The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Things that Never Happen, by M. John Harrison
reviewed by David Ian Paddy

M. John Harrison. Things that Never Happen. Intro. China Miéville. Night Shade, 2003. 443 pp. Paper: $15.00.

Desire and sickness permeate the stories of M. John Harrison. These dreamy visions explore the uncertainty of self, the fragility of the body, and the inevitable spoiling of desire upon fruition. Things That Never Happen offers a panorama of haunted worlds that Harrison has forged from a curious mix of science fiction and realism. He began writing at the end of the 1960s for New Worlds, the British hotbed of speculative fiction, and his first stories possess the postapocalyptic mood, neurotic charge, and despairing worldview of British New Wave writers Ballard, Aldiss, and Moorcock. Like Ballard, Harrison paints ordinary worlds riddled with debris and entropy, in which a first-person narrator has a transformative encounter with another, more volatile character. Rather than simply create other worlds, Harrison uses fantasy to examine why people desire fantasy, desire life to be other than it appears to be. For instance, in “Egnaro,” “A Young Man’s Journey to London,” and “The East,” the reader follows characters who seek a secret world that may exist in the hidden spaces of this world. All of Harrison’s stories balance the mystery of the mundane with the monotony of the magical. Throughout the great diversity of material offered in this collection, Harrison displays a masterful control of character, language, and landscape and an ability to expose the unnerving sense of the inexplicable that runs beneath the surfaces of life. Things that Never Happen provides a generous introduction to a woefully underrecognized author. Pieces like “Running Down,” “Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring,” “Seven Guesses of the Heart,” and “Science & the Arts” are exceptional stories of vision that live in the mind for days. Although Harrison’s world may appear dark, you find yourself wanting to book the next trip that will let you move there.