Brian LavelleI finished M. John Harrison’s new novel The End of Everything the other day and have been musing about what it is—and what it isn’t—ever since.
Absurd and beautiful, full of fractured and fragmented images, it tells of a world that has lost itself and the people who are lost within it, perhaps even lost beyond its fragile bounds. The story is unsettling in many ways, and it’s in the book’s most mundane elements that the greatest upset and confusion dwells. I don’t know, and don’t need to know, what the exact nature of the catastrophe is. Somehow, that doesn’t seem to be the point of it. And that might just be the most uncanny and disturbing aspect of all.
I love Mike’s work, and the way he writes—like absolutely no one else does; I feel he is one of our finest writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. And I love this novel. It is mysterious and profound, and profoundly unnerving in the best possible way. I’ll read it again soon, as I do with all of his books.
Novel of the year for me, no question.
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