The End of Everything

Novel · 208 pages · Kindle Edition · 2026 · Serpent’s Tail

Something can reach you and stay unreadable

Marnie is a painter accustomed to images that do not settle into one meaning. In The End of Everything, M. John Harrison tests that habit against a harder object: the iGhetti, entities whose presence has altered Britain without supplying any coherent account of what they are or what they want. Grief, when it comes at the end of Part One, asks more of that discipline than any unresolved image has.

Harrison offers no stable speculative system. Knowledge remains local. The sea washes up artefacts, biological objects the iGhetti discarded. Coastal rumour, Hampson’s experiments, military responses and the informal trade in artefacts all function, and none of them explains the whole.

Part One leans on explanation. Emails, notebooks, signals, observations and hypotheses gather around the iGhetti. Testimony is no firmer than theory. A bad patch can show everyone present the same event without telling any of them what it was. Hampson, a recluse on the Downs, spends years trying to receive and interpret transmissions through artefacts, only to reach the limit built into the novel from the start: something can reach you and stay unreadable. Phillip, Marnie’s nephew, presses at the gap from another direction. He wants proximity where Hampson wants explanation.

Phillip’s death turns that problem into matter. When he announces that he is sailing, Marnie finds the gun in her bag. It goes off. Marnie and the artefact Phillip found, by now the size of an adult, burn his body beneath a pier with painted canvases, protest signs, books and Hampson’s notebook. The fire takes in image and public language along with theory and record, every form through which Part One has tried to make experience readable. By morning Marnie cannot tell bone from driftwood as she scrapes the remains into a biscuit tin. The artefact hands back the notebook. It is charred but intact.

Part Two, Marnie’s Holiday, shifts the emphasis. The documentary density drops away and the book turns mobile and episodic, as Marnie, seventy, her memory failing since Part One, falls ill on the road north. Part One’s interpretive problem narrows to one figure, the increasingly Phillip-like artefact at her side, and Marnie tries to end the substitute and then to absorb it. She has killed before. Now she shoots the artefact and the fruit girl from the inn, who insists it is Phillip, then spends two days eating parts of the artefact. Both are alive days later. The artefact, which Marnie calls the driver, remembers only who it is now.

Harrison writes violence and landscape in one continuous register. A coast can be rendered with botanical precision while its light and geometry cease to behave reliably. A body can be opened or shot, then the sentences move on to weather or food. Early in the novel Marnie kills a twelve-year-old boy. Ordinary life resumes almost at once. The speed of that return unsettles more than the act itself.

That speed has a cost. In the chapter “Easy jets”, Marnie fires into the neighbours gathered outside her house. Two of them fall. A neighbour’s trampled violin displaces the aftermath before the violence has registered, and the two are not mentioned again.

The ending disperses what Part One gathered, though never completely. Marnie discards the pistol and almost all of Hampson’s diary. She keeps one page. When she scatters Phillip’s ashes, the wind blows some of them back at her. The kept page carries Hampson’s hypothesis, that the iGhetti are refractions of something inaccessible, and extends it to human beings. Even the catastrophe loses its claim to explain. Looking over the London Basin, Marnie recognises that things had gone wrong long before the iGhetti came.

This is a difficult book. It leaves the iGhetti unexplained to the end, and it is worth the difficulty. In the burning under the pier and the single page Marnie saves, structure carries a grief that none of the novel’s explanations can. Marnie buries the empty biscuit tin and drives down into the city.