The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again: Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2020

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Treads the line between realism and fantasy with immense assurance and draws a portrait of watery, post-Brexit Britain that brings shivers of both unease and recognition Although the EU referendum of 2016 is only sparingly referred to, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is surely the Brexit novel, capturing a nation in the slurried, atrophying grip of a devastating regression. The atmosphere of “the inter years,” the 40 months between the Brexit referendum and the COVID-19 pandemic — the abandonment of progress, the casting in circles, the insidious resurrection of dangerous forces — is captured vividly and with ire.

Harrison, M. John (18 December 2007). Viriconium. Random House Publishing Group. ISBN 9780307418692. saw two new books: a novel, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again [23] and Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020. [24] The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again won the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize, [25] and was longlisted for the 2020 BSFA Award. During 2003 Harrison was on the jury of the Michael Powell Award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

The judges on the shortlist

All this just scratches the surface. There’s a lot more going on in this book. But then, when you read it, you realise there’s even more going on if only you could get a clear view of it. What worked not as well for me was Harrison’s water-babies plot thread. I guess that readers brought up with or at least familiar with Kingsley’s The Water-Babies might find Harrison’s reimagining more natively understandable and more enjoyable. A Viriconium story adapted in collaboration with illustrator Ian Miller, based on short story of the same name

Fellow judge and author Will Eaves called it “a brilliant realist fantasy about love in middle-age and the dissolution of the postwar settlement”. They were trying to decide what to do with Tim Swann if they caught him. By then there were twenty or thirty of them, milling about the metalled pathway by the old tennis courts. Their voices, assertive yet not entirely confident on one side, polite and fluting on the other, rose and fell in the cooling air. Harrison's first short story collection The Machine in Shaft Ten (1975) collects many (but not all) of his early short tales, from such sources as New Worlds Quarterly, New Worlds Monthly, New Writings in SF, Transatlantic Review and others. "The Lamia and Lord Cromis" is an early Viriconium tale. The moody "London Melancholy" features a ruined future London haunted by winged people. None of the stories, with the exception of "Running Down", (a psychological horror tale about a man who is literally a walking disaster area), have been reprinted in his subsequent short story collections. "The Bringer with the Window" features Dr Grishkin, a character also appearing in The Centauri Device, seemingly in Harrison's recurring fictional city of Viriconium. Harrison's early novels The Committed Men, The Pastel City and The Centauri Device have been reprinted several times. The lat-named was included in the SF Masterworks series. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is a novel so good all the usual reviewerish superlatives barely seem superlative enough.My urge is less to transgress genre boundaries than insult them ... writing specifically for a genre isn't just reductive, it's an attempt to hide, a form of cowardice. It's special pleading, but it doesn't work. Harrison continued to publish short fiction in a wide variety of magazines through the late 1990s and early 21st century. Such tales were published in magazines as diverse as Conjunctions ("Entertaining Angels Unawares", Fall issue 2002), The Independent on Sunday ("Cicisbeo", 2003), the Times Literary Supplement ("Science and the Arts", 1999) and Woman's Journal ("Old Women", 1982). They were collected in his major short story collections Travel Arrangements (2000) and Things That Never Happen (2002). All these things are characteristic of Mr. Harrison’s writing, they are his finely honed semiotic tools, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t pushed the envelope a bit further: in "The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again" he undertook the risk of applying the approach he mostly uses in short stories, without adjusting it to the length of a novel, and thus leaving the readers to fight it or go along with it, and, consequentially, enjoy it. It's not his style I’m talking about – it is surprisingly relaxed, while maintaing its usual qualities of being elegant and sharp – but his ability to create a condensed and constant sense of wonder and anxiety, of nausea induced by depriving the readers of enough firm ground of cause and effect to stand on. In such stories there is no jumping board that would send you into the pleasant waters of an imagined world, the plank you stand on is floating on a liquid surface, true, but it’s rather questionable if it’s the sea or a lake: there’s no wind and waves, although something invisible is pushing you in the direction that you only hope is the shore. Pushed to the extreme, and put into skilled hands, it can work fantastically in a short story, but when expanded to the size of a novel, there’s always the risk of overwhelming the readers with oddness and confusing them too much (and for too long). The skilled hand, therefore, must achieve a fine balance between denying them the pleasure of feeling comfortable and letting them believe what they are used to believing, that a + b = c.

The Guardian Unsettling and insinuating, fabulously alert to the spaces between things, Harrison is without peer as a chronicler of the fraught, unsteady state we're in. It is also a book which is on the surface too repetitive but where in depth the repetition and replication is integral to the book. It felt very much like the text was so dense that even at a sentence level there was complexity which could be unwound, but that the complexity was of a self-similar nature: the book where pretty well any subset of the book contained and replicated the whole novel – perhaps I have invented a new way of describing this type of novel: a fractal novel. And that I think is highly appropriate for a book whose main location and theme is the liminal – the shifting and complex boundary of water and land. And also how appropriate that the depth of reading the book is very different to its superficial impressions.

Customer reviews

As Shaw and Victoria struggle to maintain their relationship, the sunken lands are rising up again, unnoticed in the shadows around them. Learning a new language is one thing, but immersing your entire self in an unknown – perhaps unknowable – culture is something entirely braver. In Barton’s revelatory and candid memoir, she frames her experiences in Japan in 50 dictionary entries, journeying through her vulnerabilities, otherness and identity in a foreign place and finding solace (and humour) in writing. One of the most powerful stories is about a death she witnesses, entitled “uwaa: the sound of the feeling that cannot be spoken”. Grappling with emotion through the medium of language is, however, what Barton does best. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

Victoria, Shaw’s occasional partner, a kindred spirit in many ways, is a lovably cynical, unhappily-lost eccentric. The main difference between the two seems to be how comparatively tethered they are. Shaw finds most people an olfactory, auditory nightmare made flesh: of the people he at first lives amongst – he will later find ‘nice people’ to live with, the suggestion not that they are especially nice but that he’s clinging onto conventional life, determined to make a virtue of it – he notices (and is rankled by) every lingering trace of their passing, every reverberating, maddening echo of their movement. Yet he’s drawn to them, needs them, loathes the fact but is consigned to it.The impression of wisdom radiates from the feeblest of their jokes. You look covertly at your watch even as you think, “How delightful!”