Susan Maxwell

An unnamed detective is hired to find his client’s husband. The husband is a salesman who disappeared at the corner of a street near their home, and the client's brother has tried without success to find him.

The detective never seems to be quite cer

An unnamed detective is hired to find his client’s husband. The husband is a salesman who disappeared at the corner of a street near their home, and the client's brother has tried without success to find him.

The detective never seems to be quite certain what he is looking for, and the story reads often as though he has two and two in his two hands, but he cannot make them make four. He seems to be in between very distinct places for much of the book: the couple's apartment and his own office, the office and the dry channel where the prostitutes work, the office and the noodle-shop, and so on. Neither the places nor his journeys between them lead to any advancement in his case, as though the eponymous ruined map he has been given keeps him in the wrong place, rather than guiding him to where he might find answers.

In the same way, the detective seems to be in-between the pages of the book, but never quite in, let alone driving, the story. He expects to find ways of resolving the mystery through his obsessive attention to irrelevant details, like traffic patterns or matchbooks. He never seems to get any closer to the object of his search, except insofar as he begins to identify strongly with the husband, thereby failing to find either of them.

The Ruined Map is written in a naturalistic way, and is bleakly funny in places, but both characteristics serve to underline isolation as a fundamental human experience, as the detailed description of particular places throws into relief the universality of absurdity as characteristic of life.

M. John Harrison has said that he never much liked this book, but that it achieved what he had intended, which was ‘to take the piss out of’ certain tenets of SFF at the time: that the main character drives the action, that the universe is knowable,

M. John Harrison has said that he never much liked this book, but that it achieved what he had intended, which was ‘to take the piss out of’ certain tenets of SFF at the time: that the main character drives the action, that the universe is knowable, and the universe is anthropocentric.

The Centauri Device takes the piss and pours it all over the place. John Truck is the main character and never seems to know what is going on. He is dragged into the plot to get the device because he is half-Centauri, and he is manipulated, lied to, threatened, and generally kicked about by all political shades. He is not a hero at all, and he only reluctantly speaks for ‘all who breathe the air of tragedy’ when none on the political spectrum can offer anything else.

Women characters are hardly worth the effort, being limited to ‘port ladies’, Truck’s limp wife, and one-eyed Alice Gaw, a sort of pulp-punk Sister George. Everything in the worlds Truck encounters is compromised, vulgar, and demeaned. There is quite a bit of violence, in fact anything that is physical seems to be violent, or to invite violence, but the register in which everything is written is sophisticated and even, very unlike the heightened register (often involving very unlikely similes) of more contemporary works.

There is a very noir-ish, Tiger Lillies aesthetic and some great characters, including the full-blooded grotesque Grishkin, Truck’s friends Tiny—the ‘last great musician’, who incurs the wonderful characterisation of having ‘all the moral sensibility of a maggot in a cemetery’—and Fix the bo’sun.

Truck has no authority, no power, and seems to have no real aim in life except not to die. He is the grubbiest, most ramshackle, and most inept of Chosen Ones, but not without depth when pressed. Whatever meaning there might be lies in that response, and the ultimate decision about the deployment of the device is with Tucker because of it. Even unreflective Truck, and the wretchedness experienced by those living on the abrasive edges of corrupt worlds, have an occasional desolate richness; not poetry but resonances of poetry in being both brief and illuminating: Truck recognizing his fellow hustlers and losers “shivering with cold and fear of the long, incomprehensible future’, and his desolate struggle back to his ship, his encounter with the undramatic but profoundly alien Device.

The Centauri Device is a space opera (at the The Stars My Destination end of the spectrum), but despite the drugs, the legions of dead bodies, and the spaceships, there are unexpected echoes—or, rather, adumbrations—of the alienating elegance of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again.

Olivia Laing, in her Guardian review in 2020, noted the “precise and estranging fluency” of Harrison’s writing. It is a perfect tool for depicting uncertain negotiation of uncertain worlds.

Shaw, one of the main characters, starts the novel coming to

Olivia Laing, in her Guardian review in 2020, noted the “precise and estranging fluency” of Harrison’s writing. It is a perfect tool for depicting uncertain negotiation of uncertain worlds.

Shaw, one of the main characters, starts the novel coming to (incomplete) rest after motion: he has had a breakdown, and has just moved house. He meets Victoria in the place where he has come, if not to rest, at least to a stop of sorts, and almost immediately she leaves, moving house in her turn. His mother has dementia, and takes pleasure in tearing up family photographs, destroying memories. Victoria’s mother has died and Victoria is moving north to Shropshire to live in the house her mother left behind.

Sunken Land is a story that has key absences: Shaw’s sense of distance from himself, Victoria’s deceased mother, the repeated failures to communicate. Shaw and Victoria seem barely to have come together before they separate. There are significant gaps in knowledge, too: the true business of the person who gives Shaw a job, the reason that copies of The Water Babies keep turning up, what is the source of the voices Shaw can hear through his wall.

This makes it sound as though Sunken Land is about the uncanny, or weird experiences, and that does it the injustice of pinning it down, but weirdness is inherent in the novel like hair on an arm, giving it distinction; the novel would look odd without it, like a face without eyebrows. It is not about them, they are factors in and consequences of life. What is most memorable is not so much the strange occurrences and recurrences, the unsettling glimpses of disturbing things, but the maps of the characters’ diffident interactions with the world, both familiar and defamiliarized, maps that are built up with such subtlety, and with so unique a literary palette, that it is almost startling to stand back and see how immaculate and strong is the resulting fictional reality.

In a 2017 interview with Heather Marshall, Harrison said that he looks for the ‘I don’t know why you did that’ moment at the endings of his own short stories, and there are plenty of these in Sunken Land too, keeping the reader on their toes, keeping the prose too dynamic and complex to be burdened down by the shifting, often gloomy, atmosphere; it is a gloomy world, but the weirdness and Harrison’s remarkable prose make it almost rebelliously suffused with resilience.