I had a strange dream last night. A dear friend finally managed to introduce me to Ursula LeGuin, who was somehow still alive, still subject of my adulation, still looking at me with barely restrained irritation like that time when I asked her a pesky question at a public poetry reading at Broadway Books, years ago. (And no, I don’t remember what I asked.) Here, in my dream, was a chance to start fresh and the most pressing thing that came out of my mouth was: “What do you make of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again?” Needless to say, I woke up before I got an answer.

The novel of that name was written by M John Harrison, one of the few contemporary authors who I would unhesitatingly put in Le Guin’s league, both as a writer and as someone who dares to jump across conventional genre borders to create amalgams that allow us to see the world from new perspectives. I am currently enrapt by his most recent book, and not alone: the novel won the coveted 2020 Goldsmiths Prize, a prize “that was established to celebrate the qualities of creative daring and to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form. The annual prize of £10,000 is awarded to a book that is deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterizes the genre at its best.”

Like LeGuin, Harrison is a master of mood, a welder of worlds that lure us with similarities and then snare us with differences, a wordsmith of poetic proportions who seduces with gorgeous imagery to have us fall into a hole of cognitive dissonance once the underlying catastrophe claws its way into our consciousness.

The new book, his first novel in 8 years or so, is not for the faint of heart or short of patience, echoes of LeGuin here as well. In turn described as unsettling, uncanny, sinister or eerie, it reminds me most of a German term that is translated into English with all the above adjectives: unheimlich. A literal translation would be not like home, but the word carries the same emotional reference in German as its English familiars, something dangerous, creepy – as so many unfamiliar things are perceived.

The brilliance of the novel lies in the fact that it manages to mirror “home” after all, despite or because of all the strange things going on, a home that itself has become unheimlich. The narrative follows a number of characters in an England under the Brexit spell, or perhaps beyond it, fallen out of time, a country paralyzed, disturbed and given to conspiracy theories. Are the strange, aquatic/human things believed to rise their head (again) and enter the land from sunken places, products of the heated imagination of a country in decline or are they all too real? Are they echos of reactions to loss of imperial status, or psychological responses to a system that has turned a threat? Fishy, in every meaning of the word.

Creatures with a watery provenance who slither half-way visible through the English landscape link, of course, back to traditional English fare, The Waterbabies, a book that is prominently represented in the novel and its dedications. The Reverend Charles Kingsley’s 1862 novel about the young chimney sweep, Tom, who finds redemption from the horrors of his work by means of becoming an aquatic creature (really he drowns and joins a fairyland of dead children), was dealing with social Darwinism, class divisions and health issues, including child labor. (Despite its vanguard open-mindedness towards science, it fell eventually into disrepute because it had large streaks of anti-Semitism, and anti-Irish/Catholics/Americans sentiments.)

It is these issues that the Sunken Land tackles, issues rising up again in a world wrecked by increasing divides between the rich and poor. The novel does so in less didactic, moralizing way than the 1862 predecessor. We have to figure it all out ourselves, tangentially reminded of the dilapidated state of the world, while we follow two hapless protagonists who are adrift, quite literally unmoored, in the real world, while the conspiratorial world splashes and gurgles against their habitat.

If you think that all sounds too depressing, let me assure you, it is not. Well, it is intermittently only. It is a rollercoaster of wit, detailed observation, clever mystery and something that the author could not have anticipated during the time of writing: a perfect description of how it feels to be stuck in isolation limbo within the Covid-scenarios. The fluidity of time and space, the feeling of suffocation, the sense of coincidence defining the remaining options, all captured to a T. Elements that are paralyzing and elements that are freeing mix and mingle, and much human contact is enacted through remote means of communication.

For a full review of the novel go here.

Every bit of ill-at-ease that you experience when reading The Sunken Land is counterbalanced by language so powerful that it makes you jittery. Well, that is so for me, when I read yet another chapter at 2 in the morning with my own sleep disrupted. The language is like the water that is source of so much speculation in the book: at times slow-moving like a mud-filled, sluggish southern waterway, at times peaceful like a forest pond, at times sparkling like a fresh brook in the Cascades, always fluid, always moving us along, often keeping a distorting lens in front of our understanding, like looking through a glass of water. It bribes with beauty before we realize it can be drowning.

Here are some of my favorite samples – descriptions of light:

“Gold light, dimly luxurious.. //In the gold light, the bruised eye looked like an embedded prune.// …asleep in a wash of moonlight a curious hyacinthine color – as if it had been stored for later release by the paintwork of the building across…//…elsewhere a curious kind of light – in which several colors were represented but only faintly…//later, thundery light swung in, flat to the flagstones, to which it lent a sullen gloss…//low-ceilinged rooms, where the light flowed slowly from wall to wall like silt//.. glittering under pastel sunlight with a sense of dawn in a foreign country..//..kind of late night city light that, while failing to relieve the darkness in any way, seems to pour in from every direction at once..//..wintry light slanted into the upstream reach at a surprising angle from the broken edges of the clouds, leaving the air architectural yet transparent between darkening banks.//

I tell you that painter of light J.M.W. Turner would have had a field day, painting all these descriptions, or maybe Harrison put into words what Turner had already painted…

In any case, if you are up to vicarious travel to a place at once familiar and new, a psychological landscape that can be found here as well as across the pond, a realm that will feed every synapse used in practicing imagination, this is the book for you.

Photographs of autumn light and water birds rather than water babies from yesterday out at a windy, rain-swept Forest Grove.

Here is a sample of Turner’s British landscapes that you will (re)discover in the novel, with a medley of classical music.

And then there is always Ravel’s jeux d’eau.