Review of The End of Everything by M. John Harrison

Over the past few years, my thoughts return with increasing frequency to the Camus-esque absurdity of normal life. Juxtapose the thousands of years of work, sleep, family, food, etc. with the fresh soil modern humanity is tilling (AI, screens, globalization, politicized media, etc.) and its mindblowing—in slippery yet sturdy, bizarre yet normal, out of touch yet 100% palpable, Camus-esque fashion. There are people following the love advice of chatgpt. That's a human doing what humans would do given such an opportunity, yes? But chatgpt?!?! Capturing this (seeming) juxtaposition pitch perfect artistically, narratively, and thematically, is M. John Harrison's The End of Everything (2026).

Boil away the skin and hair, muscles and organs, and in its bones The End of Everything is a near-future alien invasion of Britain. The iGhetti have appeared slowly and steadily in myriad forms on the island nation's shores, sometimes invasive of daily life and sometimes just hovering on the perimeter. In the wake of their arrival, government is degrading, a dense fog has descended on Europe, and all manner of the odd and uncanny is washing ashore. Two characters, Philip the beachcomber and Marnie the senior citizen artist, attempt to come to terms with their evolving world.

Examining the pot, with all of the skin and hair and muscles and organs and sinews and ligaments, and one finds what makes The End of Everything the novella what it is, however. It is a work of slipstream, that slippery subset of fantasy that refuses to let anyone pin it down. Things are both weird and normal for reasons you can't quite put your finger—surreal, indeed. Harrison's deceptive prose moves at a decent clip, relaying various aspects of Philip and Marnie's quotidian lives, then *ping* something so strange happens that it can't be true—an elderly woman nonchalantly murders a teen, for example. Did that really happen? She's back to hanging laundry, doing dishes, and thinking about grandkids. Wait, why is the neighbor holding a violin? It's such paradoxes that leave the whole feeling disconnected yet rooted.

Harrison's mode is all a deliciously appropriate way of framing, of presenting, the pace and effect of changes to modern human existence. It's the 10,000 view relayed to the reader through everyday life. The continual appearance of new and newer things, things that subtly but steadily change the way we live this thing called life. Anybody, for example, that pauses to review the additions to daily life just the past couple decades, let alone millennia, will be amazed. Cavemen would think it magic, which is, in some ways, a farther stretch than aliens landing on our shores.

There is not much more to add. At ~200 pages, The End of Everything packs its punch without exhausting itself (looking at you surrealist Scottish writers Alasdair Grey, David Lindsay, etc.). Every scene, every sentence, every word has a purpose, laying out Harrison's theme of disconnection—of absurdist reality that is reality. It's Camus-esque if ever there were. Literature can be art, and this is a shining example how.  Just do take the title with a grain of salt or two.