This short novel is weird in ways in which only M. John Harrison can be. A futuristic literary dystopia, the story is set on the southeastern English coast and centers on Phillip and his aunt Marnie. Sometime in the past, some sort of inscrutable alien race called the iGhetti appeared out of nowhere, and everything changed. Decades later, Phillip picks up flotsam on the sea coast, including artefacts which are some shifting form of alien life. His aunt is an artist who barely navigates in this strange modernity. The novel is primarily one of mood and style. The plot is minimal, and the details of the world vague and shifting if not merely undefined or actually inscrutable. Some readers will find this irritating. For me, I thought it mostly works, though if this experiment as a novel were much longer it would definitely pall. In the middle of the book, Phillip finds in a lost journal the words that pretty much sum up the novel: "Believe all you like, that at some level unavailable to you an organizing principle exists. You will never have any evidence of that." Neither will the reader. The interest is in the journey, not any imagined solutions. Harrison clearly agrees with what T.S. Eliot said long ago, the real end is not a bang but a whimper.
