The Course of the Heart

Rating:
Summary: Matters of the Heart
Review: With the success of his recent novel Light M. John Harrison has become a name. Not quite a household name perhaps, but as well known and widely acceptable as a writer who is still classified as an SF writer ever can be. Yet Harrison is about as far from being an SF writer in the mainstream definition of the genre as Andrei Tarkovsky was from being an SF film director. Instead, Harrison's work animates a tradition that connects writers like Russell Hoban, Alan Garner, J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Ben Okri, Jim Crace, Colin Thubron, and, more diversely, the J. M. Coetzee of Waiting for the Barbarians, with writers of the 20th century romantic tradition like Rosamund Lehman, H. E Bates and Elizabeth Taylor - with a touch of Iain Sinclair, Joe Orton and William S. Burroughs thrown in. Like Harrison they are all edgy romantics - William Burroughs most of all - for whom the status of the world that we experience is never given, but is always on the point of radical transformation. For M. John Harrison we imagine our world into being, we think it and we make it and unmake it, it speaks us and we speak it. The Course of the Heart is possibly the clearest example of this philosophy, and the best least-known novel of the 1990s. Elegant, eerie and melancholic, it takes the world we imagine and the world we experience and collides the two. When I first read it - ten years ago or more in one sitting in a London basement on a grey rainy spring day - I wanted to reach out and touch something that had been put in front of my eyes and fingers, just beyond my reach; something whose name I couldn't quite shape, whose voice I couldn't hear, something I wanted, something that has remained there, hovering, ever since. M. John Harrison is one of the great writers of our time. Too contrarian to be feted by the mainstream media for long, he is, like J. G. Ballard, Iain Sinclair and Carol Birch, an antidote to the received view of British life to which we continue to subscribe in contemporary literature. If the Ian McEwan of The Cement Garden had stayed on course he might have been lucky enough to grow up to be M. John Harrison. The Course of the Heart is simply, and lastingly, brilliant.