The End of Everything by M. John Harrison

iGhet the iGhetti. (Sorry)

It’s incredible that M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything was longlisted for the Booker.¹ It’s not the weirdest novel on the list that I’ve read. That would be Makenna Goodman’s Helen of Nowhere.² But still, for a mainstream award, even one that’s more genre-friendly than it’s given credit for,³ The End of Everything is a bold, courageous choice. To say it’s opaque with the logic of a fever dream doesn’t really cut it. Harrison has written a deeply strange, uncomfortable, sometimes shocking novel. It’s a narrative told mostly in an affectless tone that is both distancing and visceral. As Niall Harrison keenly observes in his excellent review of The End of Everything: “[the] sentences are so precisely commanding that I felt pinioned, unable to think outside of their premises while I was reading them.”

Humanity has been invaded by the iGhetti. It’s never explained what they are or why they’re called the iGhetti. But the lowercase “i”, mimicking (mocking?) the naming conventions of Apple’s ubiquitous hardware, suggests they are born out of our obsessions with technology.⁴ Harrison’s first description of the iGhetti, with overtones of Wittgenstein, is supremely evocative:

They had seemed at first like neither a thing nor a picture of a thing: they seemed to be extruded from a space that wasn’t quite in the world.

A little later we’re told that they look like “a kind of transparent jelly that was not to be confused with ectoplasm.”⁵ The iGhetti initially congregate around bodies of water. They then spread towards major cities, attracted to cultural sites like galleries and museums, where they construct a structure nearby. Anyone not living in London witnesses a war above the city — of helicopters and bombers and the pulsing luminosity of the iGhetti.

Society collapses not due to war but because of a lack of shared reality. The iGhetti have pockmarked existence with “bad patches”, floating anomalies that warp and distort time and space, making an already disorienting situation impossible to navigate. That’s the case for Phillip Tennant and his aunt Marnie, who aren’t so much struggling to come to terms with the catastrophe as already irrevocably changed by it. Phillip is a beachcomber searching for iGhetti cast-offs, human-shaped biological artefacts. When he finds a specimen, he brings it to Marnie, who, disgusted, lets it loose into the wild. As Phillip goes to hunt the artefact, Marnie is forced to leave her community after she slits the throat of a feral child who was pissing on her. This is one of those shocking moments — there are a few — where the prose is so devoid of emotion yet so startling that you gasp (or I did).

The End of Everything does read like a shout into the abyss about the dehumanising influence of technology. But also, it’s just a remarkably evocative, disturbing, fucked-up work of fiction. For all its fractal oddness, its unexpected swerves, its eruptions of violence, and its cool, exquisitely poised prose, this novel, more than most of the contemporary fiction I’ve read this year, captures the slow collapse of our society, that sense that we’re losing everything that’s wonderful and remarkable about humanity and replacing it with acts of cruelty and hate. The end of everything indeed.

1. And who knows, it could also be shortlisted.

2. Which (a) is wonderful, (b) is not a book I thought anyone other than BDM had read, so well done, Booker judges, and (c) is not being spoken about enough in genre circles (no real surprise there).

3. The Booker gets this bad rap for ignoring genre. What they really mean is “core” genre, i.e. books written by people we SF/F fans count as our own. The fact that Midnight’s Children is a historical fantasy novel, or that Prophet Song is an out-and-out dystopia, or that Orbital is set on a fucking space station doesn’t seem to be enough. This is why I think all genre/literary debates are bullshit. So there.

4. An obsession I share. I buy a new iPhone every year (trading in the previous year’s model). It’s my one annual tech splurge.

5. I immediately imagined them as the Rutans from Doctor Who. But specifically the blob that slithers up the stone stairs toward Leela in Horror of Fang Rock.