The End of Everything, M. John Harrison’s latest novel, which won the Booker Prize just a few days ago, begins like this: in Kent, a few decades from now, a man named Phillip Tennent picks up something on the beach that resembles a newborn baby. Tennent’s first concern is whether the discovery might have any commercial value. The object, or creature, or whatever it is, grows rapidly, learns to speak, displays a certain inclination to imitate human beings, and seems to possess a rather flexible notion of its own identity.
The setting is an England that has suffered a catastrophe whose effects are far better understood than its causes. Institutions survive as remnants of a social order whose rules no one seems able to remember entirely. Europe has become an uncertain geographical entity. Mysterious presences known as the iGhetti have compromised something fundamental in the fabric of reality. Phillip, who makes a living salvaging abandoned objects along the coast, therefore finds himself having to decide how much to charge for a being about which he knows next to nothing.
It is worth dwelling on this detail, because it contains a considerable part of what M. John Harrison is attempting to convey in his thirteenth novel. Phillip’s behaviour is perfectly understandable: he needs to earn a living, he has something potentially marketable in his possession, and he is trying to make something out of it. His inability to understand the nature of the object is temporarily resolved through a category he knows extremely well: property. It is a mental operation we perform constantly, and with such naturalness that we have ceased to recognise it. Whenever something exceeds our capacity for understanding, we attempt to bring it back within a familiar system of relationships. We assign it a name, a function, preferably a price. The problem, in Harrison’s imagined world, is that these systems have begun to operate independently of the things they purported to describe. Reality has developed an intolerance of its own towards our explanations.
On 9 November, in London, a jury chaired by the classicist Mary Beard unanimously awarded the Booker Prize to this novel of just 198 pages. Harrison is eighty-one years old, has been writing for sixty years, and is the oldest winner in the history of the prize. His victory has been hailed as a watershed moment for science fiction, the literary territory in which he developed as a writer and of which he is regarded as one of the most important authors, although much of his work consists precisely in an attempt to escape the expectations that territory entails. The occasion raises an interesting question, and perhaps a slightly embarrassing one for literary culture: why did we have to wait for science fiction to produce a writer openly hostile to its own conventions before recognising, through one of the most prestigious literary prizes, a legitimacy it already possessed?
Harrison was born in 1945 in Rugby, Warwickshire, the son of an engineer, and grew up in an England where the war continued to exist primarily through the things adults avoided explaining to children. At home, he discovered a cupboard full of old science-fiction magazines and popular fiction. It was an important discovery, as discoveries generally are when they occur before one has acquired a sufficiently respectable idea of what deserves to be read. In the 1960s, he entered the orbit of New Worlds, the magazine edited by Michael Moorcock which, alongside writers such as J. G. Ballard, was helping shift the science-fiction imagination away from the conquest of space and towards the considerably less explored regions of human consciousness.
The British New Wave had grasped something that much realist fiction would take longer to understand: modernity was producing experiences so alien to our perceptual categories that science fiction, rather than offering an escape from reality, could become one of the most effective instruments for describing it. Technologies were altering relationships between individuals before those individuals had even found the appropriate words to describe the transformation. Metropolises were acquiring the complexity of organisms incomprehensible to their own inhabitants. The future, which popular literature had imagined for decades as a destination, was beginning to resemble a pathology of the present.
Harrison develops this insight through a body of work that resists any orderly trajectory. In the books set in Viriconium, he constructs a fantastical city whose nature and history change according to the narrative, frustrating the reader’s desire to possess a definitive geography of that world. In Climbers, published in 1989, he apparently abandons the fantastic to write about climbing, an activity he knows intimately and in which the relationship between the body and a rock face raises questions of knowledge that no theory can resolve on behalf of the muscles. With Light, published in 2002, and its successors Nova Swing and Empty Space, he returns to cosmic science fiction only to subject it to a kind of internal sabotage. The laws of the universe, the motivations of the characters, even the continuity of identity itself become provisional. In The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, winner of the Goldsmiths Prize in 2020, estrangement seeps into provincial England and takes the form of an unease that cannot be entirely distinguished from ordinary life.
In 2007, in an essay that became something of a manifesto, Harrison attacked worldbuilding, the practice of constructing imaginary universes through meticulous descriptions of their geographies and institutions. What he found intolerable was the assumption that a literary reality acquired substance through the accumulation of information about it. Behind this polemic lies a surprisingly rigorous conception of art. Literature, according to Harrison, ought to allow readers to encounter something that resists their capacity to organise it intellectually. An imaginary world described down to its last detail risks becoming an environment that has already been interpreted, in which the reader’s imagination is reduced to an act of recognition.
It is a position that may seem extreme, and one that certainly overlooks the genuine pleasure many readers derive from exploring coherent fictional universes. Its significance, however, becomes clearer when we return it to the present. We inhabit a cultural environment in which every experience is accompanied by an ever-increasing quantity of information intended to make it immediately intelligible. Understanding is increasingly presented as a finished product, available for consultation. Consider the almost comical proliferation of diagrams and vector-based graphics used to translate the complexity of thought into visual schemes. Meanwhile, the workings of the systems on which our existence depends, from digital infrastructures to financial markets, become progressively harder to reconstruct. Harrison seems interested in this peculiar asymmetry: the proliferation of explanations coexists with a diminishing capacity to understand what actually governs us.
The End of Everything, conceived in the aftermath of the 2007–2008 financial crisis and developed over approximately fifteen years, takes this problem to its narrative consequences. The iGhetti, mysterious entities initially associated with London’s financial centres, might represent an allegory of capitalism, a technological mutation that has escaped the control of its creators, or something radically other. The text allows these possibilities to coexist. Their presence alters society and the perception of time; human beings experience episodes of discontinuity known as bad patches, during which experience itself seems to lose its coherence. The catastrophe remains incomprehensible even to those who are living through it.
The novel’s most unsettling insight concerns precisely this impossibility of establishing when the end of the world actually occurred. Traditional apocalyptic fiction almost always possesses a recognisable chronology, a relatively orderly distribution of events that allows the reader to distinguish the world that existed before from its destruction. Harrison dissolves that boundary. In Kent, people continue to drink coffee, organise children’s parties, and find socially acceptable ways of making a living. Collapse appears as a condition to which individuals have gradually adapted, losing in the process the memory of the normality they ought to be mourning. Writing in The Atlantic, Hillary Kelly recognised in this structure something remarkably close to contemporary experience: the possibility that the apocalypse might consist of an indefinite succession of disorienting events, each sufficiently contained to allow us to get on with our day.
The strength of this interpretation lies above all in its political implications. A society incapable of identifying the nature of its own crisis also becomes incapable of formulating a collective response. Harrison’s characters inhabit a landscape in which the categories through which public decisions were once made have lost their substance. Institutions survive in residual form, while the memory of their function deteriorates. The European continent has become a distant, almost mythological presence, as though Brexit had finally fulfilled, in a literal sense, the aspiration to separate England from its own geography. But Harrison is working with material more complex than political satire: he is interested in the way human beings learn to inhabit increasingly incomprehensible realities, assigning an appearance of continuity to transformations that have profoundly altered their existence.
The form of the novel itself participates in this process. Episodes are brief, perspectives shift, and certain events seem to escape the normal sequence of time. The characters’ motivations frequently remain opaque. Writing in the London Review of Books, Edmund Gordon observed how Harrison dispenses with much of the narrative architecture through which a traditional novel organises the reader’s experience. In the New York Times, Dave Kim recognised the power of this elliptical prose, while also emphasising its capacity to provoke frustration. Michel Faber, in The Guardian, warned against the temptation to regard the book as accessible to everyone. These are important observations, because obscurity does not in itself constitute an aesthetic virtue. Any writer can decide to withhold information, render dialogue incomprehensible, or interrupt a narrative sequence. The difficulty lies in transforming these acts of omission into an experience that carries meaning.
Harrison seems to succeed primarily because his writing establishes a profound correspondence between what is being narrated and the position occupied by the reader. In catastrophic fiction, we are accustomed to enjoying an epistemic privilege: we recognise danger before the characters do, understand the causes of the disaster, and possess an overall view of events. In The End of Everything, that privilege is progressively withdrawn. Reading means participating in the same uncertainty that governs the existence of Phillip and the other survivors. Our interpretative faculties continue to produce hypotheses, but none acquires the definitive status we ordinarily demand of an explanation.
This approach carries a less obvious consequence, concerning our relationship with other human beings. Much contemporary fiction, particularly the kind that aspires to a certain psychological respectability, seems founded on the conviction that understanding a character means reconstructing the causes of their behaviour. Childhood traumas explain adult obsessions, romantic experiences account for decisions, and biography becomes a kind of investigation through which every action can be traced back to a recognisable origin. Harrison suggests a different possibility. People possess a depth that survives our interpretations of them. Something about them continues to elude us even when we have all the information required to construct a plausible explanation.
This insight takes on particular intensity in the character of Marnie, Phillip’s seventy-year-old aunt, a former painter whose memory is beginning to deteriorate. Mary Beard identified her dementia as a possible key to interpreting the entire novel. The correspondence between the disintegration of individual memory and that of collective memory is evident, but risks becoming reductive if it turns Marnie into a mere allegory of Western civilisation. She retains her desires and her own capacity for judgement, while the progressive loss of her memories alters the relationship between her inner life and the world. Harrison seems interested in the possibility that a person may continue to exist fully even when their experience ceases to organise itself into a coherent narrative.
It is here that the novel attains a moral depth that its reputation as a work of experimental science fiction risks obscuring. Intelligence, understood as the capacity to explain reality, has immense value; its inadequacy constitutes one of the most painful experiences of the human condition. Yet the existence of other people imposes responsibilities upon us that often precede the possibility of understanding them. In the relationship between Phillip and Marnie, marked by mutual dependence and progressive estrangement, Harrison seems to pose an ancient question: how much of our willingness to care for someone depends on our ability to recognise them through the categories by which we have always known them?
At this point, it becomes possible to understand why The End of Everything has attracted so much interest precisely in the age of generative artificial intelligence. The being recovered by Phillip imitates human language, reproduces advertising slogans, and modifies its behaviour according to the expectations of those addressing it. Michel Faber recognised in it a resemblance to contemporary language models. The parallel is convincing, but the more important question concerns the criteria by which we attribute intelligence to something capable of responding to us. The ability to produce plausible discourse risks being confused with the possession of an experience of the world. Harrison, who began developing the novel long before today’s generative systems entered widespread public use, seems to have anticipated the underlying cultural problem: the ease with which we delegate to apparently competent language the task of establishing what is real.
There remains the significance of the Booker victory. Mary Beard described the book as a work capable of examining contemporary politics through the lens of the future, even recognising in it an unexpected form of optimism. Harrison, in interviews following the award, expressed a decidedly less hopeful assessment of civilisation’s prospects. This divergence is particularly interesting because it suggests that the novel possesses a capacity to generate meanings independently of its author’s declared intentions. It is the very quality Harrison has defended throughout his career, resisting the reduction of literature to a system of instructions.
The institutional recognition of science fiction, for its part, deserves a degree of caution. Writers such as Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Stanisław Lem spent decades exploring philosophical questions that a considerable portion of realist fiction proved far less willing to confront. Their association with a genre has too often been used as a criterion for establishing a cultural hierarchy that now appears difficult to defend. Harrison, however, makes this distinction even more problematic. His work demonstrates that the instruments of science fiction can be employed to challenge the conventions of science fiction itself, and that literature genuinely willing to embrace the risks of imagination inevitably ends up destabilising the categories through which we have learned to recognise it.
One might even argue that Harrison’s victory represents a belated recognition of something the great European novel understood long ago: human reality exceeds any intellectual system devised to contain it. Dostoevsky constructed characters who developed ideas of extraordinary coherence, only to demonstrate how those ideas came into conflict with the concrete experience of existence. Kafka placed his protagonists in universes governed by laws whose authority was beyond question precisely because their origins remained inaccessible. Harrison transports a similar tension into a landscape populated by alien organisms and technological remnants, where the fundamental problem continues to concern the relationship between what we know about the world and what we are called upon to do within it.
The difference, perhaps, is that our present has developed a particular faith in the possibility of resolving this tension by increasing the amount of information available. The promise of every new technological system is to make something easier to know, predict, or control. Harrison, by contrast, describes a universe in which complexity has exceeded the human capacity to impose order upon it, and in which survival requires a form of attentiveness that no additional information seems capable of guaranteeing.
His pessimism, if pessimism is what it is, therefore retains an element of surprising tenderness. The characters continue to seek one another out, to depend upon one another, to perform gestures whose meaning can no longer be guaranteed by the institutions that gave rise to them. Their humanity often emerges precisely at the moment when explanations fail. Harrison seems to attach particular importance to this persistence, to the possibility that a relationship or a responsibility might retain its value even when the world in which it first took shape becomes unrecognisable.
The Booker Prize awarded him fifty thousand pounds, which the writer said he would probably spend on repairs to his house. There is something in this news of the material concreteness that runs throughout his work, composed as it is of surfaces, salvaged objects, and bodies exposed to the precariousness of circumstance. After sixty years spent exploring the limits of human knowledge, Harrison remains interested in what exists independently of the interpretations we may give it. A house needs repairing. A person may need someone to remain beside them when their memory begins to fail.
Perhaps this is why, beneath the surface of its disintegrating universe, The End of Everything remains a profoundly human novel. The world we inhabit may become increasingly difficult to understand, even as our capacity to describe it seems to expand indefinitely. Harrison asks us to consider that understanding, however necessary, may not be the prerequisite for every form of responsibility. There will always be people we struggle to understand, events whose causes we cannot reconstruct, experiences that find no place within the categories available to us. Literature still possesses the ability to allow us to inhabit this uncertainty without claiming to resolve it. And, in doing so, to remind us that what escapes our capacity for knowledge nevertheless continues to exist, to suffer, and to demand our attention.
Niccolò Carradori