a country you have already failed to recognize

the present, the past, m. john harrison

An odd reading experience I’ve had a handful of times: reading a book I don’t know is a sequel. You cannot have such an experience on purpose and so I don’t know if I’ll ever have one again. (For this reason, I can’t even recommend doing it.) There was also a time in my life when I almost exclusively read books “cold,” which made this kind of experience, possibly, more likely. A glance at the “back material” would have revealed to me that the book in my hands was related to some other, prior book, which perhaps I ought to be reading first. However, since no such glancing was taking place, I would only find out when the book was over.

The first book that I ever read this peculiar way was Hugh Walpole’s The Secret City (1919), which I’ve never reread. Even when I was reading it and finding myself both mystified and moved, having what I knew even at the time was a life-altering reading experience, I was also going: is this, perhaps, a mediocre book? Perhaps, even, bad? Possibly it’s not; possibly, it’s even a great book. The experience, however, has remained too memorable to risk reading it again. So what I’m writing is what I recall from memory, with a couple of spot checks here and there. Maybe having put down what it was I can face the thought of perhaps reading it again one day.

The Secret City takes place on the threshold of the Russian Revolution and is narrated by an English reporter who has come through some unarticulated dark experience. He meets new people and is dragged into their private affairs; he meets a compulsive traitor called “the Rat”; and, most significantly, he re-encounters a man named Alexei Petrovitch Semyonov. It becomes clear that Semyonov was a part of that prior experience. There’s a feeling both of repulsion and of attraction:

In the early autumn of 1916 I met at a dinner-party Nicolai Leontievitch Markovitch. In the course of a conversation I informed him that I had been for a year with the Ninth Army in Galicia, and he then asked me whether I had met his wife’s uncle Alexei Petrovitch Semyonov, who was also with the Ninth Army. It happened that I had known Alexei Petrovitch very well and the sound of his name brought back to me so vividly events and persons with whom we had both been connected that I had difficulty in controlling my sudden emotion. Markovitch invited me to his house. He lived, he told me, with his wife in a flat in the Anglisky Prospect; his sister-in-law and another of his wife’s uncles, a brother of Alexei Petrovitch, also lived with them. I said that I would be very glad to come.

It is impossible to describe how deeply, in the days that followed, I struggled against the attraction that this invitation presented to me. I had succeeded during all these months in avoiding any contact with the incidents or characters of the preceding year. I had written no letters and had received none; I had resolutely avoided meeting any members of my old Atriad when they came to the town.

That is, the feeling that exists between them is: knowing what I know, how could I ever stand to see you again? And yet, who else but you knows what it means to know what I know? The details of what did happen, never quite spelled out, are also so concrete, so clearly something that did take place, that their content does not matter. The drama here is not uncovering what happened in the past but rather how these products of this past must continue on into the future, even after living through what felt like something life-defining, something after which things would cease to happen. Not only do things continue to happen but they continue to happen outside the drama of private life, and the book ends with these private people’s affairs being obliterated by the violence of history.

More or less all of this readerly experience was an accident or even an illusion. The reason the past felt so concrete and yet submerged and unspoken was because it existed in another book (which is called The Dark Forest, published in 1916). If I had happened to read that other book first, my experience of The Secret City would have been completely different. If I had even known it existed, my experience would have been completely different. It was only because it did exist but I did not know about it that I had the peculiar and haunting experience that I did have.

Of course this effect, the one I’m talking about, this sense of a real past, is one novels try to achieve on purpose all the time; hence what I think of as The Terrible Thing We Did That Summer books, where you go back and forth between some past timeline (barreling toward the unnamed Terrible Thing) and a present timeline (in which the chickens of the Terrible Thing have come home to roost).¹ It is also, naturally, the way a mystery novel works: there is not only the immediate real past (who killed Mabel Featheringstone-Wilkes?) but the past that created that past (the butler, the son of the maid who killed herself after Mabel Featheringstone-Wilkes framed her for a crime thirty years ago).

Even when these books “work,” though, and they often do, what they create is not quite the same, because these pasts are contained within the books themselves. The book we’re reading feels complete, because it is complete. It does not contain this paradoxical sense that what we are reading is complete but also supplementary. You might think, it’s impossible for a book to do that on purpose. It can only be achieved through beautiful accidents. That would make sense, but here’s the interesting thing. It’s also not impossible.

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“You don’t know what the story means, yet you know exactly what it means,” M. John Harrison writes in his not-a-memoir, Wish I Was Here (2023):

Its emotional and symbolic logics—its sense that this set of events is being left to stand in for something else, something otherwise incommunicable—are completely human. At the same time be careful not to mistake the figure of the metaphor for the ground: mistaking the figure for the ground is the literalistic, reificatory project, the sole concern, of sci-fi and fantasy. You will find it hard to understand the Weird unless you know how to relate the faces and the petals on the wet black bough—how to keep apart those components of Pound’s classic metaphor while at exactly the same time you bring them together. Which has priority, the face or the petal? And are they intended to be a description or an “image”? Is their relationship non-commutative? You will never be sure, but you must always be in the game.

Ever since I read M. John Harrison’s novel The Course of the Heart (1992) in May (briefly mentioned here) I’ve been puzzling over it. I read some short stories; I read another novel, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020); I started his not-a-memoir, though (as of writing) I remain in the middle of it. I did these things with the idea I would emerge with some kind of mastery over this material and would then return to impart it to… well, you, I suppose.² But more and more I think it is also worthwhile to write something in the middle of the experience, because one of Harrison’s big subjects seems to be is this sense of looking at the wrong thing. In hindsight you might understand what you should have been looking at, but in the present you continue to look at the wrong thing, over and over. Thus if I myself am looking at the wrong thing here, I want to know that later.

The Course of the Heart is a kind of Terrible Thing We Did That Summer book, and in fact I read it because I saw it recommended as a “version” of The Secret History (a book I do not like). Three students and their mentor undergo a magic ritual; two of them, who eventually get married and then divorced, are haunted and traumatized by the experience while the third, our narrator, just sometimes smells roses.

Much of the book was spent, by me, impatiently piecing together what I could of what that ritual might have entailed or the separate reality to which it opened a door. The threefold revelations that come toward the end of the book³ are, one, that the ritual probably wasn’t anything all that terrible, it’s just that none of them can remember it. Two, the ways in which it has haunted their lives are also not so terrible, they were just difficult to see for what they were; if one could see them properly, they would make sense and even be beautiful. But, three, and in fact for that very reason, spending their lives chasing the meaning of what happened in the past, rather than paying attention to their actual lives in the present, was a mistake.

Harrison inverts this conclusion in The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, where preoccupation with purely private matters means that we’re essentially following some depressive early middle-aged people as they live out their hot and cold romance against what certainly looks like the takeover of England by a race of fish people. It’s a little like if you were watching a mumblecore film set in the early days of Innsmouth where our sad sack protagonist sits around wondering about his situationship while in the background of shots you can see people being abducted to feed to the unnameable creatures of the deep. Sunken Land prominently references the movie Night Moves (1975), another story about looking at the wrong thing, a story in which even going in being primed to know it’s about looking at the wrong thing will probably just cause you to look at the wrong thing even harder.⁴

So I don’t take Harrison’s interest in misplaced attention to indicate that there is a single and appropriate object of our attention, that we should have been attending to private life when we were worrying about the occult,or that we should have been worrying about the occult instead of our not-quite-a-boyfriend. What would have been the right thing to pay attention to is revealed only in hindsight, but whatever we’re looking at, it’s probably not what we should have been looking at. If it is what we should have been looking at, we were probably only looking at it by accident.⁵

But what I really want to communicate here, in this post, is the way these books really do seem to communicate a reality that exists but that is simply not available to us, because we are trapped by the limited perspective of these characters who are always looking in the other direction. They read like sequels to books that were written privately but never published, or rewrites of very straightforward manuscripts that were then burned. They are coherent, they are not (in a straightforward style sense) at all opaque or difficult to read, and yet they also feel impossible to understand. It is unsettling, but it is also very beautiful.

1. Whether these books are “good” or “bad” depends, in my experience, on whether or not the author knows how to make both timelines equally interesting, and also how much pointless obfuscation of the Terrible Thing is happening among people who know perfectly well what they’re talking about. In a bad version of a book like this, the present timeline acts as filler to delay the moment when the author has to tell you the secret as long as possible, and—also—people also never, ever refer to what happened. Even to each other. Even in their minds! All bad books are the same but every good book is good in its own way so I have no prescriptions for what a “good” version looks like.

2. Perhaps when the new one comes out.

3. I don’t consider these spoilers but if you do you can stop reading here.

4. My experience, anyway.

5. Another bit from Wish I Was Here:

Massive amounts of what happens to you will happen via invisible and/or unparsable causal chains. Much of life, you will never know what happened to you at all, let alone to anyone else. Much of what goes on around you, you will never even notice. Though causes are everywhere present and dependable, the search for causality is to welter around looking for explanations you can’t have, using epistemologies and ontologies at best provisional. Why waste time, especially in fiction? Let’s have some representation in fiction for everyone who, without knowing it, puzzles through their lives in what used to be called “a dream.” Because that is all of us. Solipsism, narcissism, self-involvement seem like useful words for it. Not so. They come loaded with the judgements of a past that believed clear, discoverable chains of events were not only a feature of life, but a feature you had a responsibility to consciously engage with. They thus suffer catastrophic failure when required to describe the act of wandering through thick fog in a country you have already failed to recognise as both foreign and war-torn, in a condition of mild irritation because you’re thinking about something else. I’m not sure life is a dream. But if your attempts to map it don’t feel like one, you may be making a serious error about what being awake actually is, or where and in what conditions it is carried out.