The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison

Nightshade Books will soon be releasing The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison, the first time the novel has been published in the U.S. I'm working on an extended essay about this book along with Harrison's Light and Signs of Life, so I'm not going to say much here except that The Course of the Heart is worth both your money and your time, though, as with all of Harrison's writings, it demands a lot of the reader, and the ratio of reward to effort depends on what you're willing to bear.

In the print version of a Locus interview with Harrison, The Course of the Heart is described as "literary fantasy" (to contrast with the "literary science fiction" of Signs of Life), a problematic term for many reasons, but I suppose it was intended to both honor Harrison's ambitions and skills and to warn readers that if they're looking for a David Eddings clone, then perhaps this isn't the book for them.

The Course of the Heart tells the story of three friends who, in some sort of rite they participated in while in college, managed to break a small connection to what they call (after the Gnostics) "the pleroma" -- a connection that has haunted, terrified, and driven them to ruin ever since. (Readers familiar with Harrison's short stories may recognize this as the central concept of "The Great God Pan", and a slightly altered version of that story makes up the first forty or so pages of Course of the Heart.)

Many of the themes and techniques familiar to readers of Harrison's other works are apparent here -- mysteries that are unsolved and perhaps even delusional, but that deeply affect the lives of the characters; characters who are floundering, unhappy, self-destructive, obnoxious, violent, ill; an accumulative narrative structure that is less devoted to plot than to incident and imagery; prose that is precise and coldly beautiful. There's a ruthlessness to Harrison's imaginings that is far more unsettling than the ostentatious splatterings of so many writers whose books get put on the "Horror" shelves of bookstores.

Harrison is an easy writer to admire -- he is a master of all the basic elements of fiction, his best work has the resonance and subtlety of a great chamber concert -- and yet a difficult writer to embrace, one about whom I would have trouble saying, "He's a pleasure to read." The Viriconium books have their pleasures, as does Light, and a number of the short stories are simply overwhelming in their power, but often I have found it difficult to keep reading Harrison's books, because their shape generally doesn't start to become clear until the novel is nearly finished, and getting to the finish requires spending time with characters who are often desperate and pitiful. Many readers, I'm sure, have reached the end of Course of the Heart and Signs of Life and said, "That's it?", not realizing that the questions and plot points they thought were most important were not. Harrison is one of the few writers who is so determinedly, yet subtly, original that we must read him to learn how to read him. Rereading his novels, I'm finding, reveals them to be somewhat different than I perceived them to be on a first reading -- they feel less cruel a second time, more ordered, but somehow more ethereal. If I can manage a third reading, perhaps they will be even more different.

I'm glad Nightshade is bringing Harrison to an American audience, and that Light will be released by Spectra in August, because it gives a new audience a chance to read, reread, and discuss him.

Popular posts from this blog

"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

If Kelly Link isn't the best short story writer in the U.S., then she's the equal of whoever is. I first came to this conclusion a couple of years ago when I read her story "Lull" in Conjunctions: 39 , and I am absolutely certain of it now that I have read "Stone Animals" in Conjunctions: 43 . (Of course, I've also read her collection Stranger Things Happen , but, much as I admire it, nothing in that book is as breathtaking as the stories she has written since it appeared, particularly the two Conjunctions stories.) "Stone Animals" both employs and parodies the basic elements of suburban psychological realism, the sort of scaffolding John Cheever and so many other writers hung their words and laundry on: a family buying a house and moving into it, a father commuting to a desultory job in the city, a pregnant wife who is uncertain about her marriage, suspicions and allegations of adultery, existentially anxious children, a controlling b...
Read more

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

If you expect Never Let Me Go to be about cloning, you will be disappointed. If you expect to be able to read it as a logical science fiction novel, one that extrapolates an alternate world that makes sense, you will find much to grumble about. You will not be satisfied. You will be annoyed, even bored. You will have missed the point. Cloning is a MacGuffin that Kazuo Ishiguro uses to create symbolic situations and characters that coalesce in a powerful vision of life. The symbolism doesn't quite reach the level of allegory, because it's difficult to assign definite meanings to each scene and person, but nonetheless it quickly becomes difficult not to think about certain themes: mortality, love, fate, memory, art, nature. Each paragraph either illustrates or expands one of these themes. In the first half of the book, the ideas the novel personifies do not gain a lot of emotion, but by the second half of the book the characters have become familiar, their personalitie...
Read more

"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

I've intended to write about Nadine Gordimer's very short story "Loot" for years, ever since I first read it in The New Yorker , and for some reason I actually thought I had written a post here about it.  I recommended the story to a friend a few days ago and intended to include a link to my post about the story when, after a bit of searching, I realized I'd never written the post.  Now I will fix that mistake. From the first sentence, "Loot" is a story about time and history, about legends and imagination.  "Once upon our time," it tells us, there was a Great Event -- the greatest earthquake every recorded, the greatest of all measured "apocalyptic warnings".  Not only is it a Great Event (indeed, the Greatest of such events), but it is ours: we possess it. The second paragraph details the effects of this greatest event of ours.  Most giant earthquakes at sea produce floods and tsunamis, but not ours -- our special earthquake d...
Read more

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

     Dawn again, and I switch off the light. On the table a tattered moth shrugs its wings.      I agree. Nothing is ever quite what we expect it to be. —Robert Dunn Katherine Towler's deeply affecting and thoughtful portrait of Robert Dunn is subtitled "A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship". It's an accurate label, but one of the things that makes the book such a rewarding reading experience is that it's a memoir of struggles with place, solitude, and friendship — struggles that do not lead to a simple Hallmark card conclusion, but rather something far more complex. This is a story that could have been told superficially, sentimentally, and with cheap "messages" strewn like sugarcubes through its pages. Instead, it is a book that honors mysteries. You are probably not familiar with the poetry of Robert Dunn , nor even his name, unless you happen to live or have lived in or around Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Even then, you may not ...
Read more

Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

At the Los Angeles Review of Books , I have a new essay about Samuel R. Delany's 2007 novel Dark Reflections , which is about to be released in a new and slightly revised edition by Dover Books . Here's a taste: In many ways,  Dark Reflections  is a narrative companion to Delany’s 2006 collection of essays, letters, and interviews,  About Writing . In the introduction to that book, Delany says that its varied texts share common ideas, primary among them ideas about the art of writing fiction, the structure of the writer’s socio-aesthetic world both in the present and past, and “the way literary reputations grow — and how, today, they don’t grow.” The book is mainly, though not exclusively, aimed at aspiring writers. It provides some advice on craft, but it circles back most insistently to questions of value, and especially to questions of the difference between  good writing  and  talented writing  — and what it means, practically and materially, ...
Read more

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell's debut novel What Belongs to You  is one of the most celebrated and successful gay novels of 2016. Its success seems to me both odd and gratifying. It is a book that garnered the attention of the literati, and not just the gay literati, though it certainly has that (Edmund White blessed it with a blurb). It received praiseful notice from nearly all the major literary institutions in the U.S. (and elsewhere). It is a remarkable novel, but were I a literary agent or publisher, much of what makes the novel remarkable would have caused me to assume it would not sell very well and would find, at best, a niche audience. (This is perhaps reason #28,302 that it's good I'm neither a publisher nor an agent!) I don't know the sales figures for What Belongs to You , but it hit the LA Times  bestseller list for a couple weeks, got tremendous review coverage, and often seemed to be among the books of the moment — I traveled a lot during 2016, and nearly everyw...
Read more

The Snowtown Murders

The Snowtown Murders  (aka Snowtown ) inevitably draws comparisons to another brutal and disturbing Australian crime movie, Animal Kingdom , with which it shares some general plot elements and stylistic moves (both films were shot by Adam Arkapaw ). But where  Animal Kingdom  shows one young man's struggle to stay innocent in a family of thieves and murderers, Snowtown  depicts the power of a small-time messiah to employ hatred as an excuse for torture and murder. Both films focus their narrative on a quiet (eventually traumatized) adolescent surrounded by monsters, but Animal Kingdom,  for all its virtues, is primarily a drama of demons and angels fighting for a soul, whereas Snowtown  is less allegorical, less schematic, and more deeply disturbing. (A more meaningful comparison than with Animal Kingdom  would be with  Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer .) Though in some ways Snowtown  is the story of how Jamie Vlassakis goes fro...
Read more