Things That Never Happen

Things That Never Happen. It's an apt title for a collection of strange, disturbing, thought-provoking stories. Harrison has long been a favourite author of mine and half of this collection I'd read years ago when it was published as The Ice Monkey. That book is here collected with a later collection (Travel Arrangements) and so we have a set of stories ranging from 1975 right up to 2000.

Harrison's development as a write over this period is palpable. Early stories betray an obsession with insect tropes (Settling The World) which found it's apotheosis in the Viriconium novel A Storm of Wings in 1980. The other-worldliness of the insect informs his Science Fiction and Fantasy writings at this stage. Running Down, a tale of entropy and decay as a metaphor for mid 70s Britain (indeed, as a metaphor for today) is an early classic with the world literally collapsing around the protagonist.

Several stories here are either dry runs for tales later expanded into novels (The Ice Monkey was the basis for his superb novel Climbers), or excised parts from an early draft of a novel (The Great God Pan formed part of an early version of his masterpiece, The Course of The Heart). But these are great stories in their own right. Harrison's writing is powerful, his prose evocative and disturbing at the same time.

Later stories play with the idea of the nature of reality. Beneath this world, if you scratch the surface of reality, lie altogether stranger worlds, none of them benign. A couple of the later stories introduce the imagined land of Autotelia, which, like Viriconium before it, is nowhere and everywhere, both real and unreal.

That is the nature of Harrison's writing: he haunts the margin between worlds, dimensions, drawing surreal horrors from the everyday and strangeness from the ordinary and mundane. He is a powerful writer well worth your time.

[author:M. John Harrison]'s style is somewhat pretentious, but I adore his words. Things That Never Happen is a collection of short stories which have been published elsewhere throughout his career. As such, they are arranged in chronological order, and tend to get more interesting and more sophisticated as the book goes on.

It reads well as a coherent body, though, especially since many of the stories share themes, events, phrases with each other, as well as referencing or prefiguring events and characters from [book:Light], [book:The Course of the Heart], or [book:Viriconium]. All of the stories take place in a world very like the one we know, subtly though significantly altered in ways that are never fully explained. Many of them speak of longing for pasts that never were; places that, once glimpsed from a railway car, can never be found again. He has the most amazing way of talking around the pivotal events of a story, leaving you to reconstruct them from the negative space, letting you read between the lines of what is said and what is left unsaid. His characters, like the places in which their dramas are played out, are eccentric, dingy, flawed; but sketched with compassion and evoked so clearly with only a few precisely written sentences.

My favorite stories were: Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring, The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It, Anima, Black Houses.