M. John Harrison's WISH I WAS HERE: AN ANTI-MEMOIR

My first and still favorite M. John Harrison read was The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, in which the speculative fiction elements take place so far in the background of the story that they're barely noticeable. The focus instead is on a pair of mostly dysfunctional characters, barely competent at living their own lives, utterly incapable of even paying a little attention to the bizarre changes taking place to the landscape and society around them, which feels faintly like a prequel to J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World might -- if we're interpreting the subtle and widely scattered clues, clues like a sudden and seemingly culture-wide obsession with Charles Kingsley's Victorian era children's book The Water Babies -- at all correctly.

Author and editor and all around badass M. John Harrison's new book, Wish I Was Here: An Anti-Memoir, works on much the same principle. The details of Harrison's life and career are present mostly in the negative (with the exceptions of some anecdotes about an aging cat and about his obsession with rock climbing); the positive space is filled with the figures and ideas and opinions and bits of imagery that have occupied his mind while all of that was going on. It's a fascinating and original way to approach the arts of biography and memoir that I, only the most casual reader of these genres, have never encountered before, and I love it! 

Thus instead of "I" and "me" and banal narratives of mere events in Harrison's life, we get accounts of a sort of dream-self he calls "Map Boy" (everybody writing about this book is going to remind you that "the map is not the territory, blah blah blah, how anti- do I have to get, here?), exploring remembered landscapes and word games and dreams, and of "Beatrice," Harrison's "writer friend" to whom he attributes various mini-manifestos about genre and character and why world-building is pretty bad, actually, and other matters of writing and inspiration and work. Were we to create an image in which these two constructions face one another in profile, the space in between them might in some way be a portrait of Harrison -- but it would be a pretty weird and distorted one. Just the way he wants it, I suspect.*

I can't say for sure that I like Wish I Was Here; I found it beautiful on a purely aesthetic level, full of striking ideas and images, and the very concept of it fascinates me. I do plan to read it again a few times as I become more acquainted with the rest of his work, though. I think it will resonate much more strongly for me when I recognize more of the material in it from his fiction, as it did on this first read when I kept recognizing notions and locations from The Sunken Land, like this: 

We find that, pinkish and surrounded by brand new wire netting, the surface of the tennis court is already sinking into the mud, so that the drainage channels around it, which are still to be filled in, look more like the remains of a half-hearted rescue attempt. Someone has scratched the mileage off the nearby road signs, as if to hide the town or perhaps deny its existence.

I mean, I didn't really feel like I got The Vorrh on the first reading but now it's very likely my favorite of all trilogies.

I have a very strong feeling that Wish I Was Here will grow on me like that. But I don't mean to use it as a sort of key to all his mysteries, which I'm pretty sure was not remotely what he set out to, or indeed did, write. As he pointed out several times in this text, he deliberately cultivates ambiguity and sets out to leave much to his readers' imaginations. Guys like that don't write Dummy's guides.

What they do write, apparently, is the kind of "huh, look at that" narrative that I most associate with (again) Ballardian protagonists, though Harrison has shown a lot more agency than those passive and detached observers of their lives. Ballard protagonists don't cultivate habits like base jumping in middle age, for instance! I mean, if Harrison ever wants to write a whole big non-fiction book about what that's like, I'll sure as hell read it. For I have at least concluded this: I'm down to read whatever he cares to write, and I'm very excited to read his back catalog, much of which has occupied space in my to-be-read piles, sometimes for decades. Sometimes it just takes something special to make me yank them out of the heap and let the stuff that was on top of them fall as it may. Wish I Was Here was more than adequate to that job, if nothing else.

*But can't say I know, because I'm still very much an M. John Harrison newb, for all that much of his career has had significant impact on much of what I've enjoyed the most in my reading life. But, I mean, I haven't even read all of the Virconium tales yet!