The Course of the Heart

I was reminded of Haruki Murakami many times in reading this. There was that sense of seeing something out the corner of my eye that I couldn't quite make out. Of course, turning my head revealed nothing - but I knew something still lurked out there. You won't find answers in the story, but you can have fun filling in the gaps yourself. What was that event earlier in their lives? What is the Pleroma? What about the Coeur? And who or what is Yaxley? I've left the book in view so I can keep working on the puzzle. If you like your stories neatly tied up with a ribbon around them at the end, then stay away from this. If you like story you can play detective with then dig in.

_The Course of the Heart_ is a lovely book, but perhaps emblematic of Harrison's relative commercial obscurity. It is, it must be said, not terribly accessible. In the end it is beautiful and moving -- but it's hard to be sure exactly what was going on. The narrator had apparently completed some mysterious magical act with two other young people during his university years. This act is never revealed (somewhat frustratingly) but it involved contact with another "plane of existence" (my words) called the Pleroma. It wasn't successful, and it seems to have mentally damaged the other two people: Lucas Medlar and Pam Stuyvesant. The narrator has perhaps (or not?) escaped unscathed. Lucas and Pam marry, but can never really settle, and eventually divorce. Pam is an epileptic, always difficult, and eventually gets cancer. The story winds back and forth in time. The narrator spends some time involved with the sinister older man, Yaxley, who initiated the original magical experiment, and who is trying further experiments, including a vile act involving incest. None of the magic really seems to work, but it all seems to involve contact with incomprehensible things. The narrator also keeps in touch with Pam and Lucas, even after they divorce. His own life is conventional -- an ordinary, fairly successful, job; a sexy wife, a daughter. Things finally come to a head with Pam's cancer, and her decline and death. Intertwined with all this is a travel narrative cum history of an imaginary Eastern European country. This is supposedly written by one "Michael Ashman", but we soon gather that this is all an invention of Lucas Medlar, with some degree of cooperation from Pam. This country is perhaps called "the Coeur" -- the Heart -- and it seems somehow connected with the Pleroma. It was destroyed by invasion, but in Lucas's conception, the Empress left descendants, who continued to carry some essence of the Coeur, suppressed for the most part. Eventually leading to -- of course -- Pam Stuyvesant. What does all this mean? I am not sure, but it rewards thinking about. I should add that the fictional Michael Ashman spent time in Czechoslovakia just prior to World War II, and patronized a Tarot-telling Gypsy whore, who surely died in a concentration camp -- thus bringing the central 20th century atrocity to the table. I don't at all know what to make of the novel, but it is beautifully written, very evocative, intriguing, erotic, sad -- a striking work.

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.