A Smell With No Flowers

M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart opens with three Cambridge students performing a ritual on a hot May night, then refuses to tell you what it was. I'm only about fifty pages in, so I'm writing from inside that withholding rather than out the far side of it. The refusal already feels deliberate rather than coy. The characters can't remember either, which puts the reader and the people on the page in the same fog, and that seems to be the point.

Harrison is an odd writer to arrive at through fantasy, because he spent the 1970s and early 1980s building the Viriconium sequence and then walked away from it. He's talked about deciding to stop writing about people hitting each other over the head. What he turned toward instead has the furniture of the supernatural without the reassurance of it. His lineage runs through Arthur Machen and Charles Williams, writers for whom the uncanny was a moral and spiritual problem, not a special effect. You can feel that inheritance in how the early chapters handle Yaxley, the sorcerer who set the ritual going: not a robed magus but a seedy, faintly embarrassing presence, the kind of man you'd cross a damp street to avoid. It's the same trick T.E.D. Klein pulls in his slow, withholding horror, keeping the dread offstage and the people resolutely ordinary.

So far the book works by residue. The ritual is over before it's explained, and what remains are the things it left behind in each person. One character is plagued by visions. Another is convinced something small and malformed is following him. The narrator gets the strangest and most domestic affliction of all, an intermittent smell of roses, arriving with no flowers in the room. A monster you can point at; a smell you can't.

The theme I can feel forming, and I might be wrong this early, is escapism and what it costs. Unable to move on, one of the characters invents an elaborate private mythology, a lost European country called the Coeur, complete with forged histories, partly to comfort the other. I suspect Harrison is setting that consolation up to fail. A story you tell yourself to survive grief is still a story, and the cells decay on their own schedule regardless of how good the fiction is.

The sentences are the reason to stay. Harrison notices things at a pitch most novels can't sustain, a Manchester canal scattered with floating styrofoam, the precise social texture of two emotionally incompetent people failing to build a relationship. He's described his own writing as built on obsessive notetaking, and the discipline shows in the editing as much as the observation. He knows which details to keep.

The open question now is whether the Coeur holds, whether Harrison lets the characters keep their invented country or pulls it out from under them at the exact moment they need it most. The ground feels stable enough that I trust him to do whichever is worse.

Sources:

No Escape — Literary Review

The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison — EBSCO Research

The Course of the Heart — Serpent's Tail