What If the Apocalypse Is Already Here?
· The Atlantic
On a patch of ground in the City of London, the exact site of the former East India Company’s headquarters, stands a puzzling structure with the nickname the “Inside-Out Building.” Unlike the glittering, knifelike high-rises that surround it, the edifice is covered in a shell of equipment: all of the air ducts, electrical lines, elevators, and pipes run up the exterior. Inside, Lloyd’s of London, the three-century-old powerhouse firm, props up the globe’s insurers and guarantees financial security. So when a race of amorphous beings called the iGhetti arrives in England, Lloyd’s seems like a logical target. There is no better way to dominate humanity than to take over the economic heart of the empire. And there might be no better place for M. John Harrison to situate his new, Booker Prize–shortlisted novel, The End of Everything, than a building of great significance that is also irresistibly weird.
The End of Everything is brief and confounding; it also doesn’t care a whit for the conventions of dystopian fiction. It’s set about 20 or 30 years in the future, mostly in the small coastal towns of Kent, where strange entities (they might be aliens, or bio-machines, or really anything) wash up onshore. The “artefacts,” as they are called, arrived around the same time as the iGhetti; together they somehow upended life as everyone knew it, rendering Britain unrecognizable within a decade. As one man, Phillip Tennent, moves through this uncanny new world order, all of the tropes of postapocalyptic fiction fall away in favor of a far more timely and provocative proposal: The apocalypse might not be an end at all, but simply a long chain of baffling, disorienting incidents.
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Writers have been thinking about different versions of doomsday for thousands of years—the tale of Noah’s ark is just one example of an ancient religious story about the eradication of humanity. But the fear that seems to plague modern minds is that it might all end with a whimper, rather than a bang. Through rants about late-stage capitalism, that infamous dog-in-a-fire meme, and other expressions of alarm, it’s become more and more common to hear people worrying—or joking—that the world is enduring a rolling apocalypse, a series of catastrophes so slow-moving that they won’t prevent you from browsing a J.Crew sale while everything falls apart.
Because fiction favors drama, most postapocalyptic novels are structured around a single Event. In Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Stephen King’s The Stand, and Ling Ma’s Severance, it’s a population-decimating plague; in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, it seems to be a nuclear explosion; in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus, it’s rapid, unstoppable climate collapse. Whatever the Event may be, it kicks off a transformation in how people live. Bands of survivors poke around for degrading tins of food, tribes form and fight, the remnants of modern life waste away under coats of dust and piles of rubble. There is an immovable sense of a before and an after—distinct time periods that cannot be reconciled.
Harrison, however, favors inscrutability. He doesn’t make his Event an act of decimation; society keeps on going even as social structures dissolve. Characters still eat croissants, argue about World War II battles, and throw dance parties despite what they term “the disaster.” Tennent, who lives by the sea, discovers an artefact and plans to sell it. Over time, as he watches the artefact morph (it grows hands and eventually speaks), he repeatedly wonders why his country keeps changing—and how. No matter which way he turns his mind, the particulars of what has happened to Britain never resolve, as in an eye test in which each flick of the optometrist’s machinery reveals only a different kind of fuzziness.
[Read: Apocalypse, constantly]
Some facts are laid out: Europe has disappeared (one confused character makes a sign that aptly asks, HOW CAN YOU MISPLACE A CONTINENT?); migration has reversed course and airplanes no longer fly, so Britons regularly board ferries departing for other lands. The idea of an economy is now a historical notion, and there is no government to speak of, so militias patrol the towns, but only off the page. Londoners fled the dangerous, iGhetti-occupied city, but then returned, despite the fact that the British military continued to bombard the Lloyd’s building. (Violence is a hallmark of the postapocalyptic novel, but Harrison’s characters kill with a paucity of forethought that makes McCarthy’s rogues seem like Montessori teachers by comparison.)
Most facts, however, are disputed, and even the idea of a “fact” seems to have collapsed. The iGhetti might have “come out of the internet,” or they may embody “a re-enchantment of the world.” They could be aliens, or AI, or spiritual visitors. Harrison once calls them “tall writhing bursts of light” but otherwise avoids describing them as corporeal, as if they are some galactic version of Catholicism’s Holy Spirit. The term bad patch is used to describe a plot of land that’s been taken over by the iGhetti—such as the Lloyd’s building—but it is also an all-purpose term for someone who can’t see their way through the never-ending tumult. “Using the phrase in its older, pre-crisis sense,” Harrison writes, “the way you might talk about a failed marriage or career—was perhaps an unconscious attempt to normalise the inexplicable and minimise the disaster.”
But what was the disaster? All Harrison will say is that there was “a decade of confusion,” and “by the time things came back into focus, the climate had changed. Geography had changed.” Nobody can even agree on whether the iGhetti are an external phenomenon or something humanity has brought upon itself.
Perhaps unsurprising, all of this is a metaphor for the condition of England today. It’s no coincidence that the novel is set near Hastings, the site of the famous 1066 battle that created the modern English nation, and that the iGhetti commandeer a financial quarter that has been hollowed out by Brexit.
[Read: How Britain became as poor as Mississippi]
Yet the subject of Harrison’s experiment is larger than one referendum on territorial boundaries—or any single Event at all. He seems to be asking how humans will respond when they discover, en masse, that they are no longer in control of the planet’s destiny. Really, The End of Everything is a novel about surrender. “The apocalypse,” one character writes, “seemed to withhold itself, quickly becoming just another historical continuity. That is to say, we got used to it. No one had expected the utter banality of that.”
Harrison’s sociological portrait is attuned to the common idea that disaster can quickly become boring—or all too quickly assimilated and ignored. Horrible images of global catastrophe—razed cities, drowned villages—now flit through our phones in between makeup tutorials and political punditry. Pondering barbarity or devastation is as easy as pondering a lunch menu. So what might people do if the tide turns against the whole of humanity, if the End Times finally come? In Harrison’s estimation, they’ll shrug.
As bleak as this interpretation may sound, the novel is expansive rather than dismissive. It reaches out for connection, feeling at once bizarrely creative and, on a psychological level, strikingly familiar. In a short novel, in a wholly original way, Harrison has managed to sketch not just a world, but a worldview. I suspect that he knew he needed to create a new style of language and imagery to convey the emotional reality of a world “disconnected from itself.” As John Ashbery put it in 1977, “You can’t say it that way any more.” The same is true now.