It could, should you wish to grasp for such vacuous critical nomenclature, be called a Brexit novel. On the surface, The Sunken Land inhabits our world. His last novel, Empty Space, the final instalment of the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, spliced space opera with a more emotionally freighted realist but near-future narrative. It perhaps has more to do with his work always hovering on the edges of different genres. This seemingly eccentric premise might seem to confirm why Harrison has always haunted the peripheries of British letters. After a chance meeting in a graveyard, he finds himself employed on a houseboat running mysterious errands for Tim who runs The Water House blog, an amateur venture in which peculiar riverside sightings are connected to archaeological sites in Mexican cave complexes. The protagonist Shaw has had something of a post-mid-life crisis, absconding from Hackney home to sleepier Richmond to begin anew. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, Harrison’s latest novel, features a cult who catalogue strange water phenomena, furtively passing copies of their bible, Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies to potential disciples. After university, I too became a disciple, a late convert. I was too busy reading what my lecturers anointed as ‘literature’. When I was an undergraduate, my flatmate was one such fan, always trying to foist the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy on to me. Ballard, Harrison has always had a devout fanbase, eager to proselytise the wonder of his texts and convert people to their creed. Active since the sixties, first published in New Worlds magazine alongside other British New Wave luminaries like J.G.

This has always been reviewer code for ‘writer not many people read’.

John Harrison has long laboured under the unfortunate moniker of being a ‘writer’s writer’.

Empty Space by M. John Harrison