It appears that rumours of our backness were greatly exaggerated. I haven’t even finished Baldur’s Gate III. But here we are again, which is another, less grandiose way of saying “back”. I won’t be committing to any schedule here, but we’ll try our best. Nova Swing.
This is the sequel to Light, which came out in 2002. Light is a space opera, ranged across time and the galaxy, epic in scale and implication; it is also an act of obliterative warfare against the stock-in-trade of the space opera. And having got a taste for blood, M. John Harrison moves onto noir.
The Long Bar at the Cafe Surf was full of fractured sunlight and bright air. Sand blew across the floor from the open door; the staff were sleepy and vague. Someone’s toddler crawled about between the cane tables wearing only a T-shirt bearing the legend SURF NOIR. Meanings - all incongruous - splashed off this like drops of water, as the dead metaphors trapped inside the live one collided and reverberated endlessly and elastically, taking up new positions relative to one another. SURF NOIR, which is a whole new existence; which is a ‘world’ implied in two words, dispelled in an instant; which is foam on the appalling multitextual sea we drift on. ‘Which is probably,’ Aschemann noted, ‘the name of an aftershave.’
He beamed down at the toddler, who burst into tears.
Aschemann is the tired detective; there’s also the femme fatale, the hooker with a heart of gold, the burnout, the gangland boss… like Light’s space heroes and serial killers, all of them are deconstructions and reassemblages, revenant archetypes and fruiting stereotypes. There is a mystery, too many mysteries, though nobody - including the reader - really gets a handle on anything approaching a solution, much less a plot.
Where Philip Marlowe is a small object trapped in the orbit of Los Angeles, here Vic Serotonin, Liv Hula and the rest are pinned to the shifting edge of the event site, which is a bit like the Zone or Area X: a place where reality goes to get itself messed up.
Over the dusty months and years of searching that were to follow, Vic Serotonin penetrated the site deeper than he, or anyone, had ever done before. He threw away his gun. He ate what he found. He lived a life in there. Every day he walked until he found somewhere he liked, and at night he grew used to the sound of radios shifting randomly from station to station; girders tolling as they fell; the intrusive quack of the plastic duck. He heard the landscapes swing apart and grind themselves together again.
There is something forbiddingly magnificent about Harrison’s writing. I suspect he’s the finest writer in the world, at least by whatever my criteria are, but I find I have to parcel him out. (It’s been about six months since I read Light, for example.) It’s the sentence by sentence of it, the rhythm, the insistent and skilful manipulation.
Take that remarkable little rat-a-tat flourish of “The intrusive quack of the plastic duck.” A marching band appears just for a moment - dada-da-da-dah, dada-da-da-dah - and then disperses. The weirdness of the site reproducing itself at the sentence level. It’s a funny image; it’s a cheap punchline; it’s a cackle-in-admiration bit of writing… it’s quite something. And it’s always quite something, sentence after sentence and page after page. Prose is a thing that is done to a reader. This novel, all his novels, graciously beats you up.