M. John Harrison wins the Booker: a way into his strange world

M. John Harrison’s new Booker-winning novel starts from a recognisable concern: earning a living when the world around you has become difficult to understand. The British author received the prize in London on Monday, November 9. At 81, he is its oldest winner, recognised for The End of Everything, a 198-page novel set on a future Kent coast. (Booker announcement; ceremony reporting)

For readers wondering whether to venture into that future, the official opening extract offers a small, telling encounter. Phillip Tennent collects objects washed ashore. Other beachcombers take whatever they can carry and sell it inland, where useful contacts help business along. Before we understand the objects, we understand the work.

The community has improvised shelters from things the tide supplies. Yet incorporating an artefact into a dwelling violates local taste and superstition. That distinction is quietly revealing: people have developed customs around things the reader cannot yet explain. The unfamiliar already has an everyday etiquette.

Then Tennent meets a woman carrying groceries in a reusable bag with a broken handle. Amid the unexplained finds, Harrison supplies an immediately legible inconvenience. Asked about the sea, Tennent replies: “Eventually it’ll turn into speech.” Both characters laugh. Nobody supplies a reassuring explanation.

My reading of this opening is that its practical details give readers somewhere to stand while its mysteries remain unresolved. We can follow transactions, recognise a damaged shopping bag and notice a neighbourly exchange without possessing a map of how this world works.

That uncertainty is deliberate. In an interview reproduced in the Booker announcement, Harrison traces the initial inspiration to the 2008 financial crisis and an interest in society’s failing explanations. He also says he avoided defining the mysterious entities called the iGhetti too precisely. Their origins and purposes are not simply background information he forgot to provide. Withholding that knowledge is part of the novel’s design. The fictional catastrophe offers a way to explore incomprehension; it is not a forecast of a particular disaster.

The award also brings a long-established science-fiction writer to a wider audience. The Arthur C. Clarke Award’s archive records Harrison’s Nova Swing as its 2007 winner and Light on its 2003 shortlist. His Booker success comes after six decades of writing, rather than marking a sudden arrival.

Claims about a historic first need care. Booker chief executive Gaby Wood’s distinction concerns Harrison’s emergence from the science-fiction world. Speculative fiction—stories imagining departures from the world we know—already has Booker-winning predecessors. Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, the sequel to her dystopian The Handmaid’s Tale, shared the 2019 prize with Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other. Harrison’s win recognises a particular career; it does not establish that imagined futures have only now become literary material.

The judges’ response also complicates the bleak title. Chair Mary Beard said their choice was unanimous and described feeling a “twinge of optimism”. In her account, ordinary routines persist amid the wreckage: children’s parties, a morning coffee at a seaside café. That is the judges’ assessment of the whole novel. For a prospective reader, it adds a useful possibility to the catastrophe: Harrison’s characters still have lives to conduct, even when explanations no longer keep pace.