Harrison’s Weird World
I’m most of the way through M John Harrison’s anti-autobiography Wish I Was Here, which is as wonderful as I expected.
It’s called an anti-biography because there are very few biographical details in it and it is certainly not in any kind of order – or is it?
Mike Harrison started his career in New Worlds in the 60s with his own take on fantasy, space opera and the disaster story. He has since become a touchstone for the New Weird movement and is praised by discerning critics as one of our best novelists. However, he tells us in this book that as a writer he tries to avoid all the usual cliches of structure, plot, and obvious meaning in favour of capturing the world as we all live it. There is no plot to our lives and only fleeting resolution and any meaning we ascribe to our lives and the world as a whole are fleeting, contingent, and probably wrong.
In Harrison’s stories weird things happen, but off stage, and his characters rarely have more than a glimpse of them as they try, and fail, to make sense of their lives. There is generally an air of desperation about his characters who tend to be making a living on the fringes of the world, and have a sense of self that is fragile, fluid, and haunted by the ghosts of their past attempts at self invention as much as by any existential crisis facing their worlds.
What drives the story is not plot as such, but the accumulation of observation and detail of the world which are intended not as clues but simply what is. If there is an autobiographical element to this book and his fiction it is the threading of his own attempts to capture these observations as truthfully as he can. And that truth is independent of any meaning we ascribe to it.
I have tried, and failed, to capture some of Harrison’s spirit in my story Under Shude Hill which was published by the Dark Lane anthology series. It is incredibly hard to resist tying up a story with a plot and a message and to make observations that are accurate and not in some way symbolic. I plan to have another go, but don’t hope for much more success. The tropes of fiction are embedded in all of us, and we employ them in trying to understand the world as much as in writing. They are part of the DNA of stories since our ancestors gathered round a fire and tried to make sense of the universe of experience.
All hail Harrison for trying to mirror the world as it is without adding a layer of interpretation and allowing us to do the same.
