The Inland Cities

In 1857 the clergyman, novelist and amateur geologist Charles Kingsley gave a lecture at the Mechanics' Institute in Odiham, in Hampshire, on what a gravel pit could teach about the making of England. He described a country convulsed, its land sunk beneath the sea. At last, in his telling, the convulsions weaken, the sea returns, and whales are stranded by hundreds where there is now dry land. "Gradually the sunken land begins to rise again," he told his audience, "and falls perhaps again, and rises again after that, more and more gently each time," until the panting earth sleeps "and this new world of man is made." Six years later Kingsley published The Water-Babies, his tale of a chimney sweep who drowns in a river and is changed into a creature with gills.

In 2020 M. John Harrison took Kingsley's sentence for the epigraph and the title of a novel set in the England of the Brexit years, in which the land that rises is not obviously man's. What comes up instead is a run of wet things, from rising damp and overnight pools in fields to translucent green infants in toilet bowls, and a doctor's tale for his small daughter of "a subspecies of people born looking like fish". Harrison told the political weekly New Statesman that his sunken land "represents an unwelcome political condition, rising into view again from the UK's deep geology", and many reviewers called it the Brexit novel. Yet the word Brexit appears in the book only three times. Two of those are the same line of an email.

The novel is less about Brexit than about not noticing. Its two protagonists live at one remove from their own lives, and the catastrophe unfolds just beyond the edge of their attention, in chapters that end before anything is explained. What they miss, the reader can assemble. The clues run from a real gene named on a blog to two deaths from enlarged spleens in two families that never meet. That single choice, to hide the story where its characters are not looking, makes the book's strength and sets its limits, and the case for and against it turns on whether the reader's work is repaid.

The Argument

Beyond that political gloss, Harrison has offered two shorter keys to the book. He told the online science-fiction magazine Big Echo that his characters miss what is happening because "self-involvement prevents them noticing". To the Spanish-language blog Lit Inglesa he added that genes from another species entered ours long ago, but that "the assumption itself is hidden behind the events of the story". Told straight, as the novel never tells it, the story goes like this. Shaw, recovering in his fifties from a five-year crisis, rents a room at 17 Wharf Terrace in Mortlake, on the Thames in south-west London, and takes cash-in-hand work from his neighbour Tim, who runs a blog called The Water House. Tim sends him to a trial at which a retired engineer describes green children breeding in the sewers, and then to a medium, Annie, who turns out to be Tim's estranged sister and his rival for a map with land and sea reversed. Meanwhile Victoria, Shaw's former lover, inherits her mother's house in a Shropshire town above the Severn Gorge, befriends Pearl, who keeps a café and once swam with Victoria's mother, and is pressed with copies of The Water-Babies by tradesmen and door-to-door salesmen. Pearl walks into a pool eighteen inches deep and does not come out. The two meet only once more, for a single night by the Thames, and two or three nights before Christmas Victoria, who has sold her house, answers a voice in her garden and goes down into the water through her own lawn. Shaw finds the parts of a dismembered man in Tim's office, tips them into the Thames and moves in with a couple who swim in rivers. In spring he resolves to go north to see how Victoria is. The last sentence calls his destination the inland cities.

Introduction

The Book

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is a novel of about 73,000 words, Harrison's own count, in nineteen chapters grouped into four parts. The strands alternate in blocks. Part One (chapters 1–5) follows Shaw in London, Part Two (6–10) follows Victoria in Shropshire, Part Three (11–15) returns to Shaw and ends with the night they spend together, and Part Four gives Victoria two chapters (16–17) and Shaw the last two (18–19). Every chapter has a title, and the fifteenth takes the title of the book. Several are borrowed, among them "The Pool of Tears" from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, "The Swanns' Way", a pun on the French novelist Marcel Proust's Swann's Way, and "The Farthest Shore" from the American fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin.

Three epigraphs stand before Part One. The first is the sentence from Kingsley's gravel-pit lecture, the second comes from To the River (2011), the writer Olivia Laing's book about walking the Sussex Ouse, and the third is St Paul's promise in 1 Corinthians of a universal change. The dedication reads simply "For Deborah Chadbourn", and the book says no more about her. The Gollancz edition runs to 272 pages, and there are no notes or acknowledgements.

The novel has two settings, both drawn from places Harrison knows. The first is the Thames between Mortlake and Brentford, with its towpath, riverside pubs, cemeteries and derelict barges, and Barnes Common behind. The second is an unnamed Shropshire town that appears to combine the High Town, cliff stairs and leaning castle keep of Bridgnorth with the Wharfage, a real street in Ironbridge, a few miles upstream in the gorge where the Industrial Revolution began. Harrison, who lives near Ironbridge, has called the setting "an unapologetically Gothicised vision of the Gorge". The action runs from one May to the next spring, after the referendum. It moves between Hackney pubs, a care home off the A316 near Twickenham, a failing shop in one of the north Staffordshire pottery towns known as the Potteries, and a new-build house at Kinver, on the sandstone edge south-west of Birmingham.

The book was long in the making. In 2014 Harrison published "The 4th Domain", a Kindle Single (Amazon's format for short works sold only as ebooks), in which Shaw becomes involved, as its blurb puts it, with "the cult of Annie Swan and her brother Tim". In 2020 he called it the "testbed short version" of the novel. Drafts of scenes appeared on his blog over the following years. For a time the working title was The Water House, which became the name of Tim's blog. Harrison finished a final pass in October 2019, and Gollancz published the book on 25 June 2020, in the first summer of the pandemic. On 11 November it won the Goldsmiths Prize, which Goldsmiths, University of London, awards with £10,000 to fiction that "breaks the mould", and it was also shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association's award for the best novel of 2020.

By the time of the prize its author was seventy-five. Michael John Harrison was born in Rugby in 1945, published his first story in 1966 and from 1968 to 1975 was literary editor of New Worlds, the magazine of science fiction's experimental New Wave. His Viriconium books (1971–85) turned sword-and-sorcery against itself, Climbers (1989) turned an exact eye on rock climbing in the north of England, and The Course of the Heart (1992) mixed realism with occult longing. The Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, Light (2002), Nova Swing (2006) and Empty Space (2012), returned him to far-future science fiction. He is known too for a blog post of 2007 attacking the genre habit of "worldbuilding" as "the great clomping foot of nerdism", which helps to explain why this novel never maps the world it glimpses. The Sunken Land is his twelfth novel. Since then he has published Wish I Was Here (2023), an "anti-memoir" made from his notebooks, and a thirteenth novel, The End of Everything (2026).

Outline of the Book

The chapter titles are the book's own, and the entries are keyed to chapters rather than pages. Each entry gives the chapter's opening situation, its main events and how it ends, and a short note under each part heading says whose part it is and where it goes.

Part One. Shaw by the Thames (Chapters 1–5)

Part One stays with Shaw, from his crisis and his move to Mortlake to the odd jobs that draw him into Tim's world. It ends as Tim sends him to record the séances of a medium.

Chapter 1. Spending All Day with the Dead. In his fifties Shaw loses five years to a slow, drifting crisis. In a Hackney pub he meets Victoria, a doctor's daughter who tells strangers she works in a morgue and keeps returning to her father's story of fish-people in South American river valleys. Their affair is brief and lukewarm. When Shaw proposes something more permanent she ends it, telling him that he has lost his nerve. Once the crisis lifts he removes himself as far from Hackney as he can, to a rented room between East Sheen and the Thames.

Chapter 2. Washed Up. Wharf Terrace has no wharf. Number 17 is a damp, subdivided house whose settled tenants are young professionals on their way up. Shaw unpacks what the crisis left him, among it an unread copy of Pincher Martin, and listens to an unseen neighbour singing, swearing and perhaps sobbing through the wall. His mother, seventy-five and in dementia care near Twickenham, remembers snow falling on the sea and warns him not to wait for his life to begin. He tells her about the shared bathroom's tidemark and something he thought he saw in the toilet bowl. At home a wrong number asks for someone called Chris.

Chapter 3. The Fish Talisman. Shaw meets Victoria in Hammersmith. She has bought a car and cut her hair, talks of leaving London, gives him a jointed silver fish and spends the night. Walking the river and its cemeteries, Shaw watches a man dig down to muddy water in a graveyard off South Worple Way and fill a Victorian medicine bottle from it. This is Tim, who mentions a blog called The Water House without saying it is his and hires Shaw, cash in hand, to mind his office in a hut on a lighter moored below the Brent, where a world map swaps land and sea. Tim turns out to be the neighbour behind the wall. Shaw's mother calls her son by other men's names.

Chapter 4. Anabasis. Shaw's favourite film is Night Moves. His first job is to carry boxes by train with Tim to Smart World, a half-empty shop in a Potteries town, and the boxes turn out to hold Victorian bottles of cloudy water. Helen, who poses as staff but owns the shop, passes on a message that someone called Annie wants no more deliveries. For weeks Shaw makes the rounds of crystal, candle and conspiracy shops on the hollowed high streets of the Midlands. He sleeps with Helen at her house near Kinver, where at three in the morning she hisses reproaches from the window towards the garden and its old pond. The shop closes.

Chapter 5. Passing Water. Shaw minds the office, sells the occasional copy of a print-on-demand book called Journeys of Our Genes and relieves himself off an abandoned barge. One morning he finds Tim kneeling with his arm down the shared toilet. Under a print of Böcklin's Sea Idyll his mother tears up a photograph and weeps at the silver fish. Tim sends Shaw to a crown court in an old Severn town, where Patrick Reed, a retired engineer, describes a green flake that grew into a translucent green child when he urinated on it, and green children breeding in the sewers. Reed is cleared of violent disorder. Tim's next job for Shaw is to record the séances of a medium, Mrs Swann.

Part Two. Victoria Above the Severn (Chapters 6–10)

Part Two moves to Victoria in Shropshire, from her arrival in her mother's house to the dawn when Pearl vanishes. It ends with Victoria driving to London to call Shaw.

Chapter 6. Victoria's House. Victoria's mother, freed by her husband's death from a family curse of anxiety, moved to a small Shropshire town above the Severn Gorge, lived recklessly and died of an enlarged spleen and a very high thyroid level. Victoria takes over her mother's half of an old house at 92 High Street, is sure at once that she has made a mistake, and emails Shaw that they are like hermit crabs in a shared shell. A flood of soapy water washes a translucent green foetus down the Portway stair, and then it is gone. She meets Pearl, who runs a café and says she knew the dead woman, and Pearl's father, a handyman called Chris or Ossie. Victoria's mother's boxes hold a new copy of The Water-Babies.

Chapter 7. Deep Roads. Delighted with ownership, Victoria walks old paths through fields that each have a pylon and a new pool, and hears a man calling a name that keeps changing. Tradesmen recommended by Ossie repair the house, and Steve the roofer presses his copy of The Water-Babies on her before her mother's copy goes missing. Pearl explains that the building was her grandfather's pub, that her father sold half of it to Victoria's mother and that she and the mother swam together. A dark band on the house next door looks like a flood mark forty feet up. At a heritage estate's rose garden Pearl paddles in a pool, homesick for being seven.

Chapter 8. Nothing's Ever Good Enough for Our Pearl. The two women tour Ludlow and the Welsh border, and Pearl buys a bow blouse for what she calls her Margaret Thatcher look. At dawn Victoria watches mist turn the Shropshire Plain into an estuary, then finds Pearl standing naked in a new pool under a pylon, claiming all such pools as her own and promising that Victoria will get in eventually. Pearl's lodgings on the Wharfage, a flood-prone former hotel, hold Andy, bed-bound among boxes of new running shoes, and a room of men watching sport they cannot follow, Steve among them, who offers The Water-Babies again. Ossie speaks the chapter's title as Victoria leaves.

Chapter 9. The Pool of Tears. Victoria keeps failing to enter the pool. At two one morning she follows a white-clad figure down Woolpit Road to the Severn. It is a drunk boy of about sixteen, who strips at a soft call from the far bank, looks green in the dark and swims away downstream. A pushy salesman, Tommie Jack, insists she ordered aerial photographs of her house. Above the café Pearl shows her tanks of cloudy water with no visible fish. Her album holds the photographs of children by the river that Ossie used to sell, and pictures of men at the seaside in the 1970s, and she suggests she might be Victoria's double. Ossie names the bar in a photograph of Victoria's mother, happy beside a shorter man who is almost certainly Ossie himself. Victoria thinks she should never have come.

Chapter 10. Victoria's Progress. The weather turns, the house seems to breathe and Pearl stops answering. At her lodgings Victoria finds Pearl's laptop open at The Water House, with posts about figures seen by the Brent and about a gene, PDE10A, and an Aquatic Hypothesis, while downstairs the tradesmen lurch in a huddled dance. Tommie Jack and Brenda hand out The Water-Babies door to door, and Tommie divides people into those of the past and his own kind, who belong to the future. Following the voice, now calling Vita, Victoria spends a night lost in the woods. At dawn she watches Pearl undress, wade into the shallow pool and vanish. She plunges in after her, finds nothing, and drives to London to phone Shaw.

Part Three. Shaw Again (Chapters 11–15)

Part Three steps back to fill in Shaw's past, then follows him into the Swanns' quarrel over the map. It ends with the one night he and Victoria spend together.

Chapter 11. The Sea Change. As a child Shaw fixed on objects rather than actions and imagined growing up by a sudden change of form. At his first séance in East Sheen, Annie holds his hands and goes into trance; nothing appears, but the room seems to tilt and smell of the river. She tells him to look after his mother, and Tim admits she is his estranged sister. Shaw learns that The Water House is Tim's and sees that the map is marked with an ancient DNA sequence. At the care home the Böcklin gives way to prints by the Victorian painter John Atkinson Grimshaw, moonlit streets that look like estuaries, and Shaw decides that all change is sea change.

Chapter 12. Any Port in a Storm. On the derelict barge Anabasis Shaw finds three medicine bottles set in turf. A naked, pale figure seizes him and escapes into the river, and the bottles vanish. He phones Annie most nights, wanders her cottage while she is in trance, pockets a clockwork swimmer from her bath and sees letters to her in Tim's handwriting. Tim gives him a two-inch stack of documentation and a signed copy of Journeys of Our Genes. Shaw reads the book aloud to his mother, who is scathing.

Chapter 13. The Swanns' Way. Annie holds her monthly séance for a dozen prosperous men, each with one odd flaw, and afterwards the map, or its twin, hangs over her fireplace. She insists it is hers. Tim calls Barnes Pond the Mort Lake and invokes John Dee. He then takes Shaw by train and taxi to Helen's house at Kinver. The driver, a small man in a Castrol rally jacket who drives a Toyota and wipes his weeping eyes, is almost certainly Ossie, though the text never names him. Workmen break open the old pond, which behaves as though it were thicker than water, and drag out a groaning bundle whose hand is pale enough to look green. Tim tells Helen that Annie can keep the map but they will take everything else, and Shaw is left behind.

Chapter 14. The Little Swimmer. Shaw sets the stolen clockwork swimmer going in his pint. Following a point of light in the burial ground at night, he sees Tim run off with a poster tube, chased by Annie's séance men to Barnes Common. There a Putney crowd in head torches and older Midlands workmen in hi-vis join a brawl in which faces stretch and tear, and Shaw senses nothing wrong. At the care home a beach snapshot recalls his great-aunts and a forearm washed up on a winter beach, and his mother calls him Mickey and bars him. Tim calls the séances a blind alley. Victoria phones.

Chapter 15. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again. The strands meet. Victoria arrives transformed, in a blue boiler suit with her hair in a vivid yellow high fade. Over dinner on the Chiswick shore she gives Shaw her mother's damp old copy of The Water-Babies, then sleeps with him, says she has had enough of water and cannot bring herself to tell him what she came to say. Someone moves heavily in Tim's room. By morning she has gone, leaving a note that invites Shaw to Shropshire and tells him he hands his power over to other people. On the lighter, wet footprints lead to the padlocked door.

Part Four. Victoria, Then Shaw (Chapters 16–19)

Part Four gives two chapters to each strand. Victoria's ends in the water before Christmas, and Shaw's in the following spring.

Chapter 16. The Water Under the Sea. Back in Shropshire, Victoria finds young tradesmen gutting Pearl's café. A set piece follows on the groundwater rising through the old mine workings under the town and the Gorge. She realises that Pearl was performing for the voice in the trees, not for her, and finds Ossie's taxi abandoned in a quarry lay-by. She chases Tommie Jack to Pearl's stripped room, where a calm voice says that Pearl is the past and the speaker's own kind the future, and Tommie claims the inland cities for his people. In November the café reopens as an aquarium shop, Shropshire Fish Supplies, kept by Tommie and Brenda Jack. Victoria puts her house on the market.

Chapter 17. The Unreliability of Forms. The Severn floods. Ossie, now behind the aquarium counter, says Tommie and Brenda have gone to Kinver, tells Victoria that everyone gets an answer in the end, and slithers away through his car's broken window for good. Helen of Kinver buys the house. In a notebook Victoria's mother wrote that her nails had stopped growing and that "P" had been seen washing between her own fingers, and Victoria flushes it away. Two or three nights before Christmas a voice calls "Vita", then "Victoria". The lawn has become a warm pool. She undresses, swims across and goes down the steps beyond the rose arch, asking to be sent to the water.

Chapter 18. Adaptive Introgression. Shaw abandons an email to Victoria. At Annie's cottage he finds Tim and Annie coupling joylessly, senses a third presence in the room and realises that it is himself. Annie phones and calls him Lee. He resigns. Tim's room at Wharf Terrace turns out to be empty but for box files, one labelled with the inland cities, and a journal that pities Shaw for denying that he belongs with them. At three in the morning Annie sits before the blood-flecked map in the office. As her voice, coming from somewhere else, tells him he will not need the lever, Shaw breaks into the padlocked store and finds bins of translucent body parts, one man of about fifty. At dawn he tips them into the Thames.

Chapter 19. The Farthest Shore. Shaw wakes feeling liberated. His mother says his father died of an enlarged spleen, calls him Jack and sings him a lullaby he has never heard. Tim's lighter has gone from its mooring. Shaw becomes the lodger of Ob and Emma, BBC people who swim in rivers, as the Brexit turmoil peaks, and Annie's cottage goes up for sale. At Christmas his mother tears up her photographs and smashes his phone. He rereads a year of Victoria's emails, writes to her at midnight and hears nothing. In spring he resolves to go north, once the weather improves, to see how she is.

The Case for and Against

The Case For

The novel won the Goldsmiths Prize on 11 November 2020. The chair of the judges, the biographer Frances Wilson, explained the decision in the New Statesman. Other experimental novels, she wrote, unpick language, character and form, while "Harrison unstitches the reader herself". Her fellow judge, the novelist Will Eaves, praised it as a fantasy grounded in realism, about love in middle age and about "the dissolution of the post-war settlement". That settlement was the consensus on the welfare state and a mixed economy that held from 1945 until the late 1970s. Laing, whose book on the Ouse supplies one of the epigraphs, praised the novel warmly in the Guardian, and the novelist Jonathan Coe chose it as a book of the year for its "portrait of watery, post-Brexit Britain".

The three long reviews agree. For Allan the novel is the "triumphant flowering" of Harrison's late style, and for J. S. Barnes, a novelist reviewing it in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), it is "a profoundly and eerily disquieting experience". Nick Richardson, then an editor at the London Review of Books, admired how its damp gets under the reader's skin.

Two critics went further. John Self, in the Irish Times, thought it the most modern novel on the Goldsmiths shortlist, although it came from the oldest author. Paul Kincaid, reviewing the year for the online science-fiction magazine Strange Horizons, made it his novel of 2020, "precisely the novel that this year, this moment, this mad world needs".

Three achievements stand out. The first is the prose, which is exact about uncertainty and very funny. A laptop's base, warped by heat, looks like a bracket fungus (ch. 4), and a brawl grows quieter as it goes on until it resembles an old woodcut whose meaning is lost (ch. 14). A small town's Christmas brings a Midnight Festival of Lights and Tractors, a U2 tribute band and a llama waiting by the castle to be led to the river (ch. 17). The second is the portrait of England, a country of absentee owners with interests in Hong Kong, Palo Alto and Dubai, who winter in Barbados reviewing their family's links to slavery and sugar (chs 7, 17). It is also a country of shops kept alive by people who treat trade as a faith (ch. 4). The third is the form. Two strands that barely touch are bound together by echoes that only the reader hears.

The book can be tested on its author's own terms, and it passes. Harrison said that the premise, genes from another species entering ours long ago, is hidden behind the events of the story, and the evidence is there, in medical detail that is easy to miss. Victoria's mother died of an enlarged spleen and a very high level of the thyroid hormone T4 (ch. 6), and her notebook records that her nails had stopped growing (ch. 17). Pearl's laptop shows a post on a gene called PDE10A (ch. 10). The novel does not say what the gene does. A study published in the journal Cell in 2018 linked it to the enlarged spleens of the Bajau "sea nomads" of Indonesia, who spend much of their lives diving, probably by way of the same thyroid hormone. At the other end of the book Shaw's mother says that his father, too, died of an enlarged spleen (ch. 19), and a journal in Tim's room pities Shaw for denying that he was "always one of us" (ch. 18). The lovers never compare their parents' deaths, but the reader can. When she does, a novel accused of gesturing looks far more deliberately plotted than it first seems.

The Case Against

The objections come mostly from the science-fiction press and from bloggers, and no national paper panned the book. But they converge on one charge. The critic and editor Cheryl Morgan, writing in Salon Futura, found the pace glacial, and Mark Bilsborough, reviewing for the science-fiction news site SF² Concatenation, wanted more pace and characters easier to care about. The critic Henry Hitchings, in The Spectator, found it "low on incident but richly textured".

Even Duncan Lawie, who called it "the highlight of my reading year" in Strange Horizons, allowed that it could be read as "the stories of two middle aged people failing to cope with their lives". Among the bloggers, Maryam of The Curious SFF Reader suspected that Harrison wrote it to feel "obscure and evasive on purpose", and the novelist and poet Christopher Willard, in the only outright pan, thought it pedestrian.

The strongest form of the objection is that withholding hardens into a manner. Nor is it only the narrator who holds back. Pearl asks Victoria whether she knows what Pale Meadows means, the name of a lane Ossie has warned her away from at night, and walks off without waiting for an answer (ch. 7). Victoria comes to London to tell Shaw something and cannot begin (ch. 15), and Shaw tells Helen that he lives without explanations (ch. 13). When a whole cast evades in one cadence, the evasion starts to sound like the author's. The novel anticipates the charge, since Shaw's mother complains that Tim's book has no story and Shaw agrees (ch. 12). Self-mockery is not an answer.

The set pieces bear the objection out. At Kinver men drag a groaning bundle from a garden pond and the book never says what they took (ch. 13), and on Barnes Common the novel's own comparison of a brawl to that old woodcut is honest and also an alibi (ch. 14). Most troubling of all, Shaw tips the parts of a dismembered man into the Thames and wakes next morning feeling liberated (chs 18–19). Either the book declines to weigh a crime or the scene is allegory in Gothic costume, and in either case its most violent act produces only a mood.

The politics are thinner than the reviews suggest. The premise, a struggle between species, was already in "The 4th Domain" in 2014, two years before the referendum, and the book's political memory runs from Thatcher's first victory in 1979 through the years of austerity after the crash of 2008. Where the novel does spell out its allegory it is at its weakest, in its picture of a newly empowered kind of Londoner in the book's last months, the best adapted with rubbery faces like fish (ch. 19). That turns political opponents into a subspecies. It also contradicts the book's better idea, present since its first chapter, that anyone may carry the strain, Shaw included.

Class and gender raise harder questions. The London satire, at least, is even-handed, from the young professionals running in Richmond Park at six to the Putney crowd in head torches (chs 2, 14), but no one from the Shropshire town is given a point of view. The tradesmen are seen only from outside, as worn-out men who can build a house but not live in one, likened to elderly toddlers and nicknamed by Pearl the seven dwarves (ch. 7), and Andy is a bed-bound body among new trainers (ch. 8). Then the plot makes them literally other, lurching in a huddle-dance and massing on the stairs (chs 10, 16).

And the water takes the women. Pearl walks into it, Victoria's mother was on her way, and Victoria follows them (chs 10, 17), and for most of the book the voice that summons them is a man's (chs 7–10). Shaw, who dreams of not jumping into moving water, survives and is left an open road (ch. 19). The strain, from the first chapter, passes through women.

Weighing the Two

The charge of mannerism is half right. Some of the echoes between the strands are rhymes rather than mechanisms, and the evasive cadence can wear. But the most important links hold up on inspection, from the taxi driver whose Castrol jacket, Toyota and weeping eyes all but identify him as Ossie (chs 6, 7, 13) to the medical clues that tie two families together. Few novels repay a second reading so well. The exception is the disposal of the body, where a crime is registered only as a mood and the charge stands.

The political charge is mostly right about the reviews and partly right about the book, for the label "Brexit novel" belongs to its critics and to Harrison's interviews more than to its text. The novel's own politics are older than the referendum. Eaves's account of it, as a novel of the post-war settlement coming apart, fits better. The fish-faced satire at the end remains its weakest page.

On class the book is caught by its own method. Because everything is seen through Shaw or Victoria, provincial England appears as they see it, and while the novel mocks Victoria's metropolitan gaze, it never lets anyone answer her. On gender the book sees the pattern it repeats, for Victoria realises that Pearl was performing for the voice in the trees, not for her (ch. 16), and she goes into the water asking whether this is what happened to her mother (ch. 17). The water may also be change rather than death, as it is for Kingsley's Tom. That softens the charge without answering it.

The praise, finally, was deserved, and Allan's formula for it states the objection too, for the point, she wrote, is "not the story but the accretion of circumstance". That is the book's achievement and its limit. The case for it is stronger at the level of the sentence and the pattern, and the case against at the level of the scene, the politics, the provincial people it never lets speak and the women it sends into the water.

Where the Book Sits

The novel's ancestors are easy to name, and Kingsley's The Water-Babies is the first of them. The obvious model for its fish-people is "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (1936), by the American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, in which a New England port's people interbreed with creatures from the deep and the narrator finds the taint in his own blood. Harrison has acknowledged the debt. Allan adds the English weird tale of the Welsh writer Arthur Machen and the ghost-story writer Robert Aickman, and the film The Wicker Man (1973), which Pearl invokes by name (ch. 8).

Within Harrison's own work the book draws on the exact English landscapes of Climbers (1989) and on the gnostic yearning of The Course of the Heart (1992). It is also close kin to "Land Locked", a story in Settling the World (2020) written at the same time, and Richardson put the relation neatly, observing that the story concerns aquatic aliens adrift among humans and the novel humans adrift among aquatic aliens.

The book also takes a side in three running debates. The first asks whether fiction should explain the Brexit vote or register the mood that produced it. After 2016 a wave of state-of-the-nation novels took the vote as their subject, among them Ali Smith's Autumn (2016), Amanda Craig's The Lie of the Land (2017) and Coe's Middle England (2018), which the critic Kristian Shaw has grouped as "Brexlit". Harrison's novel takes the other side. It never names the referendum and has no argument about Europe, and what it registers instead is a mood of stalled lives, faded high streets and people half aware that something has gone wrong.

The second asks whether the weird is a genre, with its own worlds and rules, or a way of seeing open to any novel. Harrison has spent his career on the second side, refusing the genre habit of building worlds for readers to explore, and that the Goldsmiths Prize, usually given to literary experiments, went to a writer long filed under science fiction was itself remarked on. The late critic Mark Fisher, in The Weird and the Eerie (2016), distinguished the weird, a presence that does not belong, from the eerie, which turns on absence and unseen agency. The novel is eerie in Fisher's sense far more than it is weird. Its question is not what the thing is but who is calling, and what becomes of those who answer.

The third asks whether the English landscape can still console, as much of the new nature writing of the past two decades suggests. The book carries a cover line from Robert Macfarlane, the best-known of those writers, praising Harrison's fiction in general, and an epigraph from Laing. Shaw's river walks borrow the vocabulary of psychogeography. Yet Allan was right to read the book as a deliberate dismantling of traditional nature writing and of landscape as heritage, for in it the landscape offers no consolation. It is a leaking archive of extraction, full of mine shafts, spoil heaps and heritage signs, and the water rising through it comes up from below.

The Sea for the Sky

What follows is this guide's own reflection, not Harrison's argument. The novel quotes Kingsley and St Paul, but it never mentions Plato.

Kingsley's gravel-pit lecture, the source of the title, names in passing "that sunken island of Atlantis of which old Plato dreamed". In Plato's Timaeus (25c–d) an Egyptian priest tells Solon, the Athenian lawgiver, that after earthquakes and floods, in "one grievous day and night", the island of Atlantis sank beneath the sea, and that the sea there has become impassable. The water, he says, is "blocked up by the shoal mud which the island created as it settled down" (R. G. Bury's translation). Harrison's novel is full of Plato's mud, from the Wharfage, which floods every February, to the lighter stranded at low tide in the Brentford mud and the woods where Victoria spends a night lost and filthy (chs 8, 10, 15). Where Kingsley saw the land rising gently towards a world made ready for man, Harrison keeps the mud and doubts the man.

In the Phaedo (109a–c) Socrates tells his friends that we live in a small part of the earth about the sea, "like ants or frogs about a pond", without knowing that we dwell in one of its hollows. We are, he says, like someone living at the bottom of the ocean who sees the sun and the stars through the water and so "should think the sea was the sky" (H. N. Fowler's translation). Harrison's people are that sea-dweller turned upside down, living in the upper air and blind to what moves beneath them, and when they look at Tim's map the seas have become continents. But the novel does not turn upwards as Plato does. Its fourth part opens with "The Water Under the Sea", and its last words point inland.

Kingsley's own tale points both ways, towards cleansing and towards decline. The Irishwoman who walks with Tom, a fairy in disguise, promises him that "Those that wish to be clean, clean they will be" (ch. I), and the voice that calls Victoria into the pool repeats the promise (ch. 17). Tom himself, mourned as drowned, is "quite alive; and cleaner, and merrier, than he ever had been" (ch. II). Yet the same book tells of the Doasyoulikes, a lazy people who sink back into apes as their climate grows damp and only the hairy survive, and a fairy draws the moral that the same laws of circumstance can "turn men into beasts" (ch. VI). Harrison's damp England holds both stories side by side.

The third epigraph is St Paul's, "We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed" (1 Corinthians 15:51, King James Version). Read at funerals, the passage goes on to promise a change "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye", in which the dead are raised incorruptible (15:52). The novel borrows the promise and withholds its content, for Victoria's descent through her own lawn has the shape of a baptism, in Paul's words "buried with him by baptism into death" (Romans 6:4), but no creed says what she rises into. It inherits Kingsley's geology without his providence. Whether Victoria has drowned or been changed is the question it most pointedly refuses to answer.

Verdict

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is a novel of rare exactness and dry comedy. It is stranger and more carefully made than even its admirers noticed. Its evasions can become a habit, and on the lighter at dawn it lets a crime pass as a mood, but its patterns look deliberate, as the medical clues suggest. Its politics are older and deeper than the Brexit label suggests, though its one explicit satire is its crudest moment, and its provincial England is seen from outside and never allowed to answer back. Its women go into the water, and its man survives them. The novel notices the pattern without undoing it. None of these objections touches the sentences, or the book's odd power to make a reader look again at a garden pond.

Kingsley's sentence ended with a new world of man. Harrison's last sentence sends Shaw north in the spring, when the weather improves, to see how Victoria is, "to the heartlands, to the inland cities". Those are the cities Tommie Jack claimed for his own kind (ch. 16). Victoria went into the water before Christmas, and Shaw does not know it. Allan thought his escape might prove only temporary, but it reads better as a homecoming. If so, the man walks free only as far as the water. The sunken land is rising, and the man who never noticed has resolved at last to go and look.

How to Read It

The novel is short enough to read in two or three sittings. It is built to be read twice. Before starting, read the first two chapters of The Water-Babies, which are free online, for Tom's drowning and the Irishwoman's promise, since the novel takes both for granted. On a first reading, let the strangeness come as it comes and keep a note of names, which shift, for Victoria is Norman or Nyman, Ossie is also Chris, and Shaw's mother never calls him the same thing twice. On a second reading, follow three threads across the two strands, the map (chs 3, 11, 13, 14, 18), The Water House (chs 3, 10–12, 18) and the medical clues (chs 6, 10, 19). Three pairs of chapters also reward reading side by side. Chapters 10 and 14 end with the same telephone call heard from either end, chapters 4 and 13 take Shaw to Helen's pond, and in chapters 17 and 18 each of them goes down to the water, Victoria at night and Shaw at dawn.

Questions to Read With

Things You May Not Know

The title came late. Harrison announced it on his blog only in September 2019, a month before his final pass on the novel, and noted that the book could already be pre-ordered from Amazon under the wrong title.

A ghost edition of 480 pages outlived its correction. Early retailer listings gave the book as The Deep Roads, a phrase that survives, without its article, as the title of chapter 7, and put it at 480 pages. Harrison wondered on his blog how anyone could get 480 pages out of 73,000 words, but the figure lived on, and a year later the Los Angeles Review of Books repeated it.

Victoria's Brexit line is older than the book. A draft of her email from Shropshire appeared on Harrison's blog in June 2017, three years before publication, addressed there not to Shaw but to someone called Short.

The Wharfage is a real street. It runs for about half a kilometre beside the Severn in Ironbridge and was built as a wharf in the 1780s. Its temporary flood barriers gave way on 26 February 2020 and residents were evacuated, four months after Harrison finished his final pass on the novel.

Woolpit Road points to Suffolk. The medieval chroniclers William of Newburgh and Ralph of Coggeshall tell of two children with green skin found near the Suffolk village of Woolpit in the twelfth century, speaking an unknown language. The girl said later that they came from a sunless land lit as if at twilight. The novel never mentions the legend, only the road.

Shaw once tries a false name on his mother. She calls him by other men's names throughout, and when he tells her he is Alex, to test her, she scorns it (ch. 3).

Two famous names haunt the book. Shaw's walks pass the tent-shaped tomb in Mortlake of the explorer Sir Richard Burton, who died in Trieste (chs 3, 19), and Tim invokes John Dee, the Elizabethan magus whose house and library were at Mortlake (ch. 13).

Harrison went on to judge the Booker. He sat on the Booker Prize jury in 2022, and in September 2026 his thirteenth novel, The End of Everything, was shortlisted for the prize.

The Thesis and Its Claims

The novel's argument, so far as a novel has one, is that something old is surfacing in contemporary England and that the people it touches are too absorbed in themselves to notice. Harrison scatters the evidence through incidental detail for the reader to assemble, and five claims hold the argument up.

That something old is coming back up. Harrison dots the book with signs that a people older than ours is returning. Victoria's father told her of fish-people living in isolated river valleys, the trait carried through the female line (ch. 1), and a retired engineer tells a court of green children growing in lavatories and breeding in the sewers (ch. 5). Victoria sees a translucent green foetus wash down a stair in soapy water (ch. 6). Pools appear overnight in Shropshire fields (ch. 7), something is dragged groaning from a garden pond at Kinver (ch. 13), and a journal in Tim's room records a creature wading into Barnes Pond, which is nowhere deep enough to hide it (ch. 18). Tim's blog, meanwhile, posts research on ancient genes and a so-called Aquatic Hypothesis (chs 10, 11).

That nobody is watching. Harrison builds his two protagonists not to see. By university Shaw had learned to file whatever happened to him as "sketchy and uninterpretable" (ch. 11), and years later he watches strangers tear at one another's faces on Barnes Common without feeling that anything bad is happening (ch. 14). He leaves some of Victoria's emails unread, and learns too late that she had told him something was happening where she was (ch. 19). Victoria in turn takes Pearl's naked swims for a performance meant for her. Only later does she see that Pearl was performing for someone else (ch. 16).

That England is the sunken land. Harrison's England is a place of heritage trails, absentee landlords, failing high streets and cash-in-hand work. Crystal and conspiracy shops fill the gaps on high streets hollowed out since 2007, kept by people whom the novel likens to Thatcherite spies still living in 1981 (ch. 4). Margaret Thatcher, prime minister from 1979 to 1990, is at least as present as Brexit, in the economy that sank a firm in the late 1980s (ch. 5), in a rose nicknamed the Iron Lady (ch. 7) and in a charity-shop blouse (ch. 8). Brexit itself surfaces only in an email, its rereading and one aside (chs 6, 19), and in Harrison's own gloss what rises is a political condition, which the Thatcher references suggest is older than the referendum.

That all change is sea change. Harrison makes Shaw's crisis not an event but a slow flooding, a sea change in the sense of Ariel's song in The Tempest (ch. 11). As a child Shaw imagined he would grow up not by effort but by a sudden change of form, and in the end something like it happens, when he wakes one morning feeling free (chs 11, 19). Victoria returns from Shropshire transformed, in a boiler suit like those on Pearl's clothes rails and with her hair bleached a vivid yellow (ch. 15). Her story ends in the water (ch. 17). The third epigraph, St Paul's promise that all will be changed, presides over all of it without saying into what.

That forms do not hold. Harrison lets nothing in the book keep its shape. Victoria is Norman in her own chapters and Nyman in Shaw's, and Shaw's mother calls him John, William, Peter, Mickey, Jack and Leo; his given name, Lee, appears only four times, all spoken by Annie (ch. 18). The silver fish Victoria gives him, supposedly Peruvian and about 1860, looks on closer inspection like Spanish work of the 1930s (chs 3, 5). On Tim's map, land and sea change places when you blink (chs 11, 13). A chapter called "The Unreliability of Forms" (ch. 17) ends with a lawn that has become a pool. Harrison has said that he wanted the novel to repeat the moment when The Water-Babies flips from realism into "a kind of hallucinogenic cartoon", and the unreliability of forms is that flip seen from inside.

Other Core Ideas

Beneath the claims lies a method, the one Harrison took from Kingsley, in which scenes of exact, comic realism, full of brand names, road numbers and paint colours, tilt without warning into something else and then tilt back. Almost every marvel comes with a deflation beside it. The creature on the stair might be an octopus from a burst restaurant tank (ch. 6), and the green boy swimming the Severn at night is a drunk sixteen-year-old (ch. 9). Where no explanation comes, a plain fact makes things worse. The pool into which Pearl vanishes is barely knee-deep (ch. 10). The narration stays close to Shaw or to Victoria, so the reader learns only what they half notice, and the jokes come from the same source, since both of them see England with the sharp, bored eye of people who expect nothing from it.

Three devices hold the book together, and the first is doubling between the strands. Shaw's 17 Wharf Terrace, which has no wharf, answers the house on the Wharfage where Pearl lodges, and each is a warren of rented rooms with strangers behind the walls. Helen, a shopkeeper whom Shaw sleeps with in Part One, reappears at Kinver in Part Three and buys Victoria's house in Part Four. The blog open on Pearl's laptop in Shropshire is Tim's (chs 10, 11), and a phrase on one of Tim's notes, the inland cities, is repeated by a door-to-door salesman in Shropshire (chs 12, 16). The second device is the voice that calls through the Shropshire woods, whose shifting names end in Victoria's own (chs 7–10, 17), and the third is The Water-Babies, which turns up in her mother's boxes (ch. 6) and then circulates like a tract.

What the novel leaves out is explanation. The reader never learns what was in the tarpaulin at Kinver, who the dismembered man was, what the inland cities are, or what became of Pearl. No character from the Shropshire town is given a point of view, so its people are seen only as a newcomer from London sees them. The political argument, too, is left for the reader to draw. This is the book's principle, not a failure of craft, and it follows from Harrison's long war on worldbuilding, but it also sets the terms of the case against the book.

The reach is wider than its two small settings. Reviewers read it as a Brexit novel and as a climate novel, and the Severn's floods, the fish tanks dressed as lost coral reefs (ch. 17) and the rising groundwater under the Gorge (ch. 16) support the second reading at least as well as the first. The novelist and critic Nina Allan, reviewing it for the Los Angeles Review of Books, read it as the culmination of Harrison's late style, in the sense the literary critic Edward Said gave lateness, as intransigence rather than serenity.

Key Words, Characters and Motifs

Key Words

Some twenty words and phrases carry the novel, and several are borrowed from elsewhere, from Kingsley and Shakespeare to genetics and geology. They are gathered here in sixteen entries, in roughly the order in which the novel introduces them, each with what the words mean, what Harrison does with them and where to find them.

The sunken land Kingsley's phrase for ground that sinks under the sea and rises again, from his lecture "Thoughts in a Gravel-Pit" (1857). It is the novel's title, its first epigraph and the title of chapter 15, the chapter in which the two strands meet, but it never appears in the running text. The book's images of it are wet and literal, from pools that fill overnight to groundwater rising through old mine workings (chs 7, 16).

Crisis The narrator's word for the five years Shaw lost in his fifties. The first chapter insists that it was neither a breakdown nor a midlife crisis. It leaves him always a beat behind events (ch. 4), and he later decides it was never a single catastrophe but a slow disaster still spreading along unrecognisable coasts (ch. 11). His strangest release comes on the morning after the worst thing he does, when he wakes feeling free (ch. 19).

Fish-people and green children Two names, from different mouths, for what may be surfacing. The first comes from Victoria's father, a doctor, who told her of fish-like people cast out into remote river valleys, the trait passed through women (ch. 1). The second comes from the evidence of Patrick Reed, a retired engineer on trial for disorder, about green children in lavatories (ch. 5).

Psychogeography and the dérive Terms coined in Paris in the 1950s by the French theorist Guy Debord and his fellow Lettrists, who went on to found the Situationist movement, for the study of how places act on moods. The dérive ("drift") is the aimless city walk that serves it. The novel uses both words for Shaw's walks up the River Brent from its mouth at Brentford (ch. 3), and his drifting is the book's first image of a life without direction.

The Water House Tim's blog, a site in red type on black whose shabbiness is worn as a badge of honesty (ch. 11). It mixes news of ancient genes with reports of figures leaving the Brent at high tide, and later with clips from Annie's séances (chs 10–12, 18).

The reversed map A world map in Tim's office, coloured so that the oceans look like continents and the continents like seas (ch. 3). Someone has marked it with clusters of an ancient DNA sequence (ch. 11). It moves to Annie's wall, where she insists it has always been hers (ch. 13), may be what Tim carries when he is chased across Barnes Common (ch. 14), and returns to the office flecked with blood (ch. 18). No one explains what it shows.

Anabasis Greek for "a going up", the title of the Athenian soldier Xenophon's account of a march from the coast into the interior of Asia. It names chapter 4, in which Shaw first goes up-country with Tim to the Midlands, and it is stencilled on the bow of the derelict barge where Shaw is attacked (ch. 12). It anticipates the novel's last movement, inland.

Journeys of Our Genes Tim's print-on-demand book, which Shaw sells one copy at a time and reads aloud to his mother (chs 5, 12). It reproduces the map and strings facts together with empty connectives. A passage Shaw remembers at Christmas, about an ancient gene coming back to the surface, is the nearest thing in the book to an explanation (ch. 19).

The Water-Babies Kingsley's fairy tale of 1863, in which Tom, a boy chimney sweep, drowns in a river and is changed into a water-baby, four inches long with gills. In the novel it turns up in the dead mother's boxes (ch. 6), is offered to Victoria by a roofer (chs 7, 8) and is handed out door to door like a tract (ch. 10). It passes from Victoria to Shaw as a joke present (ch. 15) and ends on his shelf (ch. 19). Its sudden slides from realism into fantasy are the model for the novel's method.

Heritage The official England of ruined keeps, restored ironworks, rose gardens and signposted trails. Victoria jokes that the county is heritage from end to end (chs 9, 11), and beyond Wolverhampton's ring road the novel enters English Heritage country (ch. 13). The irony peaks when the Severn's flood barriers cut tourists off from the heritage sites they came to photograph (ch. 17).

Unconformity A geologists' term for a buried surface where rocks of very different ages meet, marking a gap in the record. The phrase "unconformable layers of time" appears in chapter 9, and the idea returns in chapters 12 and 16. The novel's method is unconformable in the same way, laying scenes of the present directly on something much older with the connecting strata missing.

Adaptive introgression A term from genetics for useful genes passing from one population into another through interbreeding, as when genes from the Denisovans, an extinct archaic people, survive in living humans. It is the title of chapter 18, and a post about it on Tim's blog appears on Pearl's laptop (ch. 10). The blog mixes real science with fringe theory, from PDE10A, a real gene, to an "Aquatic Hypothesis" that recalls the aquatic ape theory of the marine biologist Alister Hardy, which most scientists reject (chs 10, 11).

Sea change From Ariel's song in Shakespeare's The Tempest, where a drowned father suffers "a sea-change / Into something rich and strange". It titles chapter 11, and Shaw concludes there that all change is sea change. The play is being cast at the leisure centre in Victoria's town (ch. 8), and the song's drowned father suits a man who has had several fathers and knows none of them.

The inland cities The book's most persistent mystery. The phrase appears on a Post-it in Tim's papers (ch. 12), in the door-to-door salesman Tommie Jack's claim to them for his people (ch. 16), on one of Tim's box files (ch. 18) and in the last sentence, where Shaw resolves to go there (ch. 19). It is never explained, and it may mean the Midlands, a future, or somewhere under the water.

The Mort Lake Tim's name for Barnes Pond, which he also calls the Dark Pool (ch. 13). It plays on the district's own name, Mortlake, as if that meant "dead lake", though the place-name probably means "salmon stream". Tim hints that John Dee, the Elizabethan mathematician and magus who lived at Mortlake, knew what the pond was. In a journal found in Tim's room a creature wades into it and disappears, though the pond is nowhere more than twenty inches deep (ch. 18).

Brexit and Brexitania Brexit is named in Victoria's first email from Shropshire (ch. 6), when Shaw rereads that email (ch. 19), and in the narrator's phrase "the height of the Brexit debacle", in the passage that describes a new, fish-faced type in London (ch. 19). Brexitania is Victoria's word in a later email. The word referendum never appears.

Characters

The two drifters. Shaw is in his fifties, the survivor of a crisis that cost him five years, a career in IT and most of his possessions. He dresses younger than his age, walks the river, avoids the internet and reads the London Review of Books in an office whose business he never understands. His mother calls him by other men's names. Victoria, in her forties, is a doctor's daughter with red hair and a home in Dalston. She has a habit of telling strangers that she works in a morgue, and a story of seeing her first corpse at fourteen that she later admits she told for attention (chs 1, 15). Her mother's family is cursed with paralysing anxiety in middle age (ch. 6), and she is braver, funnier and more frightened than Shaw.

The Swanns and their circle. Tim Swann, about fifty, tall and stooped, a once-elegant man run to fat, lives behind the wall of Shaw's room. He keeps an office in a hut on a lighter, a flat-bottomed cargo barge, moored in the Thames mud. He runs The Water House, signs copies of Journeys of Our Genes, which he appears to have written, and samples graveyard water in Victorian medicine bottles (chs 3–5, 11–12). Annie Swann is a medium in a cottage by Old Mortlake burial ground, younger than Shaw and worn out by her work, whose monthly séances draw a dozen prosperous men, each with one odd physical flaw (ch. 13). She is Tim's estranged sister, his rival for the map and at last something like his partner (ch. 18). Helen owns a failing shop in the Potteries and lives near Kinver beside a pond older than her house. She has a brief affair with Shaw and ends up buying Victoria's house (chs 4, 13, 17).

The café and the pub. Pearl runs the café in a pink overall, later wears a white-blonde pompadour, swam with Victoria's mother, claims the new pools in the fields as her own and walks into one of them (chs 6–10). Her father, born Chris and known to the Kinver crowd as Ossie or Wee Ossie, is a handyman and taxi driver with streaming eyes and a 1970s rally jacket, who once sold photographs of children naked by the Severn (chs 6–9, 17). Old Ossie, Pearl's grandfather, kept the pub that became Victoria's house (ch. 7).

Salesmen and tradesmen. Tommie Jack, a door-to-door salesman of double glazing and then aerial photographs, and Brenda Jack, a neat woman in her thirties, hand out The Water-Babies and later keep the aquarium shop (chs 9, 10, 16). Steve the roofer, with faded heavy-metal tattoos, is one of the worn-out men who repair Victoria's house (ch. 7). Andy, a bed-bound diabetic ringed by boxes of new running shoes, lodges with Pearl on the Wharfage (ch. 8). Seaside photographs from the 1970s in Pearl's album show Tommie, Steve and Andy as young men (ch. 9).

Parents. Shaw's mother, seventy-five and in care off the A316, left a man every five years or so from the age of twenty and started a new family each time, leaving Shaw with half-siblings scattered along the coasts of Canada and Australia (chs 3, 19). Sharp, cruel and lucid in bursts, she is the book's most vivid character, and not even her dementia is quite certain (ch. 18). Victoria's mother was timid from adolescence until her husband's death freed her. She moved to Shropshire, went home with strange men and died of an enlarged spleen and an excess of thyroid hormone (ch. 6), and a notebook suggests that before she died she had begun to change (ch. 17). Victoria's father, a doctor who took up fishing late, dropped dead in a car park by the Severn (ch. 6).

Shaw's fathers. Of Shaw's several fathers only Keith is drawn at length, a retired teacher of creative writing who once turned up drunk at Shaw's flat and died soon after (ch. 11). Another, in a photograph on a Pembroke beach, may have been called Carson or Carlson (ch. 5). When his mother says that his father died of an enlarged spleen, Shaw has to ask which one (ch. 19). Two great-aunts, Jehovah's Witnesses in a seaside town, took him in during his mother's absences (ch. 14).

Witnesses. Patrick Reed, a courteous retired civil engineer of about seventy, sees green children wherever he urinates and shouts his warnings in a high street. He is cleared of violent disorder and convicted only of being drunk (ch. 5). Harry, the subject of a local newspaper story of 1984 that Shaw finds in the office, faked his death on the Brent towpath, was glimpsed for years along the river and then turned up living quietly with his wife in Acton (ch. 11). Ob and Emma, a BBC couple in their late thirties who swim in rivers and lakes, take Shaw in as a lodger at the end (ch. 19).

Places

The Thames. 17 Wharf Terrace, in Mortlake near the brewery, is a damp Georgian house cut up into rooms, and Shaw's attic has a glimpse of the tideway (ch. 2). Tim's office is a site hut on the deck of an old Thames lighter moored in the mud below the mouth of the Brent at Brentford, with the map above the desk and a padlocked door that Tim says leads nowhere (chs 3, 18). Upriver lie derelict barges, one of them stencilled Anabasis (ch. 12). The Earl of March is the pub where Tim holds court. Old Mortlake burial ground adjoins a psychiatric hospital and Annie's row of cottages, and Barnes Pond and Barnes Common, beyond, are where the Swanns' quarrel spills into the open (chs 13–14).

The Severn. Victoria's town is never named in the present, though she tells an estate agent it was called Bolsoe in 1086 (ch. 17). It stands on a red-sandstone promontory above the river, with a High Town, the leaning fragment of a castle keep and a steep old stair called the Portway. Pearl's café lies in a square behind the shops, and a Woolpit Road drops to the river (chs 6–9). Victoria's house, 92 High Street, is half of a late-eighteenth-century building that was once a pub, and the lower lawn of its garden looks like a pond under weed (ch. 6). Down in the Gorge, on the Wharfage, Pearl lodges in a former hotel turned bedsits that has flooded every February for two centuries (ch. 8). The fields behind the town hold pylons and pools, among them the pool under a pylon where Pearl vanishes (chs 8, 10). Childe Beckwith is a heritage estate with a walled rose garden and a long stone pool (chs 7, 17).

In between. An unnamed light-engineering town in the Potteries, with "a Marks & Spencer the size of a suburb", holds the failing shop Smart World (ch. 4). A crown-court town above the Severn on the edge of Wales, with Shrewsbury's street names Grope Lane and Dogpole, hears Patrick Reed's case (ch. 5). Kinver, below the sandstone rock-houses of Kinver Edge, is where Helen's pond is broken open and where Tommie and Brenda Jack go on business they do not explain (chs 4, 13, 17).

Motifs and Analogies

The plastic waterfall. In the aquarium shop that replaces Pearl's café, the tanks come to hold more drowned scenery than fish, with sunken castles, temple columns, treasure chests spilling pearls and a plastic waterfall that shows water flowing under water. It makes Victoria shiver (ch. 17). It is the book's image of itself, a picture of water set inside water, where the difference between a thing and its representation has gone under.

The silver fish. Victoria's house-warming present is a jointed silver fish with glass eyes and a thick-lipped mouth, supposedly Peruvian (ch. 3). At night it seems to tell Shaw that its kind came before him and will outlast him. Its provenance collapses (ch. 5), Shaw's mother weeps at it, and it tarnishes in the river air (ch. 15), but at the end it is still there, staring back (ch. 19).

Böcklin's Sea Idyll. A print of the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin's Meeresidylle (1887) hangs in the care home (ch. 5). The novel describes it as a woman and two children clinging to a half-sunk rock while a man, or something out of myth, rises waist-deep from the sea, and the woman, reaching towards him, lets her baby slip into the water (ch. 18). The painting itself shows a family of merfolk, the mother cradling a sleeping infant, so the slipping baby is the novel's own reading. Shaw's mother, who left her children again and again, has it moved above her bed (ch. 18) and stares at it after smashing his phone (ch. 19).

Night Moves. The American director Arthur Penn's thriller of 1975 stars Gene Hackman as Harry Moseby, a Los Angeles detective who follows a missing girl to the Florida Keys without grasping that he is a pawn in other people's schemes. It ends with him wounded in a boat circling on the sea. Shaw, whose favourite film it is, rewatches it for the moment Moseby misses the truth (chs 4, 14). The novel is built on the same blind spot.

Pincher Martin. William Golding's novel of 1956 follows a naval officer who seems to survive a sinking on a rock in the Atlantic, until the last page reveals that he drowned at once. Shaw owns a copy he has never read (chs 2, 19), and Victoria reads a few pages of it (ch. 3). It is the book's quiet hint that its people may already be in the water without knowing it.

The calling voice. In Shropshire a man's light tenor voice calls at night for Moya, Voya, Mira or Vita, as if for a dog or a lost woman, in the woods, in the street and at last under Victoria's window (chs 7–10). In chapter 17 it calls her own name, and the reader sees whom it was calling all along.

The clockwork swimmer. Shaw steals a toy swimmer in an Edwardian bathing costume from Annie's bath and sets it paddling round his pint (chs 12, 14). It is the novel's small joke on The Water-Babies, a man-made water-baby going round in circles.

Further Reading

Start with Kingsley. The Water-Babies (London, 1863) is strange, digressive and free online, and its first two chapters and its sixth, on the Doasyoulikes, are the ones the novel needs. His lecture "Thoughts in a Gravel-Pit" (1857), collected in his Scientific Essays and Lectures, supplies the title and a Victorian's confidence in geology that the novel does not share. Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (1936) is the classic tale of fish-people breeding with humans, and William Golding's Pincher Martin (London, 1956), the novel Shaw never reads, is the great fable of a man who does not know he has drowned.

Of Harrison's own books, Climbers (London, 1989) turns the same exact eye on the north of England. The Course of the Heart (London, 1992) is the nearest earlier novel, in which friends who once took part in an occult ritual live ordinary lives haunted by it. The stories in You Should Come With Me Now (Manchester, 2017) and the selection Settling the World (Manchester, 2020), which includes "Land Locked", are the workshop in which this novel was made. Wish I Was Here (London, 2023) is his anti-memoir, and The End of Everything (London, 2026) his thirteenth novel.

For companions and critics, Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie (London, 2016) gives the vocabulary for the novel's effects. Laing's To the River (Edinburgh, 2011), which supplies an epigraph, is its gentler counterpart, a walk down a river full of drowned history. Kristian Shaw's Brexlit (London, 2021) maps the fiction of the referendum years. The best short accounts of the novel itself are Allan's review in the Los Angeles Review of Books (2020) and Richardson's essay on Harrison's career, "On the Interface", in the London Review of Books (2021). The sharpest dissent is Morgan's review in Salon Futura (2020), which reads the book as a Brexit allegory and finds it slow.