A book resistant to many things, among them clarity, simplicity and relatability, and mostly the better for it.
"Nothing in memory ever made itself so available"
This line, from late on in The End of Everything, the new and Booker longlisted novel from M. John Harrison, is a fair summation of the book the precedes it. But not the only one. Not by a mile.
This is the point of a review that usually contains a plot summary. It won't here. I could try to craft one, and talk about some of the things that do, probably, happen in the book. But it would be wildly unhelpful, and possibly misleading. I could, by stating only facts, give the impression of a thriller or a dystopian climate mystery or even a cosy journey through a landscape (though that one might require a few elisions). Some characters exist. Some actions and conversations are undertaken, the world has suffered a dramatic change. This isn't a novel that's about its events; it's just not what its for. To effectively talk about it, then, I have to turn to what it is, and is about... and that feels rather more slippery.
First up, it's been longlisted for the Booker Prize, which, if you're familiar with their game, says a fair bit about it in some regards. There's a type of prose-forwardness, and formal play, that is far more usual in literary fiction than in SF or broader speculative fiction (not unknown! just less common), and a lack of interest in the nuts and bolts of the world that speaks to its use far more metaphorically than functionally. The prose particularly of these is worth focussing on, because it's in that interesting space of being obviously crafted and thoughtfully deployed without being particularly purple. Though certainly there are some high scoring scrabble vocab choices around, they don't feel encrusted onto the text or particularly burdensome to it (though they do, fairly quickly, form a distinctive style that comes through especially in the dialogue - more on that a little later).
More prominently though, are the themes and metaphors and general sense of idea interplay. If novels can be plot forward or character forward, I would call this one theme forward, perhaps. Or idea forward. Motif-forward? It is dense with moments and scenes that feel laden with meaning, invested with something being their direct plot function, and often divested of a direct plot function - there are meandering digressions that don't seem to relate to what anyone is doing, because well... they don't. They serve instead the text's function as a potential map of meaning and interpretation.
There are many ways to feel when you finish a book, but one of them, and one I savour very much, is the feverish excitement and urge to discuss when finishing a book that sparks not just thought but criticism. That's what all that theme is serving here: the creation of a book that wants not just to be read, but to be read into, and which provides a rich field for the harvest, a cornucopia of potential readings. With that sort of book, you always, at least to some extent, take out what you yourself bring to it, so I do not consider these an exhaustive list of potential readings, but they were the ones that came to my mind most readily as I made my way through the text, and the ones I felt best connected into one another and were best served by being laid alongside the rest.
The first, and one I will freely admit is absolutely something I'm primed to bring into a text with me, is a class reading. Specifically, a disdain for a certain kind of grasping middle class, and perhaps a glee at the downfall the cataclysmic change may have wrought on them. There are several vignettes from a before time, of the rich partying (predominantly in South London; it's strange but wonderful to read a book in which I recognised so much of the landscape), that felt drenched in contempt for their excess. I don't think at any point it turned into a wider take about capitalism more broadly; it felt too pointed, too specific and sharply observational for that. And it was, in that, desperately English too. Those South London and south coast locations all felt critical to the message being put across, to the very particular people being evoked in some of the characters, even those who only got a very brief stint on the page. Even in that brief time, many of them felt familiar without necessarily being individual: washed out photos of someone I might once have known, or a face in a crowd. There's... not anger, quite, but some emotion that felt to me underlying all this, a disgruntlement or irritation, that made it feel more powerful.
But where that reading felt to me sharply invective, there's another one more drenched in sorrow, and possibly the most obvious reading of the book: about dementia. One of the characters is described explicitly as suffering from it, and the way her actions proceed throughout the narrative, and the way the descriptions and emotions are portrayed as diffuse, blurry things, only swinging into sharp delineation at key points, seems to underscore her experiences as she describes them. But this is not just focussing on the memory loss aspect of dementia. Instead, it is quite easy to read some of the events as representative of the loss of inhibition that is also part of the condition, and so to take some of the worst events of the book as a possibly inescapable tragedy, horrible for all involved.
This reading makes particular sense to me of a moment which comes early on in the book - page 14 in my edition - that seems out of nowhere. It is horrific, particularly because it is a horrific act described with intense nonchalance. The horror has to come from the reader, because the prose isn't providing it. And it is somehow more palpable for that choice. This moment unsettles everything that comes later, and made me doubt the emotional tone being presented, and how that connected with the events and the characters' perceived reality.
There's also a more generalised reading about ageing, which goes hand in hand but distinct from the dementia one. This is more tied to the actuality of the characters' words and experiences, rather than in reading into the gaps and how different pieces interact. There are several moments of characters noticing how the world has changed around them, how it seemed to happen without any way of stopping it, and feeling detached from and alienated by the world they now live in but can neither change nor control, fondly thinking back to the better time of their youth. What is this if not a lament for the passage of time? And while the dementia thread is a great tragedy, made all the more so by what it causes, the ageing one feels to me more ambivalent, resigned to the reality but not happy about it.
There's definitely also some "politics of modern Britain" in the mix, though I admit I could not quite find a specific angle to connect throughout the story. There are sharp moments scattered throughout that felt specific and directed - like a line talking about the state of the country at the time the story is set, where the tide of small boats has turned to predominantly fleeing rather than entering. I certainly paused when I got to that part of the text. But I cannot quite figure out what it's doing or saying. Is it just broadly pessimistic about modern Britain? In what way? I am lingering over it, picking at it, wanting to figure it out and not being quite able. We'll come back to this too.
Aside from the potential for thematic readings (plentiful) there is still more to enjoy. The formal playfulness comes out not just in the crafted prose, but in occasional oddities, repetitions and deviations out of the flow of the text, used to illustrate the shape of the world but also just fun, as pieces of artistic meandering all by themselves. There's also a hint, maybe, that the text is at least in part diegetic, in a way that is pleasingly headfucky if thought about too long or in too much detail. Harrison is clearly interested in the text as specifically a text, and what texts, collections of words imbued with greater significance, can do in the hands of someone with a mind bent towards nonsense (in the most complimentary sense).
There is also, to loop back to that first delayed point, an oddity of character. I enjoy it, but it runs rather counter to the norms I'm used to both in genre and in litfic - a rejection of realism. None of the characters feels intended to convey individuals that one might meet on the street. They do not have distinctive, individual voices, and they all talk, more or less, like the text rather than like themselves or anyone I've ever met in the world. They are constantly artful, affected and approaching their topics at a weird angle, full of slightly off-kilter descriptions and philosophical musing. They aren't people, meaningfully, and that's fine, realism is only one option among many. But it's still strange to read, when it's the thing I'm quite so immersed in 99% of my reading time. And because I'm not quite sure I can articulate why Harrison has chosen to make it this way, what purpose its serving to the text. It's possible that this rejection of relatability, this intense opacity of character interiority, is meant to demonstrate quite how implausible relatablity ever was - every man truly is an island, and we can see through no window into his soul. Or is it meant to render out the individuality, in this broken down world where so much else about normality has been lost? I don't know. It could be something else entirely. It could be nothing. It could simply be an affectation. There's nothing I can quite find purchase on to really figure it out.
Which brings me back round to my second delayed point.
There's a spectre that haunts the corners of the text, and that is the iGhetti, who are, perhaps, an invading alien force from the astral plane. Maybe. Of all the things in the book resistant to explanation, they are perhaps the most opaque, the most unclear, to the extent that, at times, I doubted whether they existed at all. I think it entirely possible that Harrison is having us all on with this, and it's some sort of complex bit in service of a different narrative agenda. Or that it's just doing something I haven't quite figured out yet. There are conflicting details littered through the book, but few of them, never in enough useful explanation to make much in the way of sense. It feels like the characters try not to think about them, mostly. And so it's a book that's making you work for a lot of its content, both the thematic and the background. Getting a sense of the iGhetti requires me to be reading in a very active, brain on sort of way, and in the end all that activity merits little in the way of reward, just as the politics seem ever so slightly out of reach.
This is, I think, the novel's great strength, and also its great weakness. It is a text oblique enough to permit many readings, and it is also a text oblique enough to be unsatisfyingly impenetrable at times.
I like books that are hard work. I like sometimes not being given everything on a plate - I complain often enough about books that do that too readily and too clearly. And so it feels rather perverse to be complaining that I got what I asked for. And I'm not... not exactly. I certainly wouldn't change the book in any way. I think the thing is that, by choosing to be so resistant to reading, Harrison has closed himself off to the sort of emotional access that, for me at least, allows me to love a book. He's maxed out the "appreciate" bar, though, and I like it plenty. It's a siloing of the type of response available all into one pot, and one that runs counter to a lot of current speculative fiction's approach, and I can only salute it. I think making the book easier to access would ruin much of the magic. But it does just mean it's not quite all the way for me.
And my literary diet needs that variation. I want to read books that satisfy me intellectually as well as emotionally. And that is, more or less, what is happening here. I felt a sort of feverish rush when I finished it. I felt awake. I felt stretched, like I'd done a nice jog with the little grey cells. I felt satisfied. Books like this are a necessary complement to the ones full of character realism and emotional heft, and absolutely ones prime for critical discussion. If I stick with the food metaphor, that's broccoli, but I fucking love broccoli.
So, after all that, what is this book?
It's SF but it's also unapologetically literary fiction in how it approaches its concepts - no sense of or desire for explanation, or even necessarily experience. It's about conjunction, reaction, the interposition of idea and motif and theme and how they might bounce off each other to make the reader have some sort of response, rather than an attempt to create immersion or realistic people. It's a book asking you to criticise, not asking you to solve or relate. It's a book doing a dystopia and an alien invasion and an astral plane and maybe even some satire. It's about dementia and ageing and Britain right now - if the unspecified pessimism that runs through it all can be considered of the moment (not unreasonable). It's a fuzzy journey through a familiar yet strange landscape, a tragedy and a warning. It is intensely, indescribably itself. It's fascinating. And it's frustrating.
The thing is about the books that cause this feverish excitement, the thrill doesn't always last. Sometimes it smoulders down into the embers of a long, burning passion, it's true. But not always. I think, after my initial fascination with The End of Everything dies down, what will be left instead is something less emotional - an appreciation for the complex artistry, a fascination with the way the different layers and pieces work together across the whole. Not exactly love, but something nonetheless necessary and worthwhile.
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The Math
Highlights: Delicious prose with the occasional line that lands with a big bang, rich text full of possible readings, lot of cleverness available to find as soon as you start looking
Nerd Coefficient: Yes.
Reference: M. John Harrison, The End of Everything, [Serpent's Tail, 2026].
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
