Literature

M. John Harrison is a remarkable British science fiction writer who is the author of bestsellers such as “The committed Men" (1971) and “In Viriconium” (1982), which was nominated for the Guardian Fiction Prize. He also wrote “Climbers” in 1989, which won the Boardman Tasker Memorial Award, in spite of the fact, that this prize was given only to nonfiction works at that time.

Harrison has also written many short fiction stories, including collaborations with Simon Ings. He has also collaborated with the director Simon Pummel on a short animated film for a television channel called “Ray, Gun, Fun". Harrison has also worked as a journalist, reviewing fiction and nonfiction for the Spectator, the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement.

He has just published on the market his latest masterpiece: “Light”, which was published on October, 2002. "Light" is an outstanding story that is set in another galaxy, in the year 2400, with impressive characters, who have strong and nóir personalities.

It was an honor to interview Mike John Harrison.

Interview by Marisa Darnel

ARTIST INTERVIEWS: Mike, your latest novel: "Light" has received a warm response from the media, as well as from your readers. The novel deals with horror, as well as humor, and a fascinating cast of characters, set in an imaginary world. Can you tell us about the message in the novel?

Mike John Harrison: The themes of Light fall into two basic groups.

First and foremost it's a book about the rejection of lived experience, and how that damages and divides people. Most of the characters are alienated and sexually wounded because they have tried to avoid life. Readers will know that this isn't a new theme for me. I had the narrator of "The Course of the Heart" sum it up this way: It's no triumph to feel you've given life the slip. In the gated community of the West we are doing just that, exchanging experience for virtual experience, giving real life the slip in numerous ways.

The second group of themes is to do with science. As a human project, science is going through an unlikeable phase. It has reduced itself to a form of beachcombing. It's a corporate, entrepreneurial project whose brief is to discover new things that can be sold. But if we have a duty in the universe it's to crank up and shoot through to some explosive understanding of things. Not to help the corporates repackage existence as a commodity.

The two broad groups of themes are brought together in the idea that to accept life is to accept risk, that discovery is a form of adventure, and that there is always more in the universe, always more after that. That it's more important to put yourself at risk--to live and die speechless and adrenalised in the face of the world--than it is to keep yourself safe and buy a lot of goods and services.

A.I. : I would like to talk about your forthcoming short story collection, titled: "Things That Never Happen".

M.J.H.: Things That Never Happen is a retrospective collection, containing most of my short work since 1974, with an introduction by China Mieville along with a foreword and story notes by the author. Few US readers will have encountered any of these stories. They are ghost stories, horror stories, romances of imaginary countries, from which the usual elements have been removed, or reduced to the minimum necessary to back up the emotional content and to give the reader a kind of inexplicable frisson. They are narratives of desire--which often look at the way our need for the new is constantly undercut by its own achievement--of the colonization of the fantastic, of the liberalization of the improbable, of the amazing made ordinary. And, of course, vice versa. They are, in a sense, about fantasy--not written fantasy so much as the personal fantasy which precedes it.

A.I.: Some of your writing deals with metaphysics. What are your current metaphysical beliefs?

M.J.H.: I don't really have any metaphysical beliefs. I'm interested in the point at which metaphysics and spirituality connect with human yearning and desire. I'm concerned to make metaphors for human yearning and desire using images drawn from metaphysics and spirituality, as well as from science and the unconscious and from literary forms like the ghost story or the horror story. My ideal fictional mechanism is a kind of knot, tied using all these elements, which are presented with as much realism as possible. The reader is encouraged to try & untie the knot and thus take the tour of the themes presented. This can be seen in Light, and in all the stories collected in "Things That Never Happen".

A.I.: You have alternated between fiction and science-fiction. Which genre makes you feel more comfortable to express yourself?

M.J.H.: Both, along with horror, fantasy, romance and hard boiled crime! I'm happiest using the mixture of genres which best seems to express the themes of a given piece of work. I¹m rather against the impermeable boundaries of genre. I could never write a pure generic work.

A.I.: You collaborated with the director Simon Pummel on a short film : "Ray, Gun, Fun." Can you share with us your experience in the film industry?

M.J.H.: Well I'd hardly dignify it by calling it that. We wrote the script in the afternoons in Presto's Cafe on Old Compton Street. This was in 1996, 1997? It was usually raining. I had omelets. Simon had zabaglione. Presto's is completely unhip, a survivor from an earlier Soho, but it's cheap and quiet. We worked the script up from a bleakly generalized set of statements which began, I think, "Light falls on an object." Simon had some weird footage he had taken of battered old Indonesian puppets, and we went from there. Two things fascinated me. One was how much Simon had to hold in his head across the four or five days of shooting; and how well he did it. I could never be a director, it's such an austere, demanding process. Writing is a lot sloppier; you can get away with a lot more. The other thing was the utter magic of being in the motion control studio at Three Mills Island in the East End. We used a mixture of live actors and animated toys, we built an entire room, full size, furnished and decorated it, and then turned it upside down to see what would happen. Well, we filmed it as well, of course. But I think Simon just wanted to see what would happen if you turned a room upside down. I know I did.

My next experience in the film industry is to be an extra in Neil Gaiman's short film, "A Short Film about John Bolton". We extras are to dress in 'smart casual' clothes and on no account wear anything red. I would never be seen dead in anything red anyway.

A.I.: Being in science fiction as a reader and a writer since the sixties,what can you tell us about the evolution in the field?

M.J.H.: Less than you¹d think. I was very caught up in the changes of the late 1960s and 70s, but since then I¹ve tended to hoe my own row. I only began to pay attention again recently, when the new British writers started their skyline operations. Ken McLeod, China Mieville, Al Reynolds, John Courtenay Grimwood, Justina Robson, they have the energy of difference, they make UKSF the station to tune to. But it would be a mistake to think of them as a reprise of the old New Wave. All that's over, and these people are very much themselves.

I think the next thing that has to go is the feeble idea that science fiction is somehow special and mustn¹t be judged in a broader literary context. That's the protectionism of the insecure. We also have to write tighter and harder and more human. I'd prescribe a course of Raymond Carver for all fantasy and sciece-fiction writers.

A.I.: Speaking about other areas in art, which music do you enjoy, and which painters do you like?

M.J.H.: I listen to music a lot when I work. I have quite broad tastes, from jazz funk to Parisian chansons. I'm quite keen on UK Asian breakbeat, especially Nitraj Chag. This month I went to the London premier of The Logic of the Birds, Susan Deyhim's latest mixed-media piece. I was astounded by the richness of that and instantly bought the Shy Angels CD. My landlady is a professional musician. Until she moved to Ireland recently, we had a lot of baroque music rehearsed in the house. I'm very keen on one of her bands, Virelai, especially a fantastic track from their Chansons Nouvelles CD, "Hau hau hau le buys!" It has quite an effect played after Nick Cave or Grant McClennan.

I'd go and see any exhibition of Tracy Emin's. But my favourite painter of the moment is Stanley Spencer. I admire those curious postwar village paintings like The Boat Builders' Yard and The Scarecrow, also The Blacksmith's Yard. These seem like sites of personal revelation. From 1932 on he seems to be constructing the elements of an iconographical narrative--an autobiography of the soul assembled from secret views of Cookham. The corner full of rubbish depicted in The Blacksmith's Yard, particularly, presents as a site of hermetic experience, specific, exact, momentous (and, for the artist, insurmountable; as insurmountable, perhaps, as the more well-known obsessive sites--the bodies of his lovers, the village graveyard--of his publicly-admitted spiritual narrative.)

A.I.: What are your future plans?

M.J.H.: I¹m working on some short stories. But I suppose my major project is the next novel. I have three major ideas in competition, one of which--I hope--will cross the finish line and be ready to start writing in January next year. But I could equally fail all three and do something else on the spur of the moment! I like everything to stay in a fairly labile state until the last minute.

My only other plan is to take a holiday. I was in the Alpujara earlier this year, walking these extraordinary Moorish acquifers they have there. I'd like to go back. Seven thousand feet up, a baking, arid hillside is suddenly all rose bushes and butterflies like a Warwickshire hedgerow in summer when I was a kid. Everything changes. The air is softer, the signature of things is different. Paradise. Like being in The Course of the Heart.

A.I.: What's a day in the life of M. John Harrison?

M.J.H.: I wish I could say I got up at six in the morning, jogged a few miles over rough moorland, then, after a light breakfast, took my mountain bike apart & serviced the front suspension before settling down to a five thousand word day on the latest book. Or at least that I cleaned the house a lot. In fact, I hang about in front of the iMac from about ten in the morning, drinking cups of tea and making playlists. What can I say? I tease my cat. I read a lot. (Someone recommended Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, and it's the funniest, saddest, truest book I've read all year.) Eventually I get the nerve up to try and write something. The next thing I know I've got a couple of paragraphs and it's time to go to bed.

A.I.: Thank you very much, Mike!

You Can Visit Mike Harrison's Official Site at: www.mjohnharrison.com