The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again By M. John Harrison

I travel to England from Germany a few times a year to see my family, it’s become increasingly difficult with the Corona pandemic. And whilst I’m there I often read a lot less, having a lot more people to see. Luckily I had time to read this one. 

This book seemed eerily fitting for my trip, watching England open up again, declaring premature victory over a disease that didn’t know it was fighting a war against the obese British spirit. I had read the first few chapters and was afterwards walking with the dogs by the river on a bank holiday, I watched as a man ordered takeaway to his door at 10.30 in the morning, kids threw glass bottles onto the floor on the pathway (I had to lift my dogs up to stop them from walking home with bleeding paws). I later ventured into town, homeless people begged the drunkards for a pound, whilst the drunkards themselves wandered about topless in the heat, begging the sun to burn them. 

It seemed to clash with what I was reading, because this book is about England in its current state, and it’s a trajectory leading down. 

In The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again we have two characters who are moping around, they have no idea what they’re doing, they’re lost, desperately trying to connect with people they don’t really know, trying to find some place in modern England that is so clearly fading (or maybe drowning?). There isn’t really a plot so much as an idea that bleeds into most chapters, the idea that people are going missing or are losing themselves so completely they feel compelled to dive into a land beneath our own. The conspiracy theories might just be true. 

It’s a book built on atmosphere. A strange tension lingers around seemingly mundane and  menial encounters. We might only be visiting the local cafe or talking to a neighbour, but the encounters are off-kilter, not quite right. 

Harrison seems to have a disdain for Brexit - “It’s all a bit Brexit up here,” one character states in her emails to the other - the book is aching for relevance and it’s not the first time Harrison has done this. Light also had a disdain for modern Britain, but way back in 2002. His London-based characters had the vague idea of a job but never actually did any work. The same occurs here. Victoria doesn’t have a job, she’s living off inheritance, renovating her dead mother’s old house. Shaw travels for work, kind of IT, kind of not, he goes to a mystic and hangs about, he investigates conspiracy theories and doesn’t enjoy the books he’s reading. 

I found myself enjoying the book and I’m not sure why. It had a breezy feeling to it, it was pacy and terse and didn’t relent, regardless that not much was happening. I was hanging on every sentence, due to Harrison being a better prose writer than any I’ve read so far, cutting, dry and doomy, never purple, often witty. The atmosphere, commentary, hapless characters and out-of-tune song that Harrison composed just held me. 

With Brexit, Harrison has found his catalyst for societal downfall in England, despite already believing and writing one in a novel 19 years ago. Maybe Brexit is the last bullet to shoot the island into the sea, or for an Atlantis below to rise. The further one sinks, the heavier the water becomes and the more the dead land rises. 

“Gradually the sunken land begins to rise again, and fall perhaps again, and rises again after that.” - Harrison quotes of Charles Kingsley from Thoughts in a Gravel Pit. 

The more I thought about the book, the more I realised I liked it. The more I walked about my north Lancashire town, listening to The English Beat (Stand Down Margaret Please), the more I felt the book’s lingering effect.