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Publishers make ludicrous statements about novels that are offensive to authors, the Booker prize winner has said as he called for an end to the packaging of books into genres.
M John Harrison said that being pushed into genre categories crippled writers by limiting their audiences and the number of literary tools they could use in their stories.
Harrison has been classed as a science fiction writer but The End of Everything, which was announced as the winner of the Booker on Monday, mixes several genres.
He said the industry had been bracketing books for too long and was not “doing anything” to break down the categories. Harrison said, after collecting his £50,000 cheque: “The whole of book marketing has been generic for so long now that the momentum that that concept has is huge.”
He added: “In the end you want something like this [winning the prize] to happen because it gives you permission to be who you are without a label being stuck on your forehead.”
Harrison, 81, said he would use his platform to continue his “drive against the whole concept of generification” and that he hoped his victory showed mainstream publishers that it was “very possible to write a book that mixes not just two genres but three or four”.
Mary Beard, the chair of this year’s jury, said it had encountered many novels which had misleading marketing material. “It is partly not actually what is being written in the novel but the way it is then packaged in the blurb and on the front cover,” she said.
“We saw many novels where there was something genre-bending going on inside but the cover would say ‘a coming-of-age novel’. It is being packaged in those terms even when it isn’t.”
Harrison added: “Framing is one of the most important things. There is almost no point these days writing your own book because it will be framed as something else to sell it.
“The most ludicrous statements will be made about it and to a degree that’s quite offensive.” Last month Richard Osman raised the issue of genre classification, revealing that books in his Thursday Murder Club series were marketed as murder mysteries “because people don’t buy comedies”.
Harrison, whose winning novel was published by Serpent’s Tail, said “independents are much more open” to “mixed-genre” or “non-genre” fiction.
“Genre cripples you,” he said, adding that books should be able to “take advantage of any aspect of any genre that comes to hand to solve the writer’s problems ... books are about solving problems. It can be solved into a pigeon-hole but what is the point of that. You limit your audience and I want to talk to anybody, everybody.”
Harrison is the oldest person to win the Booker prize. He said that he would probably spend the money on “repairs to the house”. He added: “If it was 20 years ago I would have spent it on climbing equipment and going to France to climb but I’m too old for that now.”
‘I remember saying to my editor, ‘This book I’m working on, it’s pretty weird.’ And she said, ‘Mike, we’ll lean into it.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, this is what an author wants to hear after 40years!’”
I’m talking to the novelist M John Harrison — known as Mike — who, at 81 years old, on Monday night became the oldest writer to win the Booker prize for fiction, when his novel The End of Everything triumphed. We’re speaking the morning after the award ceremony, and for a man who says he got no sleep last night, he’s surprisingly bright and sprightly, and laughs frequently as we talk.
When he won, the cameras in the room zoomed in on a man with his hand on his mouth, an expression of complete amazement on his face. “It was a shock,” he says. “A good shock, obviously.”
One reason why Harrison’s win was a shock was that he has been writing “pretty weird” stuff for a long time. He never seemed like mainstream literary award material, even when his career got a boost in 2021 after his previous novel, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, won the Goldsmiths prize for fiction that “breaks the mould”. For a writer like this to win the Booker, the biggest prize of them all — “I told myself many years ago that if I could get a longlist for the Booker, I’d be doing well” — is a ground-shaking, life-changing achievement. “The Goldsmiths and [then] this prize, that was like permission,” he says.
“Permission to write who you are and what you want.”
The End of Everything has been described variously as a dystopia, a science fiction novel, a black comedy and more. It’s set in England after a crisis of unclear origin involving an invasion of beings known as the iGhetti, and it’s about how people try to carry on in the aftermath without really knowing what’s going on. But description is pointless: it’s the sort of book that’s impossible to encapsulate in summary. You need to read it.
But not everyone who does will like it. “You either love it or hate it,”
Harrison says of his work. “It’s Marmite. People who pick it up instantly, they become lifetime users.”
He laughs. Does it surprise him that people often find his books difficult or confusing? “Yes and no. It does surprise me because I personally like to read books that are difficult to access, they hold my interest. Whereas books that are easy to access, they bore me quite quickly.
“Someone said, the mystery is what counts, not the solution. What drags a reader through the book is the mystery. Once you produce a solution, the moment you produce closure, that’s the end for that book. Whereas if you keep the possibilities open while providing the best narrative push you can, you’ll keep the reader. That’s my idea, anyway.”
Harrison’s dedication to writing the sort of books he wants to, and not compromising, means he has never been a big name — until now. But he has been a writer most of his adult life, bar a few early jobs. “I worked in a hunting stable for a while as a 17-yearold,” he says. “I was keen on horses, [though] why escapes me now. They’re large, they tread on your feet.”
Harrison was born in 1945 in Rugby, Warwickshire. His father, an engineer, died when he was 13 and Harrison, who didn’t enjoy school — he used to regularly bunk off — left formal education at 18. An omnivorous reader, in his teens he started writing stories for science fiction magazines.
He joined New Worlds science fiction magazine as an editor in his mid-twenties and has lived by his pen ever since. “I decided that if you’re going to be a writer, you should try to live on it, it should be your work, so I lived hand to mouth quite a bit without a job,” he says. “And no one should take this advice but if you put yourself in a position where writing is all you’ve got to make a living with, that really does focus you amazingly.” His first novel, The Committed Men, was published in 1971.
Apart from the validation a prize like the Booker brings, the money — £50,000 — is welcome too. “I’ve never made much money, so all payment is good payment as far as I’m concerned,” he says. What will he do with the money? “We might repair some of the house, get a decent roof on.” He lives with his partner, Cath Phillips, in “a very old house — 1785 or something like that” — in Shropshire.
They have no children but Phillips’s nieces “apparently jumped around the living room shrieking when my name was announced”.
Harrison’s books have been published variously as fantasy (the Viriconium quartet), science fiction (the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy) and literary fiction (The End of Everything).
Does he find it strange to have his books shelved in different locations in bookshops? “Strange is perhaps not the word. It makes me angry. Categories aren’t inevitable, they don’t exist naturally. And the mixing of categories seems to me just the author taking what they need to write the book.”
His genre-blending approach does have some benefits. “When I wrote Climbers [his 1989 novel about rock climbers], I walked into one of the big bookshops and found it shelved in five different places. Autobiography, contemporary novels, sport, rock climbing and something else. And I thought, this is heaven! They can’t decide how to categorise this book.”
A similarly blended approach to writing was taken by one of Harrison’s literary heroes, JG Ballard. He was “a huge influence especially between the ages of 16 and 20, along with TS Eliot.”
Ballard “wrote a vibe”, Harrison says, “and you felt it as you read it. At the end, you didn’t know anything more than you had at the beginning [but] you’re left with a feeling, and a message that is visceral and emotional, and I adored that.”
"I’ll just keep going until Mr Alzheimer comes to call
I wonder if a novelist as innovative as Harrison thinks AI could write fiction one day. “I don’t think we can see far enough into the future to know what it can do,” he says, but adds: “I have read two reviews of [The End of Everything] which I was delighted by — and then horrified to learn they had been written by AI. I enjoyed the reviews and thought they were very accurate!” And does this specialist in dystopian worlds believe the AI apocalypse is coming, as we’re often told? “I think that is overrated as an idea. It strikes me as science fiction.
But who am I to know? We’ve seen too much but we haven’t seen enough.”
Harrison remains modest about his work — he said in his acceptance speech that he was “totally lacking in confidence” — but he believes Climbers is the best book he has written “or will write. I don’t expect to match Climbers because it’s the perfect blend between a niche subject and a completely human approach”.
He used to be a rock climber himself. Has he stopped? “I packed it in after Covid, when I was on a route in Stanage Edge near Sheffield, in the rain. And I wasn’t enjoying it any more. [I thought], ‘Damn this for a game of soldiers.’ It’s very sad because it was my prime obsession for a long time.”
Where does that obsession go now? “It goes solely into the fiction now. In a way, it was a good choice.
It allowed me to become re-obsessed by writing.” And with a Booker win under his belt, it feels like a “massive career change” anyway. “I’ll just keep going,” he concludes. “I’ll just keep going until Mr Alzheimer comes to call.” He laughs again, longer than ever.
The End of Everything by M John Harrison (Serpent’s Tail £16.99)
