The 2026 Booker Prize-winning book, The End of Everything, by the 81-year-old prolific writer John Harrison, is in keeping with a Booker tradition of searching out esoteric and mostly inaccessible novels that are difficult to pin down. The jury was headed by a classicist, Mary Beard, who is known for her backing of such novels, and at least one other member of the jury has said that she had never heard of John Harrison before being summoned to be a judge. We cannot grudge the writer Harrison, who has stuck to his chosen lonely path, mostly ignored and unheard of, before coming up with this novel set on his familiar Kent coast. And then he went on to win the Booker, which he really did not expect, and was totally overwhelmed at the event.
A Novel That Defies Genres
The novel is a real genre bender and, according to the jury, “can be read as a thriller, a mystery, a satire, a dystopia, a road novel, a work of realism”. Another critic has said that he has read more than half his novels, including the Light trilogy, but has never really figured out what was happening and still keeps going back to his books. Well, that must be a really great quality for any writer.
Science Fiction Or Something Else?
The jury has also said that this is the first award for a truly science fiction work, and the earlier works, which had sci-fi, did not really go the whole way for the genre. Many might disagree because, as many critics have said, it is difficult to make much of the sci-fi element in this novel. The alien is iGhetti, who is picked up from the beach by the beachcomber, Philip Tennet, and given to his aunt, whose life also turns topsy-turvy after that. Nobody knows much about iGhetti and where it came from. But the alien, not shaped like a human being but as an artefact, could make buildings which “lasted a week or a month before toppling slowly away into a kind of dark blue air”. To many in India, it could seem like a PWD contractor taking the form of an alien who builds bridges which collapse. In the novel, Harrison is really having fun, sometimes with some old-style English wit, sometimes with meaningless sentences. Try this for texture or meaning: “The artefact came and stood near the bottom of the stairs in a cloud of Givenchy’s L’Interdit.”
The Writer’s Unconventional Approach
Harrison believes that novels should throw up things which people do not grasp or understand and show us a way of life that we are not familiar with. For the many novels he has written since the early 1970s, he may be a deserving winner. After all, some novels need to be maddening and troubling and make us feel like formless artefacts.
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