Said novel is about the fraught and hesitant mid-life affair between its two central characters, a human connection made in fits and starts it also might be about a secret society of fish people. Harrison also won the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize-“to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form”-for his novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again. Le Guin, Robert Macfarlane, and Olivia Laing. Its back cover bears blurbs by the unlikely trifecta of Ursula K. Jennifer Hodgson, whose work elevating the profile of the legendary experimental writer Ann Quin, edited a career-spanning anthology of Harrison’s short fiction, titled Settling the World: Selected Stories. Harrison has long been a cult writer with a number of high-profile admirers-Neil Gaiman penned the foreword to the omnibus Viriconium, for instance-but that cult might be getting a little larger. That abrupt pivot, from dinner party frustration to a shocking act of violence, is indicative of both Harrison’s skill as a writer and his manifold ability to avoid narrative beats he feels are unnecessary are both on display in this handful of pages. A cursory search of the novel will likely reveal to you an image of a book with a starship on its cover, as the vast majority of Light is set 400 years in the future. Suddenly, this novel’s very nature has spun on the proverbial dime. It’s what happens next that prompted a double take when I first read it: Michael and Clara make their exit, and they go into an empty room “where he killed her as quickly as he had all the others.” Suddenly, our angry young man isn’t what he seemed to be. It’s a familiar scene, and in just a handful of sentences the author of this scene perfectly summons a sense of an embittered guest at a stagnant dinner party. Kearny is, apparently, bored with the conversation. A man named Michael Kearny is there, accompanied by a woman named Clara.
The setting is a dinner party in the Midlands.
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