Signs of Life
M John Harrison
Gollancz hbk, £16.99 (since published as a Flamingo paperback)
Review by David Kendall
When you mention M John Harrison you generally get a blank stare or an electrified response, whether it’s my local librarian saying "Good choice that" as he stamps out Climbers, or Alan Moore shouting "He’s the fucking man alright" from the back of a minicab. Harrison is definitely ‘literary’, but he loads his work with a weirdness that looks towards the genre-infested hinterlands of fiction.
Readers of ‘Isabel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring’, which appeared in the 1994 short story collection Little Deaths, will recognise the heart of this novel. Middle-aged Mick ‘China’ Rose falls in love with Isabel, a waitress in an airport cafe. This first encounter holds the seed of all that follows: China’s devotion to Isabel, and her obsession with flight, at first contained within her dreams; later, she wants to actualise her desire.
Signs of Life may have its origins in a short story but it emerges into a fully developed novel which wraps the eighties track marks of hurt, obsession and greed around its more esoteric core. This is an eighties we’re familiar with, a time of cash from deregulated chaos, where a business can die and rise within a week as capital jumps onto the next bandwagon. China and his mate Choe run a courier service and Choe at least isn’t too particular about what they carry. China finds himself dropping laboratory waste in unmarked sink holes. These old quarries are already littered with burnt out cars and other debris but Choe and China’s contributions are stamped with biohazard labels. Disposing of unwanted waste makes them highly paid dustmen and the company expands.
Choe is the wild card, the one driven by demons that seem perfectly linked to the time; speed and expansion. His past comes to light in sporadic bursts, like his temper. Choe wants to savour the world on his own terms. It’s never enough and he tries to forge links with gangsters from Eastern Europe, which eventually splits him from China. By now China has his own problems as Isabel gets involved with a genetic fantasist who she believes can make her desires real.
Harrison weaves these elements into a narrative that works on many levels, leaving us with sadness at the strangeness of love and flashes of deja vu of a time already receding into myth. Signs of Life is about three people with very different desires; Isabel realises hers in a way, as does China, but even at the close we’re no nearer untangling what really motivates Chloe; in the haze of multiple self-reinvention there is single truth.