Light by M. John Harrison

Honestly, I thought I’d already posted about this one. But it appears I haven’t.

Maybe I half-wrote a post about this in late August and it got lost somewhere in the intervals between laptops and phones or possibly I just dreamed about blogging about it and possibly I just spoke about it or thought about it enough to feel like the labour, the process, had been done.

Looks like it hadn’t.

AND I CARE ABOUT THAT!

Light by M. John Harrison was the other book I had in my bag during my brief trip to the Edinburgh Festival in mid-August, and it went with me when I spent most of a week later that month living on a canal boat somewhere between Warwick and Birmingham with just my baby… which I don’t know if I mentioned here before.

Almost a decade ago, I nearly ended up living permanently on a boat, sinking (not literally, though nearly) all of the pennies I departed my previous life with in 2017. That boat (named Pegasus, though Icarus would have been more apt), turned out to be structurally unsound, and the debt I had taken on to permit that purchase bothered me until most of the way through the COVID-19 pandemic (remember that?).

In a way, though, it was cleansing: it was a taste of pecuniary masochism that allowed me to feel purged of any claim that I’d profited from my idle twenties. I didn’t. I left that decade poorer than I went in, thanks to the collapse (the allegedly likely collapse (who knows if it was all an elaborate con?)) of my houseboat. Which, in the longer term, allowed a sense of cleanliness. No ill-gotten gains. No gains at all, sure, but no ill-gotten ones.

I’m not too far from getting out of my thirties, either, and I certainly haven’t made many gains this decade either. And that’s fine. I suppose, ultimately, I think it’s disinteresting to gain. Sustain, not grow.

The world would be a better place if more people, like me, lacked acquisitive ambition.

Anyway.

I ended up solo with my baby/toddler on a narrowboat in the countryside for a long weekend in late August. And, my main advice to anyone who is considering spending time on a boat alone with an infant just learning to walk: don’t.

It was wall to wall hazards.

Thankfully, the weather didn’t break for the colder season until we were safely back in London, so we didn’t need to have the coal fire burning, but the curiousness of a new mind (with 50% genes of an intellectual and 50% genes of whatever I am) and the neat, thoughtful compactness and practicality of a houseboat meant that my mind was constantly on high alert.

And also I was terrified of doing so many poos in the toilet that I’d have to try and empty it in the chemical toilet disposal a 30 minute walk away along the towpath, a journey that would have been near impossible with the baby, unless I’d reversed the boat the whole way (the canal too narrow to turn in), and as someone who is not a practiced narrowboat skipper (I nearly was!), that did not appeal to me AT ALL.

I spent most of my time living on that boat walking in oppositional directionals along the towpath, through Warwick and on to Leamington Spa one day, or jumping on the proximate train and meandering around Central Birmingham. But in the evenings, once the baby was asleep and I’d managed to forage myself something to eat, I’d read myself a little bit of Light by M. John Harrison.

It was a strange few days.

–///–

M. John Harrison is a writer who I really do keep trying to love.

The kind of people who like the kind of things I like, like him. He’s spoken of in the same breath as people whose work I seek out with abandon. And yet, much like my other dalliances with his work, I here often found myself engaged, but never enraptured.

Light contains three narrative threads which all do, neatly, coalesce by the novel’s end, but don’t seem to necessarily feel like natural bedfellows for most of the novel.

One of them, in particular, offered huge scope for complex imaginings beyond its own narrative, one had a neat and very ’90s thread of hyper-violence through it, and the third one built a complex future intergalactic (or maybe just interstellar) universe.

One thread is set in the present day (ish) and is about a serial killer who is working on complex quantum science, while on the run from a potentially real supernatural being that pursues him relentlessly (and he claims the killing is an effort to scare this off). His scientific endeavours pay off, as he is mentioned early on in one of the future-set threads as the presumed inventor of a technology that permitted space travel and human colonisation of the stars…

The other two threads are set in the same future, and one is about a former ace pilot turned addict who spends most of his time in tanks where one inhabits incredibly vivid hallucinations, until he’s pulled out of this by gangsters he owes money to and goes on the run. The third thread is about a person who has had their body fused into the structure of a spaceship that they now control, who is exploring near-unexplored parts of the galaxy.

The three threads often feel quite tonally different, particularly in the earlier sections of the tank-addict character, as his vivid, realistic, hallucinations take up a lot of his time. Levels of world-building complexity, levels of narrative cruelty and space opera/social satire with haunted madness/speculative “what ifs” spin around each other and sure, yes, it’s all engaging and imaginative and characters and their motives and their hopes and dreams are evoked and clarified and described, yes, but in almost every section I found myself hungry to get on to the next one, and though this might imply all were equally exciting, I more meant that, very often, every chapter felt like a chore I had to get through to get back to the narrative I was missing at that time.

I think I’ve been accused before of being to stupid to “get” M. John Harrison, and maybe that’s true, maybe that’s what it is.

I liked this, though, and I enjoyed reading it. But I didn’t love it, and maybe it is my high expectations and high hopes for a response to Harrison’s work that keeps causing the disappointment. It’s my lofty expectations that are impossible to fulfil, perhaps, rather than any actual lack in his work?

I dunno.

I liked it, yes. And I’ll try again. But I need to, next time, with reduced expectations. M. John Harrison isn’t giving me the feelings that the work of Samuel Delany, Ursula Le Guin, and the SF of Doris Lessing has done… And maybe that’s me.

Maybe it’s me.

It’s probably, yes… it’s probably me…