Not Your Usual Dystopia Novel
I've been feeling quite anxious lately, both about things in my own life and about the wider world. So I turned to this book that I wouldn't necessarily call consoling, but that offered me a different way of looking at things when it feels like the world is collapsing. This is unlike any dystopian novel I've read before. Yes, it's about technology outpacing the human race and reshaping society, but most dystopian fiction gives you a sinister, controlling government or a fascist dictator running the show. Here, set in a near future on the Kent coastline, there's no mention of government or any real governing body, no real police force. People are left largely to their own devices, living on the fringes, while the capital, London, has effectively been taken over by something referred to only as "the iGhetti" — possibly an alien force from outer space, possibly something that emerged out of the internet, it's never entirely clear. Its presence has pushed humans to the margins of their own society, left scurrying through the routines of their old lives while everything around them grows steadily shabbier.
I wouldn't just call this a dystopian story, either — it's literary science fiction, and it gets genuinely surreal in places, with sections that read more like a philosophical essay meditating on consciousness and what it means to be alive and human in relation to technology. There's a character named Hampson who leaves behind diary entries, since he's one of the few people who's actually gone into London and observed the iGhetti up close. He raises the unsettling possibility that the iGhetti may not even be aware humans exist — that people feel taken over, but no one is really clear on how, or whether, it's actually controlling the landscape at all. There's a pervading sense that rather than becoming alarmed at the world's deterioration, everyone has simply gotten used to the apocalypse — which felt very true to how it can feel being aware of huge, global problems while feeling powerless to do anything about them: accepting higher average temperatures, increasingly ineffectual governments and technology running our lives in ways nobody is actually steering.
Characters Over Plot
The novel doesn't have an urgent plot thrust so much as it spends time with a small group of characters. There's Philip, a man scraping out a living on the coastline by salvaging things from the channel and selling them, and his much older aunt, Marnie, an artist who has to leave her home and community early in the novel after a genuinely shocking event. There are surprising moments of violence in the story — not gruesome, but sudden, emerging out of nowhere in a way that makes them land harder — alongside a lot of weird, uncomfortable humor. It's a very strange book, and I won't pretend the central meaning or premise feels entirely graspable. I wasn't always sure what I was reading, but it produced a sensation that resonated with the current climate of things: this uncomfortable sense of sliding into a future we can't control and are just passively accepting.
Even without fully grasping it intellectually, I felt a real emotional connection to the story. One of the main threads follows an object Philip salvages from the channel early on, which he calls an "artifact" — something part robot, part humanoid, that grows and regenerates itself. As he spends time with it, it takes on more human qualities: it starts dressing in clothes, becomes more conversational, and seems to want an emotional connection with the people around it. I found it strange and moving how much empathy I developed for this biological gadget simply because it exhibits human traits, even though it isn't human — and there are startling moments when that distinction becomes brutally clear, including one where a character starts slicing pieces off it and eating them.
Marnie, Brexit, and Disconnection
I think part of the beating heart of this novel is Marnie, who drifts through the story staging her own quiet protest, at one point brandishing a placard reading "How can you misplace a continent?" — a reference to the sense that the UK has become disconnected from Europe and the rest of the world because of the iGhetti's presence. That obviously draws comparisons to Brexit, but it also gestures at something broader: even though we tend to believe technology and the internet have brought the world together, we're probably more disconnected from each other than ever. I found myself oddly, deeply engaged with this story even though I couldn't always say exactly what was going on — and I don't think it's meant to resolve into something fully clear. So much of it carries an underlying resonance with the current state of the world rather than commenting on it directly. Part of the real tragedy here is the sense that people's morality has been lost, that there's no governance driving our humanity anymore, and people are simply left to fend for themselves and take what they can. It's a gloomy story, but also compellingly weird as it gets more surreal — there's a later moment where a girl seems to transform into Shirley Temple, an absurd invocation of an old celebrity figure that becomes its own strange little beacon of optimism in this gray, deteriorating landscape.
In the Author's Own Words
The publisher kindly sent me a copy of the book along with a letter from Harrison discussing his thinking behind it, and I want to share some of it. He wrote that he started the novel in 2010, as "a disaster story told from the basis of a prolonged catastrophe, one that would to its victims seem to unfold so slowly that they were like the proverbial frogs in the pot, not noticing that their world is changing." He describes wanting to mirror our current situation through themes of environmental degradation and cultural change, with Brexit-linked subthemes and a strand that presents alien invasion as gentrification. The book is set along the seaside arts towns of the southeastern UK, from Hastings to Margate, where gentrification and generational change represent their own slow disaster for the culture of the original inhabitants. He wanted the book to be dark, both tragedy and comedy, landscape-oriented, with strong satire, parody, and mischief; a limited cast of characters and a simple picaresque structure, a journey along a coastline being geographically changed; a collision of the Gothic, the road movie, and the seaside novel. He said he hoped readers would feel empathy for Marnie and her nephew Philip in their confused attempt to understand a world that's no longer understandable, no longer theirs, and a creepy delight at the behaviour of alien overlords whose origins and motives are impossible to pin down. I think he really delivered on that.
Verdict
I really appreciated how this novel gave me a kind of touchstone for the underlying anxieties I've been feeling lately, offering a genuinely creative and different perspective on them. I'd recommend it, though I'm sure it won't be for everyone. If you've read it, or if you've read other books by M. John Harrison you'd recommend, I'd love to hear about it — he's a well-established author with a long body of work, and I want to read more of his fiction now.
