M John Harrison has been writing novels that refuse to explain themselves since before most Booker judges were born. The End of Everything, his Booker-winning novel, follows Phillip, a beachcomber on the Kent coast, and his artist aunt Marnie, in a Britain decades into slow-motion collapse after alien entities called the iGhetti have seeped into the world. The City of London is a battle zone. Strange biological artefacts wash up from the sea. People suffer episodes of psychic rupture they call, with the specific British talent for understatement, a "bad patch." Nothing is explained. Harrison is not interested in explaining. The novel's deliberate refusal of clarity is its argument. Harrison has always worked this way — in Climbers, his 1989 novel about rock climbing, the protagonist ends the book knowing only that "I didn't know anything about anything." But the unknowing in The End of Everything hits differently in 2026. The iGhetti became more forceful in the 1980s and cluster around the financial district — late-stage capitalism, then. The continent is cut off from England — Brexit. An artefact Phillip retrieves from the sea demonstrates the mimicry and uncanny self-actualisation of a large language model. Harrison isn't offering allegory so much as texture: the specific feeling of living inside a catastrophe you cannot name. Harrison's lineage is unusual enough to be worth tracing carefully. He published his first story in Science Fantasy magazine in 1966 and ran with the 1970s SF New Wave alongside Ballard and Michael Moorcock. But genre conventions chafed almost immediately. Olivia Laing's formulation — "the missing evolutionary link between William Burroughs and Virginia Woolf" — is exactly right: the associative disruption of Burroughs, the consciousness-dissolving interiority of Woolf, applied to genre materials. Moorcock called him "an anarchist aesthete," which also works. The SF Kefahuchi Tract trilogy in the 2000s and 2020's Goldsmiths Prize-winning The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again — which functions as an uneasy prequel to this novel — extended Harrison's reputation without enlarging his readership much. What's remarkable about The End of Everything is how visual it's become. Harrison has always been a landscape writer, but the prose here operates closer to cinema and painting than to conventional fiction. There's a depth of eight decades of looking at the world that accumulates in certain scenes, producing effects that feel less like reading and more like being shown something. The catastrophe isn't rendered through plot mechanics but through the way light falls, through the texture of a shoreline at the wrong time of day. The Booker win, then, is an institution acknowledging something it took sixty years to see. Harrison has never courted it. He came up through science fiction — a genre the Booker has famously treated as a category error — and remained anchored to what he calls "Weird literature": SF, fantasy, and horror filtered through a politically aware modernist sensibility. His 2023 anti-memoir Wish I Was Here crystallised the position: "The Weird is a way of writing about the real." The End of Everything is the fullest expression of that method: a novel in which nothing is comprehensible and everything is true.
