Some Thoughts on M. John Harrison’s Wish I Was Here

Just before sitting down to write this, I learned that Christopher Priest passed away, on February the 2^nd, 2024, at the age of 80. He was a contemporary of M. John Harrison’s, and it made me all the more grateful that so many people from the New Wave are still around and working. Rest in Peace, Christopher.

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I’ve been broadly familiar with M. John Harrison for a long time (he’s great on Twitter and has a blog you should definitely be reading), but until recently the only novel of his I’d read had been The Centauri Device, which was a delightful, complex, psychedelic space opera that had clearly been an inspiration for Iain M. Banks, an SF writer I adore. I knew Harrison’s reputation for subverting, and sometimes outright demolishing, genre expectations, and The Centauri Device lived up to those… expectations. Which means he… lived up to my expectations by subverting them? Anyway. More recently I read The Pastel City, which I loved and will be reviewing once I’ve read more of the Viriconium stuff,. I also got gifted a copy of his new memoir Wish I Was Here for Christmas, and I’ve just finished it.

Well, I call it a memoir. It’s billed very clearly as an anti-memoir, which in this case means that while it is autobiographical, it isn’t a strict, linear account of Harrison’s life. All the better for it. It is fragmentary, elliptical, told in snatches, it reflects the complexities of inner life and of attempting to reckon with memory in a way that’s far truer than a straight account. I’m reminded of classes I’ve taken on modernism, where we all argued about whether Virginia Woolf hadn’t actually written far more “realistic” fiction than Dickens.

And Wish I Was Here is fiction, really. At the core of the book is that remove between the version of yourself you are in the present and the version of yourself you were. You are no longer that person, to write about them is to write fiction by definition, albeit fiction informed by your memories, and whatever notes you’ve taken, notes that are also impossibly removed from you, something you’ll be familiar with if you’ve kept notebooks or journals. If you haven’t, read this excellent Joan Didion essay. Like I noted in my review of Chris Porsz’ recent exhibition, there’s something to be said for a consistency of accretion, for shoring fragments against your ruins.

I wanted to put off Wish I Was Here until I’d read more Harrison, but I glanced over a few pages and instantly got sucked into the rhythm and flow of it. He writes with a voice that is knowing, funny, wise, that takes you into his confidence. You want to keep listening. When someone is sharing with you the way Harrison is sharing with you, you don’t want to stop them. And it is funny as hell. I don’t want to spoil any of the jokes or stories but the little routine about the sink rotting in a ditch in the midlands is great, trust me.

You get the feeling he’s determined not to write about himself, but that’s fine. There’s some great nature writing in here, some lovely passages about the magic of owning a cat and the awfulness of losing one. There’s some writing advice I wish I’d heard years ago, and plenty of insight into other writers Harrison admires. There’s some frightening passages about the nature of the discontinuity we’re living through; that you’d say the book is partly a reflection of, if you didn’t know any better.

He shows glimpses of letting you in, laying out the details, explicating the five Ws, but they’re a feint. He draws you in with one hand and then keeps you at a distance with the other, the way he is distanced from his past selves. He details conversations and relationships he’s had but he lets you know he’s fictionalised them. He mentions some famous people he’s known but the anecdotes don’t get much juicer than having been a few tables over from Tim Henman at a restaurant, or bumping into William S. Burroughs at a party. Sonic Life, this ain’t, but that’s the point.

Harrison manages to not talk too much about his childhood or his relationships with his parents until the last few pages. It just doesn’t matter. Far more important to get across the sense of disconnection he’s always felt. In a way I think Wish I Was Here is an exercise in examining just how impossible it is to really know anything about your own life, let alone anyone else’s. In that sense I think it’s kin with Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and is similarly a masterpiece.

Yeah, I love New Wave SF, and I would have loved a nice long chapter on what it was like to be a part of New Worlds, but Harrison deftly shows us that that would be too reductive, that the work is what’s important, that it’d be impossible, anyway. You should immediately go and read Wish I Was Here. I’ll echo the recommendation that Weighing a Pig Doesn’t Fatten It gave – it’s among the best books I’ve ever read.