“Whole worlds… trapped in a few daisies, some grapes in a bowl.”
“What would she remember about him in the end anyway that could be separated from everything else that happened?”
Baffling and bizarre, M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything is a bit Seascraper meets Fringe. (You remember – the tv show where Joshua Jackson is an FBI agent investigating fringe science and unexplained phenomena with his institutionalized mad scientist father.) The blurb and the opening would lead one to believe this is about Phillip, a beachcomber, who has found an iGhetti artefact and is seeking to sell it. The artefact is shimmery and gelatinous, growing, molding, and reforming by the second.
Spoiler – it’s not about Phillip. The novel, distorted and rippling like waves on water, is about Phillip’s 70-year-old aunt, Marnie. She used to paint still life. This is important. The thing she misses most since the disaster that has uprooted and forever shifted her world is air travel.
By the way, you’re not going to learn about the disaster, the so-called “bad patch” that has descended on London. You will get very little about the iGhetti or the artefacts that wash up. Because this isn’t really about that. Harrison kicks us out on the beach where the world is what it is, and whati t is ain’t great. Buck up, figure it out, and survive.
Marnie is losing her marbles. And she has a gun. And Phillip, Phillip has found the artefact to top all artefacts. It has hands and has mastered speech. It seems to have feelings. Marnie hates it.
For not a long novel, there’s a lot going on here. We have emails between Phillip and Marnie when he was a kid. We have Hampson’s notes – Hampson is a bit of a mad scientist who buys artefacts. (What has he done with his parents and the artefacts? What is he creating?!?!)
Did I mention Marnie has a gun? What does Chekhov say about a gun?
Bang.
Read this one. I want it shortlisted.
A Girl Named Tommi 