The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again

Author: M. John Harrison

Stock information

General Fields

  • : 38.00 NZD
  • : 9781473232150
  • : Orion Publishing Group, Limited
  • : Gollancz
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  • : 0.33
  • : March 2020
  • : 2.9 Centimeters X 23.2 Centimeters X 15.4 Centimeters
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : M. John Harrison
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  • : Paperback
  • : 2007
  • :
  • :
  • : 823.92
  • : 384
  • : FA
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Barcode 9781473232150
9781473232150

Local Description

 "That M. John Harrison is not a Nobel laureate proves the bankruptcy of the literary establishment. Austere, unflinching and desperately moving, he is one of the very great writers alive today. And yes, he writes fantasy and sf, though of a form, scale and brilliance that it shames not only the rest of the field, but most modern fiction." —China Mieville

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STELLA'S REVIEW:
Water, water, everywhere: the river — the Thames — the ponds, the rain and the damp.  M.John Harrison's award-winning novel throws you into the chaos of Shaw, recently recovered from a midlife breakdown, and his sometime girlfriend Victoria's seemingly mundane worlds. It's Brexit London and the Midlands. The damp is rising, as are conspiracy theories, small green humanoid creatures, shonky business dealings and the residue of times past. We open with Shaw. He’s living in a bedsit, has scored a job of sorts from a man (Tim, who may or may not be his neighbour) he met down at the pub, and is slowly adjusting to being in the world again. If you can call it that. Tim sends him on strange missions delivering parcels of second rate (probably fourth rate) merchandise, as well as attending and reporting back on seances conducted by Tim’s either sister or lover. Tim keeps office on a barge where he has a beguiling reverse map of England where the water is land and the land water, and has a blog called The Water House — a mysterious and convoluted conspiracy theory that involves sightings of green humanoid creatures rising from the depths (who turn up by the river, washed out of the bath-water, down the toilet bowl, and lurking in the ponds all over England). Shaw also has to contend with his demented mother in the nursing home, who gets pleasure from calling him by the names of his many half-siblings or absent step-fathers and by insisting on ‘having the photographs’ before tearing these memories to shreds. Meanwhile, Victoria has decided it’s time to depart London and claim her inheritance — a house in need of repair in a small town. That her mother has died in mysterious circumstances doesn’t seem to bother her too much as she paints, gets the roof fixed and has a succession of tradies through the house — each odder than the next and all obsessed with the book (as are most of the locals) The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley. Kicking around with Pearl, the cafe waitress who knew her mother and with whom she has struck up a kind of friendship, and firing off pithy emails to Shaw (which he reads but never responds to) allows her to keep her rose-tinted glasses on as she endeavours to tackle the house. Yet, something is bothering her. Why are the locals so odd, and are they driving her mad with their cryptic comments and obsession with The Water-Babies? Why is Pearl’s father, Wee Ossie, the sometimes taxi driver so unsavoury, and what did happen to her mother? When Pearl disappears (literally!) into a pond on the edge of the woods, Victoria is further rattled, and as the winter rain and damp set in, she thinks it might be time to sell up and return to London, where things have reached a surreal level for Shaw amid the shenanigans of Tim and his cronies. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again was awarded the 2020 Goldsmith’s Prize. What starts as a pedestrian plot-dominated novel soon reveals its layers and complexity. It doesn’t sit easily in any particular genre: it is a psychological, speculative, absurdist, social commentary, a cultural parody, and an overwhelming political novel. The residue of Thatcherite Britain hangs there in the damp undercurrent, while Brexit raises its head to subsume the next generation. Conspiracy theories run to rack and ruin, while consumerism and neo-liberalism look just as foolhardy. As the facade falls away, the chaos that crisis triggers — a rising tide of recognition — swamps both Victoria and Shaw, each in its own way. Damp and mysterious — unexpectedly delicious prose with endless subaqueous thoughts to engage you beyond the page.

Author Biography: M. John Harrison (1945 - ) Michael John Harrison is the author of, amongst others, the Viriconium stories, The Centauri DeviceClimbersThe Course of the HeartSigns of LifeLight and Nova Swing. He has won the Boardman Tasker Award (Climbers), the James Tiptree Jr Award (Light) and the Arthur C. Clarke Award (Nova Swing). He lives in Shropshire.

Description

Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2020, this is fiction that pushes the boundaries of the novel form.


"One of the best writers of fiction currently at work in English" - Robert MacFarlane.


 Shaw had a breakdown, but he's getting himself back together. He has a single room, a job on a decaying London barge, and an on-off affair with a doctor's daughter called Victoria, who claims to have seen her first corpse at age thirteen.

It's not ideal, but it's a life. Or it would be if Shaw hadn't got himself involved in a conspiracy theory that, on dark nights by the river, seems less and less theoretical...

Meanwhile, Victoria is up in the Midlands, renovating her dead mother's house, trying to make new friends. But what, exactly, happened to her mother? Why has the local waitress disappeared into a shallow pool in a field behind the house? And why is the town so obsessed with that old Victorian morality tale, The Water Babies?

As Shaw and Victoria struggle to maintain their relationship, the sunken lands are rising up again, unnoticed in the shadows around them.


"Treads the line between realism and fantasy with immense assurance and draws a portrait of watery, post-Brexit Britain that brings shivers of both unease and recognition" - Jonathan Coe.


"No one alive can write sentences as he can. He’s the missing evolutionary link between William Burroughs and Virginia Woolf, bringing together new blooms of language, gathering up advertising copy and internet lingo and arranging them in startling hybrid forms." - Olivia Laing.