harrison's writing style as well - he seems to illustrate emotion by not describing but hinting. A character states what'd normally be a set up for a response in so much other fictional dialogue, but he always seems to move the action on, and therefore kinda hints at the unsaid, the inbetweeness of the character's feeling. Really unuusal but very rich and evocative and leads to a pervasive sense of me as reader only half-understanding what's occurring.

Altogether brilliant. Now someone talk to me about it.
Dan, go on my facebook, someone recommended M John Harrison yesterday weirdly enough. He would probably be up for discussion. I guess I remember those books well enough myself although I'd completely forgotten the title....
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Will do. Another quick thought - the mysterious book that Lucas is writing, Michael Ashman's Beautiful Swimmers - reminds me of nothing more than WG Sebald.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Seems M John Harrison won a literary prize today... must be cos I mentioned him yesterday on dissensus. Can't seem to link to it on my phone... maybe when I get in.
 

jenks

thread death
He’s on my TBR pile. He’s got a collected short stories out as well as the new novel. He sounds like a very Dissensus kind of writer.
 

version

Well-known member
"Conceptualism makes a frame, sets parameters, limits definitions. It’s nerdy, always working out its own implications to a minute degree, like a man in a pub argument who can’t give up on an analogy. Whereas being alive is this sad but luminous muddle best conveyed by doing street photography, writing down the things that happen to you and around you. For me the language of science fiction must never be fully conceptualist, never fully cognitive. It’s a poetics. It’s the language of imagery and metaphor, of awe; a phenomenology of the imagination. It has more in common with dreams, spiritualism and the ghost story than it would ever admit."
 

Woebot

Well-known member
i came across this guy too. apparently a big influence on william gibson. not reached for any yet though.

 

jenks

thread death
Started his most recent one today - really enjoying it, it has a kind of surface simplicity, unfussy but precise. Still in the set up phase. Second novel in a row with someone with someone dealing with a parent with dementia - don't know if that is coincidence or a contemporary theme.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I just read the first 3 pages of this book from the library (the sunken land begins to rise again) and it's pretty good. Very readable and instantly interesting characters. Sort of reminiscent of woops' book cos it's about a bloke drifting about in hackney meeting and having some not great times with a similarly drifting woman.
 

catalog

Well-known member
30 pages in now. He's very very ballard and sinclair, to me. Or maybe most like Robinson by Chris Petit, but far better writer, in terms of using words and having a flow. With a bit of pop culture bits eg

Shaw's favourite song was Janitor of Lunacy' by Nico.

His favourite film - played and replayed on a thirteen-inch MacBook, the rubbery base of which had deformed in some
overheating event so that it displayed the colour, texture and surface contours of a bracket fungus growing out of a tree -
was the 1975 Arthur Penn neo-noir Night Moves.

This he preferred to watch with someone else, excitedly identifying for them those points at which Gene Hackman's detective reaches - without understanding that he's reached - the limits of his emotional intelligence.

On his own, he tended to play it late at night, the sound dialled down until he had to strain to follow the dialogue, observing with a kind of forensic intensity Hackman's growing unease and unconscious embrace of his inevitable fate.

Not sure where the story is going but one of those where it doesn't matter.
 
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