Reading The End of Everything for the Telegraph, 27 June 2026
What kind of end, what kind of everything, is this?
The iGhetti arrived by accident, pouring “like neither a thing nor a picture of a thing” out of New York, Dubai, the great banking cities of China. They’re not of this world, but they’re not unworldly, either. In their own reality-breaking way, they’re not so different from us: “All projects, the iGhetti believe, are inherently good. They are good because they are projects.”
The iGhetti have filled Earth’s oceans with amorphous artefacts of uncertain use that swell up and adapt to whatever environment they end up in. Tennent, an Oxford PPE drop-out turned beachcomber, fishes one out of the Hastings surf (maybe Hastings, maybe Hythe, maybe some point in between – since the iGhetti arrived and broke things, who cares for geography?) and within days it’s grown limbs and a face and the rudiments of language: “Hello, nice,” it says.
Tennent’s aunt Marnie wants nothing to do with the thing; neither does Tennent’s sometime lover Alice. He tries selling the thing to Hampson, “the beachcomber’s call of last resort”, who uses iGhetti artefacts as organic batteries, or maybe sentient transmitters, or maybe none of the above, in an effort to communicate with the “invaders”. But Hampson is a creep, and Tennent changes his mind. Alice catches a passenger ferry into the impenetrable sea fog that stands, in this broken world, for the future. Sooner than accompany her, Tennent and the thing wave her goodbye and then fetch up at a seaside gallery where they find Marnie sleeping “in a corner of the inevitable gift shop, under a pile of Mondrian-themed cycling jerseys”.
Things are mounting to a tragic crisis. Newcomers to Harrison’s work will have immense difficulty articulating how. It is the end of everything. It would take a novel to explain why.
Toxic praise has dogged the forty-odd year career of M John Harrison. He’s so weird, his fans sigh; he’s one of a kind. If you insist you can read The End of Everything this way – as a pretty ribbon, tying together much of what Harrison has made before. The iGhetti are the same existential bumblers we met in 1980’s A Storm of Wings. Alice and Marnie might have wondered out of 1992’s metaphysical puzzle-box The Course of the Heart. The Great Rift of Harrison’s sly space opera Light and its sequels is implicit here in the Strip – a stretch of post-apocalyptic High Weald coastline where, along with the teashops and antiques fairs, “there was a lot of poured cement and half-functioning neon, a lot of territoriality”.
But this would be to miss much that is new, or at any rate, whetted to a finer edge.
Now the iGhetti are here, people don’t quite know what to do with themselves. But – this is a point Harrison has been orbiting around for a while, and this time he nails it – they never did know. Reality is big and humans are small. Apprehending the world in its fullness would annihilate them, so they have always taken care to wear blinkers. Back before the iGhetti arrived there was something called “the economy”, and that made no sense either, and “life had been like a huge silent beautiful blossom opening to the economic light, with its roots deep in a mysterious, self-fulfilling growth medium and its leaves outstretched to welcome each new opportunity, untroubled and hothoused…”
Harrison understands the novel is merely a score: that it’s the reader who does all the work. The End of Everything is constructed like an overheard conversation – the reader can’t quite credit that they heard what they thought they heard, or that it means what they think it means.
It takes an extraordinary amount of engineering to carry off this effect. Harrison isn’t weirder than most other writers; he’s better. Writing at this level of intensity takes its toll. For the first time, and writing ostensibly about his protagonist, Harrison allows himself what amounts to a life statement: “What had begun as his desire to see and understand the end of the world,” he writes, “had decayed first into a kind of adventure sport, then a profession, and at the last, a burden.”
Most of this burden is being lifted from the reader’s shoulders: reading The End of Everything, you feel you’re not so much reading as dreaming. I’d call this a painterly effect, if calling a novel “painterly” wasn’t itself a kiss of sales death. But what the hell: The End of Everything is like a painting by Paul Nash – chalky, degreased, illumined – as the man himself says – by “a pure 1930s light, from an imagination stocked when people could use words like ‘spiritual’ and still mean something.”