Michael John Harrison was born two months after VE Day and grew up in semi-rural Warwickshire. His father was an engineer and not much of a reader; the sparsely eclectic selection of books in the Harrison household reflected that fact and included staples such as Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies and a stack of military biographies.
“Monty” Harrison died when Mike was 13, taking that whole world with him and with it the sense of stability, even staidness, that characterised his childhood. “I’d bought into writing as an escape route,” Harrison says, “rather than an honest admission of what I saw and experienced.” That was soon to change.
Harrison first began publishing his stories in science fiction magazines towards the end of the 1960s. Even then he was an outlier, and found himself unjustly neglected outside the sphere of fantasy while being ignored within it – at least at first – for his refusal to conform.
Throughout his writing life, Harrison has refused the generic, escapist iterations of fantasy and science fiction as “easy things to think, a waste of the power of the big visionary-apocalyptic machine”. It is central to his practice that novels be recognised not as immersive experiences, illusory spaces to inhabit, but for the artificial constructs they are. They aren’t alternative worlds, but the work of a writer in our own.
If Harrison rejects story as a mode of writing, he is equally ambivalent about the idea of memoir, which, he insists, can only ever be another form of fiction, an idea of self that is constructed after the fact. It is this treacherous divide between what is experienced and what is remembered that is the true subject of Wish I Was Here, a searching meditation on the writing life that Harrison has termed an anti-memoir and that might equally be described as an album of dissociated snapshots, a flickering-past of images as glimpsed through the window of a moving car.
The scenes most keenly recalled relate to the decade Harrison spent rock climbing in the Peak District, a period immortalised in his 1989 novel Climbers. That time and place is his lost idyll, or to use his own term, a “dream estate”. It is the domain of an alternative self he names Map Boy, “always out in front, picking things up, putting them down; he was always in the lead”. Map Boy is the renegade, the easy rider, the bolder, wilder persona emblematic of the life the author yearns for but is unable to fully embrace.
“Perhaps the worst discovery of all is that you don’t even have to be very good at something to ache from missing it,” Harrison reflects. Fortunately for us, he has had to settle for being a writer. After 50 years of “staring grimly at things and writing them down”, Harrison’s writing is still vital and still angry, still engaged in the now, still fighting for purchase, and Wish I Was Here is a literary statement one feels he has been working towards his entire life.
“File an observation until its context is lost, then treat it as a found object. Something to be misappropriated from yourself, something levered out of its authentic moment. The notes know there are only inauthentic moments, and moments are all we have,” Harrison reminds himself in one of his notebooks. There is fascinating autobiographical material to be found here for those who wish to dig for it, though as with Harrison’s 2020 novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, what Wish I Was Here does triumphantly is to capture the feeling of living in the 21st century with all its anxieties. Against the uncertainty, the writing; the restless thrum of art, like the ghostly flight of the barn owl glimpsed at dusk, wondrous and self-defining and defiant.
• Wish I Was Here is published by Serpent’s Tail (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
