The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

by M. John Harrison

They were like old-fashioned commercial travellers, fading away in bars and single rooms, exchanging order books on windy corners as if it was still 1981 – denizens of futures that failed to take, whole worlds that never got past the economic turbulence and out into clear air, men and women in cheap business clothes washed up on rail platforms, weak-eyed with the brief energy of the defeated, exchanging obsolete tradecraft like Thatcherite spies.

Beneath sphagnum and hart’s tongue and crusts of dead leaves over black mud lay the contorted and paradoxical strata from which, for almost a thousand years, the local profits had been gouged. Coal for the Cistercians in their abbey; then limestone; then iron and clays for the ironmasters, with their Silicon Valley rhetoric, their promises of a future, their estates called Paradise or Heaven.