Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.

Start by marking “The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again” as Want to Read:

Other editions

Enlarge cover

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Open Preview

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

M. John Harrison

3.66 · Rating details · 464 ratings · 97 reviews

Shaw had a breakdown, but he's getting himself back together. He has a single room, a job on a decaying London barge, and an on-off affair with a doctor's daughter called Victoria, who claims to have seen her first corpse at age thirteen.

It's not ideal, but it's a life. Or it would be if Shaw hadn't got himself involved in a conspiracy theory that, on dark nights by the ri ...more

Get A Copy

Kindle Edition, 219 pages

Published June 25th 2020 by Gollancz

More Details... Edit Details

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Reader Q&A

To ask other readers questions about The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, please sign up.

Be the first to ask a question about The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

Lists with This Book

Booker Prize Eligible 2020

159 books — 107 voters

Ife-Iyoku, Tale of Imadeyunuagbon by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

Threading the Labyrinth by Tiffani Angus

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison

BSFA Awards shortlisted works 2020/2021

23 books — 2 voters

More lists with this book...

Community Reviews

Showing 1-30

Average rating 3.66 ·

Rating details

· 464 ratings · 97 reviews

More filters

Sort order

Start your review of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

Oct 21, 2020 Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer rated it liked it

Shelves: 2020, goldsmith-winners, 2020-goldsmith-prize

Now winner of the 2020 Goldsmith Prize. I have proposed in the past that given its rather obvious lack of diversity the prize should be renamed the Celtic Prize. So how appropriate to have a “state of the nation” book where the only characters not white are green.

Essex Serpent (by Sarah Perry), River (by Esther Kinsky), Fen (by Daisy Johnson) thrown in a food blender with a dash of Dr Who.

Sea change, taking place in damp air, foul weather, at a distance, at night. Everything liquidised. Wher

...more

flag 36 likes · Like · see review

Jul 19, 2020 Jayaprakash Satyamurthy rated it it was amazing

OMFG this book.

So there's a man, emerging from a kind of loss of self, still only halfway out. There's a woman retreating to a safe place, but it turns out to be something else. There is a conspiracy community, or several. Anxiety: selfhood, brexit, climate change. There is transformation and renewal. And death and disappearance. And transformation. The islands are becoming boats and the boats are becoming islands.

Tense, nervy, spackled with correspondences and coincidences. Lock yourself away f ...more

flag 27 likes · Like · see review

Jul 18, 2020 Paul Fulcher rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: goldsmiths-2020, 2020

"As I said, in July..."Recommended - and one that would make a good Goldsmith's contender" - now winner of the Prize!!

Is logic in any sense the right method to be applying here?

Two years ago I had the pleasure of reading a range of innovative fiction from UK/Irish small independent presses as part of the Republic of Consciousness Prize.

One of the most fascinating books I read was the collection You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts, by M. John Harrison. My review: https://www.goodreads. ...more

flag 27 likes · Like · see review

Nov 28, 2020 Lee rated it it was amazing

'Vast feathery geysers erupted through the road. Prismatic colours flashed in all directions. The water collected in front of the ironmonger’s before racing away like a flood between the bungalows of Woolpit Road towards the river. Everyone was hurrying out of the nearby shops, smiling with a kind of delighted alarm. The children, and even some of the men, shouted and ran about, and had to be restrained. It seemed to her as if the whole town stood there for a moment, wondering if the world would ...more

flag 35 likes · Like · see review

Nov 23, 2020 Sarah added it

Shelves: fiction

Pros: psychogeography (love!) and some beautiful passages
Cons: no semblance of a coherent plot and I had no idea what was happening 85% of the time

flag 18 likes · Like · see review

Nov 22, 2020 Peter Boyle rated it did not like it

A middle-aged man, recovering from a breakdown, takes a job from a strange fellow he meets down by a river. His occasional lover inherits a house in a village with some unusual locals. They both hear voices. And then there are rumours of a new species of human in England, green people that come from the water.

What does it all mean? I haven't the foggiest. I know there is an allegory about Brexit buried in here somewhere but I can't summon the energy to unravel it. Even though Harrison does a de ...more

flag 12 likes · Like · see review

Dec 01, 2020 Dan rated it it was amazing

”In fact, the faeries had turned him into a water-baby. A water-baby? You never heard of a water-baby. Perhaps not. That is the very reason why this story was written. There are a great many things in the world which you never heard of; and a great many more which nobody ever heard of; and a great many things, too, which nobody will ever hear of. . .”
”No water babies, indeed? Why, wise men of old said that everything on earth had its double in the water; any you may see that that is, if not quit ”In fact, the faeries had turned him into a water-baby. A water-baby? You never heard of a water-baby. Perhaps not. That is the very reason why this story was written. There are a great many things in the world which you never heard of; and a great many more which nobody ever heard of; and a great many things, too, which nobody will ever hear of. . .”
”No water babies, indeed? Why, wise men of old said that everything on earth had its double in the water; any you may see that that is, if not quite true, still quite as true as most other theories which you are likely to hear for many a day. There are land-babies — hen why not water-babies?”
—Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies, 1863

Reading M. John Harrison’s The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again was a pleasure from beginning to end. It’s an unusually rich novel: intelligent, thoughtful, both emotionally credible and emotionally perfect. The Sunken Land. . . holds multiple facets for this reader, with each facet enjoyable on its own: weird characters; head-scratching relationships; contemporary settings and life skewered; and a sometimes fantastical plot line threaded with The Water-Babies, Charles Kingsley’s nineteenth century British children’s classic. The Sunken Land. . .’s facets work in concert to magnify each other, yet a strength of The Sunken Land. . . is how this reader could choose which facets to focus on while paying less attention to others.

What worked best for me was Harrison’s reminding me, through his off-beat characters and through their head-scratching relationships, that ”There are a great many things in the world which you never heard of”. Harrison’s Shaw is arguably one of the best and most memorable characters in current fiction. ”[D]uring his fifties. . . [Shaw] went through a rough patch. . . His life had been, until then, perfectly normal. He had been determined on normality. Perhaps that had been the problem. Anyway, his life lost shape and five years were expended on nothing very much. They slid into themselves like the parts of a trick box and wouldn’t open again.” ”. . . [H]is life lost shape and five years were expended on nothing very much.” ”In fact, he was reasonably content. It was a relief not to have a life. He read. He visited his mother in the care home. He looked for a new IT gig, and when he couldn’t find one, he wandered the banks of the Thames. . .” According to Victoria Nyman, Shaw’s occasional lover and bemused friend, he has ”’forgotten what’s everything’s about.’ He wondered if he had. If he had, how would he know? What would be the epistemology of that?”.

Shaw’s elderly mother, riding out dementia in a care home, is another great Harrison creation, with a reproduction of Arnold Böcklin’s spectacularly creepy 1887 painting of Sea Idyll on the wall above her bed. Here she upbraids Shaw: ”’How old are you?’ his mother said. ‘Grow up.’ Shaw shrugged. ‘Don’t wait for your life to start. I was always waiting for my life to start. Everything that happened seemed like a good beginning, but it turned out to be the thing itself.” And here she instructs Shaw, ”’There’s less to everyone than meets the eye,’ she told Shaw as he left. ‘You were always a cunt, William.’” The relationship between Shaw and his mother seems dominated by Shaw’s theory that ”. . . while some families cling together, others have a more ballistic tradition. The latter soon can’t stand the sight of each other or forgive anything. Unable to manage conflict, the individual members fly apart, start new lives. But even those don’t hold. ‘They lose the ability, ‘ he said, ‘to contribute to any myth but their own.’”. Then there’s Victoria’s dead parents: ”Victoria’s father, who had taken up fishing in late life, dropped dead in a secluded car park on the bank of the River Severn, leaving the mother at a loss but at the same time inexplicably relieved. Relief saw her through the menopause. It saw her relocate to a small, not very picturesque town in Shropshire, where she acquired an iPhone and went home with strange men, drunk-texting crush after crush late at night late at night until she died of a peculiarly enlarged spleen and very high levels of the thyroid hormone T4.”.

Harrison’s skewering contemporary life is another joy of The Sunken Land. . . Shaw eats ”. . . an artisanal sandwich at the Jouissance Bistro & Well-Being Centre.” At ”. . . another lunchtime, for a change, he walked downstream to Strand-on-the-Green and ate a hamburger sitting outside a barge called the City Barge while middle-aged women in yoga pants by Liquido and Spiritual Gangster exercised their miniature dogs between him and the river. Shaw felt as if he was sick of all that side of things. The tide had turned. The water was beginning to slacken and churn.” Shaw observes that ”Coastal towns are suicide towns. . . : although it’s rarely an actual suicide that people commit in them, more a fading-away, an adjustment of values, the step change to a less energetic state.” Victoria writes a letter to Shaw: ”’It’s very Brexit up here. . . Eight pubs in a mile and deep surrounding woods. I always think of it as my Brocéliande, although the high streets seems to have been deforested as early as 1307.’” And Victoria emails Shaw: ”’It’s very English Heritage up here. I expect I’ve told you that before.’ As soon as you entered the woods, a dozen footpaths, signposted at the will of competing conservation bodies, went off busily in all directions, running precipitously into one another, stumbling over brand new stiles, toppling into an overgrown quarry and out the other side.”

What worked not as well for me was Harrison’s water-babies plot thread. I guess that readers brought up with or at least familiar with Kingsley’s The Water-Babies might find Harrison’s reimagining more natively understandable and more enjoyable.

4.5 stars, certainly among the most enjoyable and thought-provoking recent novels ...more

flag 12 likes · Like · see review

Dec 02, 2020 Jerrie (redwritinghood) rated it liked it

While I enjoyed the writing, the characters, and the settings in this book, it was often hard to tell what was going on. It highlights a lot of modern-day angst (conspiracy theories, elder care responsibilities, economic and political uncertainty), but too much of the action in the book was murky at best. 2.5⭐️

flag 12 likes · Like · see review

Jul 17, 2020 Darko Tuševljaković rated it it was amazing

Intelligent and eerie, masterfully crafted and inconspicuously relevant, the new M. John Harrison novel draws a lot from his previous work – from "Climbers" to his recent flash fiction, via "The Course of the Heart", "Signs of Life" and even the Kefahuchi Tract novels – subliming the already seen and now perfectly ripe elements of his prose into the essence of almost alchemical quality. Readers who have already tried the previous batches will recognize its taste, but even they are at risk of bec Intelligent and eerie, masterfully crafted and inconspicuously relevant, the new M. John Harrison novel draws a lot from his previous work – from "Climbers" to his recent flash fiction, via "The Course of the Heart", "Signs of Life" and even the Kefahuchi Tract novels – subliming the already seen and now perfectly ripe elements of his prose into the essence of almost alchemical quality. Readers who have already tried the previous batches will recognize its taste, but even they are at risk of becoming properly dizzy from these unique literary fumes.

There are two protagonists, who are trying to find themselves and finally take hold of their lives, but it seems they’re way better at losing themselves in the world they occupy but fail to understand; there’s a great deal of urban landscape and countryside which almost pose as the additional protagonists of the novel, sometimes playing enemies, sometimes friends; there are strange and disturbing, even menacing events that cannot be (easily) explained; there are confusing, koanlike dialogues, pretending to clarify things, but really only making them murkier, and most of the time the membrane between the quotidian and the extraordinary, the aberrant, is semiporous, so that you, as well as the main characters of the novel, cannot tell for sure which is which.

All these things are characteristic of Mr. Harrison’s writing, they are his finely honed semiotic tools, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t pushed the envelope a bit further: in "The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again" he undertook the risk of applying the approach he mostly uses in short stories, without adjusting it to the length of a novel, and thus leaving the readers to fight it or go along with it, and, consequentially, enjoy it. It's not his style I’m talking about – it is surprisingly relaxed, while maintaing its usual qualities of being elegant and sharp – but his ability to create a condensed and constant sense of wonder and anxiety, of nausea induced by depriving the readers of enough firm ground of cause and effect to stand on. In such stories there is no jumping board that would send you into the pleasant waters of an imagined world, the plank you stand on is floating on a liquid surface, true, but it’s rather questionable if it’s the sea or a lake: there’s no wind and waves, although something invisible is pushing you in the direction that you only hope is the shore. Pushed to the extreme, and put into skilled hands, it can work fantastically in a short story, but when expanded to the size of a novel, there’s always the risk of overwhelming the readers with oddness and confusing them too much (and for too long). The skilled hand, therefore, must achieve a fine balance between denying them the pleasure of feeling comfortable and letting them believe what they are used to believing, that a + b = c.

In this novel, M. John Harrison does exactly that: he denies us solid ground more than in any of his previous novels, but at the same time, manages to keep our attention, and, among other things, demonstrates the possibility of enjoying a novel without waiting for the mystery to be fully unraveled, explained. Everything is episodic, anecdotal, full of details that seem unimportant (while the things that appear to be of importance remain obscure, even when meticulously depicted), full of protagonists’ petty insecurities and frustrations, and underneath all that a greater picture might lay, but we’re left only with its snippets – left to draw our own conclusions. We recognize the novel’s metaphors, but aren’t sure what they address. Or, better yet, there are many things they may be referring to. So maybe the trick is not to single out any of those references, maybe everything that appears to have some connection to the novel is actually connected to it. The novel’s vagueness is, then, its virtue, and although a twinpeaksesque approach like this one demands a careful and patient reader, for such a reader the reward is guaranteed.

M. John Harrison has a history of provoking us to consider the notion that in life, just like in art, there are no compasses and exact maps that would make the journey easier, provided that there is such a thing as “a journey“ at all, and the readers who don’t care to engage too much, who prefer answers over questions, should avoid this novel. For all the rest, the curious and the bold: this is your best summer isolation read. ...more

flag 10 likes · Like · see review

Jul 22, 2020 Bart rated it really liked it

Shelves: reviewed, speculative

(...)

But this is a review, so I have to tell you something about the beautiful, beautiful prose, which at times is maybe bit overdone as well. But that didn’t really bother me: it’s art’s prerogative. This novel is first and foremost about its sentences – just like Twin Peaks: The Return is about the scenes. Harrison’s prose consists of fragments of 2020 contemporary life, and an eye for plants and how the weather affects light. I also have to tell you about certain meta-parts, in which Harriso ...more

flag 8 likes · Like · see review

Oct 27, 2020 Neil rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2020, 2020-goldsmiths

I read this book because of its shortlisting for the 2020 Goldsmith’s Prize. It’s a story that follows two different characters, Shaw and Victoria. But the remarkable thing about the book is that the reader is quickly aware that there is a whole other storyline developing outside of Shaw and Victoria’s lives and, crucially, just outside of the reader’s perception. When, very early on in the book, we read

”He seemed to bring a smell into the kitchen. She couldn’t quite smell it, but she knew it wa I read this book because of its shortlisting for the 2020 Goldsmith’s Prize. It’s a story that follows two different characters, Shaw and Victoria. But the remarkable thing about the book is that the reader is quickly aware that there is a whole other storyline developing outside of Shaw and Victoria’s lives and, crucially, just outside of the reader’s perception. When, very early on in the book, we read

”He seemed to bring a smell into the kitchen. She couldn’t quite smell it, but she knew it was there.”

we get an inkling of the way the book is going to work. There will be things we know are there but which we can quite grasp hold of. Later, the book will say of another piece of writing:

”…as if the writer had learned to mimic sentence structure without having any idea how to link it to its own content.”

And there are times when reading this book when the reader can relate to this. Indeed, there are times when either Shaw of Victoria say something and have no idea why they said it.

”Does your father own a dog?” Victoria asked. She wasn’t sure why.”

All this makes for an unsettling read. We are following Shaw and Victoria, but we know that just outside of our “field of view” there’s a whole bunch of weirdness going on. We know we are in a Brexit environment (that’s not the weird part, although a lot of Brits might beg to differ) and we know Shaw and Victoria seem strangely unaware of upheavals across the country. But, weirder than that, there are rumours and potential sightings of a new life form emerging and it seems that the man who has given Shaw a sort of job might be involved. There’s a door on a boat that cannot be opened. There are rumours of conspiracy theories. The Victorian (surely the name of one of the protagonists is not coincidental) novel The Water Babies keeps intruding into the story as copies are passed around.

All this just scratches the surface. There’s a lot more going on in this book. But then, when you read it, you realise there’s even more going on if only you could get a clear view of it.

I liked the way this book makes the reader constantly feel that they are on the verge of discovering what it is all about. I liked that there are hints and possibilities that are glimpsed almost out of the corner of the reader’s eye. This is not a book to read if you prefer your novels to tie up loose ends.

This is a great book to read if, like me, you don’t mind navigating your way through a novel where it’s not clear what is going on and there’s a fair chance you will still feel that way when you finish the final page. A lot of the time, that’s my definition of a good book. ...more

flag 7 likes · Like · see review

Jun 29, 2020 Liviu rated it really liked it

Shelves: genre-fantasy, 2020_releases_read, read_2020, mainstream

A book with a lot of promise that feels like it's left unfulfilled; eccentric characters, great prose and a mixture of weird and the banal, the novel sparkles for the first 50 or so pages but then it starts scattering and doesn't really come together again; definitely worth reading but I had very high expectations and those fell somewhat short. ...more

flag 7 likes · Like · see review

Jun 25, 2020 Rainmaker rated it it was amazing

Let me preface this by saying that I'm a gigantic fan of M. John Harrison's exquisite prose. I don't necessarily love all of his works equally, but The Course of the Heart is quite possibly one of my top three favorite works of fiction (which is why I'm never going to review it; it's too personal, just like my relationship with the utterly sublime The Hour After Westerly), so of course I was excited about The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again when it was announced, and now the digital edition is ...more

flag 6 likes · Like · see review

Sep 15, 2020 peg rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Reading through the Goodreads list of books eligible for the upcoming GoldsmithsPrize, I was delighted to find this book by the sf/f writer M. John Harrison. I have read his trilogy beginning with LIGHT and while I wasn’t sure what I thought about it at the time, have thought about it many times since, especially the eerie surreal worldbuilding.

This novel has that same atmosphere, which I can only describe as “UNCANNY”. The main character, a middle-aged man named Shaw, seems to be going through ...more

flag 6 likes · Like · see review

Dec 08, 2020 John Banks rated it really liked it

4.5

I read M. John Harrison's The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again because it was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths prize 2020 and then won it. A very deserving if slightly uneven winner.

There's much to admire here formally and in terms of just the share quality of writing. The book sets out focusing on the character Shaw, a man in his fifties who has lost his way in life somewhat and seems to inhabit a state of almost permanent, disquieting crisis ("His adult life had been, until then, perfectly n ...more

flag 4 likes · Like · see review

Jan 16, 2021 Stephen Bacon rated it it was amazing

I first came across the fiction of M John Harrison in the late 80s and early 90s, in the anthologies edited by Stephen Jones – the annual Best New Horror and his original Dark Terrors series. His writing, on the surface so straightforward and conventional, merely hints at things just out of sight, the weirdness is not in any way overt. And yet his skill is such that, as a reader, you can’t fail to pick up on the disturbing element of the narrative. He manages to conjure a dreamlike quality to hi I first came across the fiction of M John Harrison in the late 80s and early 90s, in the anthologies edited by Stephen Jones – the annual Best New Horror and his original Dark Terrors series. His writing, on the surface so straightforward and conventional, merely hints at things just out of sight, the weirdness is not in any way overt. And yet his skill is such that, as a reader, you can’t fail to pick up on the disturbing element of the narrative. He manages to conjure a dreamlike quality to his stories. You almost feel like you’re not fully aware of all the facts, like you’ve missed some part of the narrative. Although the sense of paranoia this evokes is not at all accidental…

Shaw lives in south west London. He’s recovering after suffering some kind of breakdown. He’s clearly distanced from everything, and has little contact with his surroundings other than his occasional visits to his aging mum, who has dementia and is being looked after in a care-home. One day he meets Victoria, the daughter of a doctor, who claims she saw her first corpse at the age of 13. He is offered a job by one of his neighbours, and spends his days on a barge doing menial jobs. Meanwhile Victoria journeys up to Shropshire to restore the property that her late mother left. There she encounters a strange set of characters and events, most of which cross over with Shaw’s experiences. It feels like there is a conspiracy taking place, one to which Shaw and Victoria (and us, as the reader) are on the outside.

The book is littered with references to water and fish, and is underscored with a hint of the numinous, although there is a strong suggestion that the events are rather outside the realms of human understanding. There are a couple of scenes that left me feeling unsettled and disturbed, and yet I couldn’t quite explain why. This is largely to do with Harrison’s skill as a writer, and it’s no surprise to see that The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again won the Goldsmiths Prize 2020. Each of his sentences offer something startling, or beautiful, or unsettling, sometimes at the same time.

I loved this book, but its unconventional narrative and lack of explanatory hand-holding, might not be for everyone. I couldn’t pretend to understand all of the motifs and metaphors, and there are no doubt some dots I probably failed to connect, but nevertheless this is an assured novel, brilliantly realised, and a major entry into the catalogue of the very best of weird fiction. Highly recommended. ...more

flag 4 likes · Like · see review

Jul 06, 2020 Chris Amies rated it liked it

I feel that I'm somehow supposed to give a good review because, y'know, M John Harrison. Amazing writer he may be but this novel left me with a feeling that I'd seen most of it before, probably in Iain Sinclair (question: did M John Harrison invent psychogeography? He may have done). Character lives a peripatetic life in Mortlake, SW London. And how peripatetic: walking to Kingston and round back to Barnes via Richmond Park is what he does for normal - that's around 18km depending on the route. I feel that I'm somehow supposed to give a good review because, y'know, M John Harrison. Amazing writer he may be but this novel left me with a feeling that I'd seen most of it before, probably in Iain Sinclair (question: did M John Harrison invent psychogeography? He may have done). Character lives a peripatetic life in Mortlake, SW London. And how peripatetic: walking to Kingston and round back to Barnes via Richmond Park is what he does for normal - that's around 18km depending on the route. So, over ten-mile walks he thinks nothing of. He also engages in joyless-sounding sex with two different women, falls in with a medium who seems at one point to have murdered her husband and he disposes of the body. This is not ok. If the husband had murdered -her-, this would now be a crime novel.
Victoria, the other principal char, is more interesting. She flees London and heads for Shropshire (MJH doesn't name the town but I'm presuming Bridgnorth as it's on the Severn gorge not far from Telford, although at one point a character gets a train to Shrewsbury). There she has a nice life but as is common with these characters dominated by others; she also (is it her) finds it all a bit Brexity. West Midlands (of which Shropshire is a part) is pure Brexit territory; I suspect Brexit happened while Harrison was writing this novel as it isn't mentioned until near the very end.
Is there some kind of correlation between West London and the West Midlands? I'm sure there is. Being in Hammersmith (by the Bridge or Brook Green) one day and in Birmingham the next is not unusual.
Then there's the Water Babies thing, and that gives TSLBTRA a whole new aspect. Starting with a drunk seeing green babies in a pub toilet and culminating in a character diving into her lawn like it was a swimming pool, Charles Kingsley's unpleasant and traumatising (well it was to me as a child) novel sits as a kind of background radiation to TSLBTRA. Translucent glowing children abound. People hand copies of that unpleasant book about.
A lot of it is about rivers really, and that isn't mentioned; a tale of two rivers, with Victoria by the Severn and Shaw by the Thames. Secret connections and influences are what MJH is all about. The book, unlike a river, just doesn't really go anywhere. The flaneux (my preferred spelling; neither male nor female, and 'eux' is a form of the French word for 'they') does not wander idly; but then again, the journey not the arrival matters. Finish lines not finish times (but there's still a line). Not all who are lost, wander. ...more

flag 4 likes · Like · see review

Jul 26, 2020 Brent rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

M. John Harrison’s earthbound twelfth novel brings us back to the Britain of Signs of Life and Climbers—except that now, Brexited and decades older, the country’s slowly sliding back into some sort of primordial state. Like William Gibson’s Jackpot, the crisis here is “distributed rather than catastrophic” and the lessons are “patiently dispensed.” People and culture slide slowly in reverse. It’s not exactly terra firma for protagonists Shaw and Victoria, but this is the terrain MJH works best, ...more

flag 4 likes · Like · see review

Jul 19, 2020 S. Naomi Scott rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2020, to-review

A strange and confusing and disturbing and delightfully magical tale, but what more can you ask for from M. John Harrison. Full review to follow shortly.

flag 4 likes · Like · see review

Feb 12, 2021 Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) marked it as did-not-finish · review of another edition

Shelves: review-copy

This is not really a review, and I have marked it as such, as I didn't finish it. I dropped it around 25% cause I was just not feeling it and, to be honest, found it incredibly boring which is really a shame as it had all the hallmarks of books I love. It's as much about England and Brexit as it's about strange occurrences taking place around water bodies. Dereliction and decay permeate the text, the past trying to be present. The promise of regrowth and renewal is there, but hollow.

Harrison kee ...more

flag 5 likes · Like · see review

Nov 02, 2020 Sebastian rated it really liked it

I have a high-amplitude oscillating relationship with Harrison’s work, it either murders me cutting deep into my soul, or it leaves me indifferent and bored. This book, somehow, managed both at the same time. It is full of this kind of flip-floppery: it goes on forever, yet it is over too quick; it is highly emotional, but at the same time oddly apathetic; the language flows beautifully right until it crashes in a jarringly unintelligible clatter of sentence structures. The same with the two POV ...more

flag 4 likes · Like · see review

Jul 27, 2020 Gabi rated it really liked it

A dreamlike, stream-of-consciousness prose which evokes deeply felt melancholia in the reader.

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

Jul 31, 2020 Tony Ellis rated it really liked it

MJH at his most Aickmanesque, which should tell you all you need to know. It's no Climbers, but then again, what is? ...more

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

Dec 23, 2020 David Harris rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is another 2020 book that I put aside till less hectic times and eventually read over Christmas. It was a glorious read for me, but I have to say I find my reviewing skills rather lacking in describing exactly why.

The book follows two protagonists. Shaw is a middle aged man living in West London ('south and west of Hammersmith Bridge in a quiet suburban badlands between East Sheen and the Thames, bounded by Little Chelsea on one side and Sheen Lane on the oth The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is another 2020 book that I put aside till less hectic times and eventually read over Christmas. It was a glorious read for me, but I have to say I find my reviewing skills rather lacking in describing exactly why.

The book follows two protagonists. Shaw is a middle aged man living in West London ('south and west of Hammersmith Bridge in a quiet suburban badlands between East Sheen and the Thames, bounded by Little Chelsea on one side and Sheen Lane on the other') who is just coming out of a 'rough patch' which he doesn't remember well. he frequently visits his mother in a care home (oh, pre Covid writing!). Victoria, the daughter of a doctor who claims to have seen her first corpse at 13, now lives in a Midlands town on the river Severn. At the start of the book they are, or have recently been, together, and throughout they email, telephone and occasionally meet - indeed, parts of the story are told in these emails, although it may be they are never actually sent.

So Victoria and Shaw are apart, facing ostensibly different circumstances but there are parallels in their lives which become more obvious as time goes on (although I would still be hard put to explain exactly what is happening to them). These range from locations (the descriptions of Shaw's lodgings and the building which Victoria visits to find Pearl) to passing references (tourist trap villages which claimed to have hosted a parliament in the 14th century) to relationships with other characters - each is engaged with a more-knowing set, focussed, in different ways, on local waters and pools (the rivers of West London for Shaw, the Severn and field-pools for Victoria).

In a sense, each is I think investigating the same mystery, and if they had sat down together at any point and shared all of what they knew, both might have made more progress. (As they might if they had read the copies of Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies that keep being pressed on them - a book I remember trying to read as a child and giving up in bafflement).

Shaw works for Tim, who has contacts in turn with a medium and with a chain of businesses to whom he sells - what exactly? I was never sure - across the country, landing Shaw with many rail journeys to run down towns. There is also a mystery around Shaw's boarding house and the unseen occupant of the room next to his.

Victoria has moved into her dead mother's house in the Midlands town and is having it renovated. She makes friends with Pearl, who runs a local café. Names are shifty here - we get different versions of Victoria's surname at different times, at first this looks as though it's meant to be due to Shaw's confusion or memory but in fact I think she's introduced differently by the narrator at different times. Similarly, sometimes Victoria refers to her friend Pearl as such, sometimes as "the waitress". Pearl is knowing of the locals, speaking to Victoria of groups and localities, rivalries and factions. In both strands of the story there seems to be a struggle, though between whom, and over what, is obscure. Eventually, Pearl vanishes, having apparently walked into a shallow pond, and the final part of Victoria's story focusses on her attempt to find the waitress, leading her to (perhaps) a closer knowledge and understanding of her mother.

That is about as clear as I can be over the "story" in this book. It's not meant, I think, to be obvious, it may not even be meant to be "there" in the sense of complete, coherent and self-consistent. Rather it is "there" in the sense of being present, glimpsed, seen differently at different times because it has evolved and developed, or is being seen form different viewpoints.

The themes are clearer, I think - layers of the past rising to interact with the present. This is sometimes a geological metaphor (note, though, that while the implication in the title is on some kind of buried land, what most often seems to be happening is the effect of rising, or shifting, waters - Harrison emphasises how the diverted River Severn, flowing South rather than North after the ice age, carved a gorge which exposed deposits of easily won and useful minerals - fireclay, coal, tars, limestone - to kickstart the Industrial Revolution). It is sometimes a genetic metaphor, with Tim and his sister, the medium (who seem at odds in some way - Time has Shaw spy on her) involved in some kind of online group which seems to centre around alternate human ancestry.

Actually, that doesn't make the themes seen clearer, does it? This is a very knotty, rich and evocative book which I think perhaps can only really be grasped by reading it, not be reading anything about it. To get the most from it, it needs to be read, and taken in, slowly. I don't mean by that, "read in a solemn and po-faced manner". The atmosphere of this story is simply gorgeous, Harrison deftly sketching the workings of a provincial town, the miasma-y nights of the creeks and backyards in West London, or the almost alien shouts and boasts to be heard on city streets late at night. The effect is cumulative, and unsettling, but also revealing: it's like stepping into an Edward Hopper picture, but on a night when the power has gone down.

In short, I'm a fan of this book, but I know I can't easily, or well, explain why. Do read it, if you like this kind of thing you will REALLY like The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again. ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Aug 01, 2020 David Allison rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

If you tried to take a holiday from yourself, where would you expect to go? Where might you come back to?

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Dec 14, 2020 Fx Smeets rated it really liked it · review of another edition

M.John Harrison does everything his own way. He puts his initial in first position (which makes sense when you think about it). He subverts genre codes by ignoring all of them within the same novel. He uses a whole verse as a book title. M. John Harrison loves giving book reviewers a hard time. I hope he has a laugh when he reads them – just picturing them having to type “The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again” ten times must be quite fun.

Reading M. John Harrison has always been a puzzling game to ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Jul 28, 2020 Ancillary Pride-Goeth-Before-the-Fall rated it liked it · review of another edition

M. John Harrison's writing is always intentional and skillful, and strange. Usually I love it. This one is pretty far from the wild Kefahuchi or Viriconium settings, but its focus isn't totally un-Harrisonian: human disconnection, personal crises without the possibility of expression or even internal understanding, strange events that don't have rational explanation. But I couldn't connect to the two main characters -- after all, their entire core is an inability to connect, one can't even get t ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Nov 13, 2020 Rachel Dawn Drenning rated it it was ok

A lot of people loved this book. I'm sorry, but I found it excruciating to read. I didn't finish. I stopped at page 123. I kept waiting for something interesting to happen, and there were hints of that possibility, but nope. Just a story about two humans with boring lives. It had potential, but just fell flat as a board. ...more

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

Jul 14, 2020 Susan rated it it was amazing

Perplexing in the best possible way

Draws you into not only a set of characters but a geography, richly rendered and often wet. It’s a very English alternate universe, very very slightly sideways from our own. Or is it?

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Dec 07, 2020 Adam rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: eldritch, england, 2020

whoa

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

« previous 1 2 3 4 next »

new topic
Discuss This Book

topics	posts	views	last activity
The Mookse and th...: 2020 Goldsmiths Shortlist - The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again	36	62	Nov 14, 2020 04:46AM

Readers also enjoyed

See similar books…

Genres

Fiction

31 users

Fantasy

20 users

Fantasy > Weird Fiction

6 users

European Literature > British Literature

6 users

Novels

4 users

Speculative Fiction

4 users

Horror

4 users

Science Fiction

4 users

Literature > 21st Century

3 users

Contemporary

3 users

See top shelves…

About M. John Harrison

M. John Harrison

592 followers

aka Gabriel King (with Jane Johnson)

Michael John Harrison was born in Rugby, Warwickshire in 1945 and now lives in London.
Harrison is stylistically an Imagist and his early work relies heavily on the use of strange juxtapositions characteristic of absurdism.

...more

Books by M. John Harrison

More…

News & Interviews

33 Sweeping Multigenerational Family Dramas

Why not focus on some serious family drama? Not yours, of course, but a fictional family whose story you can follow through the generations of...

Trivia About The Sunken Land B...

No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »

Quotes from The Sunken Land B...

“Two men deep in conversation could be seen disappearing along the opposite pavement towards Mortlake, their shadows cast huge and filmily onto the brewery walls by the kind of late-night city light that, while failing to relieve the darkness in any way, seems to pour in from every direction at once. Otherwise Wharf Terrace presented itself with only minute differences from his usual point of view. He had expected more.” — 1 likes

“I would never have to fake my own death, he found himself thinking. I've all but vanished already. Part of him welcomed that. Another part, larger but distributed so thinly across his personality that it seemed invisible, panicked soundlessly on a twenty-four-hour schedule.” — 0 likes

More quotes…

See a Problem?

Preview — The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

Get A Copy

Friend Reviews

Reader Q&A

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topic
Discuss This Book

Readers also enjoyed

Genres

About M. John Harrison

Books by M. John Harrison

News & Interviews

Trivia About The Sunken Land B...

Quotes from The Sunken Land B...

See a Problem?

Preview — The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

Get A Copy

Friend Reviews

Reader Q&A

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topicDiscuss This Book

Readers also enjoyed

Genres

About M. John Harrison

Books by M. John Harrison

News & Interviews

Trivia About The Sunken Land B...

Quotes from The Sunken Land B...

new topic
Discuss This Book