In his 2005 Vector review of Gollancz’s omnibus edition of M. John Harrison’s short stories, Things That Never Happen, Paul Kincaid described Harrison thus:
He is one of the essential writers of British speculative literature; anyone who does not know his work cannot know what the genre is capable of.
‘Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring’, a story that was first published in the SF magazine Omni in the mid nineties, forms the central, pivotal point in that particular gathering-together of Harrison’s work. It’s a kind of Janus-story, looking equally back in time towards his 1983 collection The Ice Monkey and forward towards Travel Arrangements, the collection that appeared almost two decades after The Ice Monkey in the year 2000. You could almost say that ‘Isobel’ is MJH in microcosm.
It bears many ur-Harrison trademarks: gaunt cityscapes in decline, disenchanted individualists in terminal disconnect mode, intimations of the marvellous. The language of the story manages somehow to be both resolute and dissolute, a gradual persuasion of the drab towards incandescence.
Like all M. John Harrison stories, it can be read on many levels. Thus in ‘Isobel’ we find a simple and agonizing exposition of what happens when a relationship breaks down, when passion wears itself out, when the love between two people is ineradicably soiled by the incursions of a third:
For forty eight hours all she would do was wail and sob and throw up on me. She refused to eat, she couldn’t bear to sleep. If she dropped off for ten minutes, she would wake silent for the instant it took her to remember what had happened. Then this appalling dull asthmatic noise would come out of her — “zhhh, zhhh, zhhh”, somewhere between retching and whining — as she tried to suppress the memory, and wake me up, and sob, all at the same time.
I was always awake anyway.
“Hush now, it will get better. I know.”
I knew because she had done the same thing to me.
We find equally a near-future horror nightmare in which the inherent toxicity of late-stage capitalism – symbolized in ‘Isobel’ by the indiscriminate dumping of hazardous waste products, genetic science run amok, a wearing-out of history as inexorable as that portrayed by J. G. Ballard in his 1962 story ‘The Garden of Time’ – has already engulfed the world. Isobel Avens’s desire for the impossible – for a power of flight both literal and metaphorical – forms a leitmotif for the insatiable avarice of our whole consumer society:
“Designer hormones trigger the ‘brown fat’ mechanism. Our client becomes as light and as hot to the touch as a female hawk. Then metabolically induced calcium shortages hollow the bones. She can be handled only with great care. And the dreams of flight! Engineered endorphins released during sexual arousal simulate the sidesweep, swoop and mad fall of mating flight, the frantically beating heart, long sight. Sometimes the touch of her own feathers will be enough.”
If ‘Isobel’ is a story about the socio-political fin de siecle-type mass hypnosis of satiation capitalism, it’s equally an examination of the hubris inherent in the creative act, its rapture and its dreadful depredations. Isobel Avens, Dr Alexander insists, ‘was dying anyway… We did far more than we would normally do on a client. Most of it was illegal. It would be illegal to do most of it to a laboratory rat… I couldn’t make her understand that she could never have what she wanted.’
The story suggests that the strength of Isobel’s desire for the impossible has quite literally changed her into something else, something not-human, or post-human, but that her most cherished goal still eludes her, as it always must. All artists exist along a sliding scale of madness, and it is probably for this reason that literature has so often concerned itself with the visionary nature of some mental illness, with the thinness of the divide between creativity and self-destruction. But stories such as this, in which the conflict is played out so graphically – where the metaphor is made so shockingly explicit – are rarer finds.
Side by side with all of this, ‘Isobel’ is unrepentantly a London story. As he brings Isobel home from her latest round of toxic medical treatments in Miami, Harrison’s narrator China Rose refers poignantly to Stepney as ‘the gentle East End,’ reminding us that this story’s consolation, if it has one, lies in the streets and stones of this tenacious and immutably accepting place, this cracked grey edifice, a city-refuge where exhausted souls have for centuries sought out a crawlspace in which to restore themselves, recover their lost identities, or simply hide.
Finally though, ‘Isobel’ is a story about writing, about the power of language to make the unreal real, to make tangible the texture of thought, to crystallize hyper-reality. To freeze time for a moment so we can breathe it in.
To paraphrase Paul Kincaid, it is a demonstration of what speculative fiction is capable of.
I reread ‘Isobel’ this week because I love the story – Signs of Life, the novel that grew out of it, was almost the first M. John Harrison I ever read and it was a life-changer – and because I wanted to make a contribution to the discussion of it that will be going on over at David Hebblethwaite’s blog this Sunday. Now that I come to talk about it though I find myself feeling doubtful, as I always do when I encounter any piece of work this well achieved, that comment of any kind is valuable or even desirable. Would I insist on talking through a performance of a string quartet by Benjamin Britten or Michael Tippett? It would actively pain me to do such a thing – yet that’s what trying to talk about this marvellous story feels like to me.
‘Isobel’ doesn’t need me to explain her. Here she is. Go read.