The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

Harrison's latest novel is an eerie, brooding tale of disconnection. The book is steeped in water imagery; copies of The Water Babies are passed around like religious texts; barges, rivers and pools abound; even character names echo the theme: Shaw, Pearl.

The story focuses on two middle aged people living in London, Lee Shaw who is/was something in the digital industry who's had some kind of crisis and come unmoored from his life; and Victoria Norman, a woman Shaw sees for a while before she moves into her dead mother's house in a town in Shropshire on the River Severn. The town is unnamed but could be Ironbridge, or an amalgam of aspects of Shropshire towns.

Shaw finds work with the mysterious Tim, who runs a website/blog called The Water House from a barge on the river, which is full of obscure conspiracy theories and blurred GIFs. Essentially a dogsbody, Shaw finds himself sent on increasingly odd errands: carrying boxes of books (The Journey of Our Genes) to strange shops in the Midlands; visiting Tim's sister Annie, who is a medium, and filing her trance-like state. Shaw has no idea what it all means but he's drifting and can't make sense of it. He rents a room in an old Georgian house, full of strange noises from the next room. He visits his mother in a care home. He goes through the motions.

Victoria meanwhile tries to make something of her new life in Shropshire. She befriends a waitress, Pearl, at a local café, who she later finds lives in the house next door. This house is a surreal, claustrophobic place where tradesmen fill darkened rooms, a fat man and his dogs never leave and where Pearl drops hints of her friendship with Victoria's mother. Victoria emails Shaw with updates that he never replies to. And everywhere the sunken land begins to rise....

The strange dreamlike quality prevalent in so many of Harrison's books is thick here. Victoria sees Pearl disappear into a pool only inches deep. Shaw sees Tim chased by disparate bands of people all seeming to want something he possesses. Victoria's attempts to build a new life in Shropshire founder and in the end she goes somewhere else, somewhere that shouldn't exist. For Shaw the tensions between Tim and his sister become to much and he resigns and finds a new place to live, coming through his crisis into a new kind of life. He decides to visit Victoria.

This is a book that will repay your patience. It is slow and dreamlike and some of the imagery is disturbing, nightmarish. But as a novel of the disconnected 21st century, in the evening of capitalism, where nothing is certain and everything is running to stand still, it's probably one of the best.

As ever, highly recommended.