What I've Been Reading:

What I've Been Reading:

The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison

There is a moment early in The Course of the Heart where the narrator sits in a Cambridge front room, shaded by a tree on a bright day, with a woman whose name we won't learn until much later — Pam, one of the novel's two damaged protagonists. Harrison writes it with genuine tenderness, and you feel it precisely because you know, even on a first reading, that it will not last. The tenderness is load-bearing. Without it, what follows would simply be punishment.

What follows is punishment.

The novel circles an act of magical working performed by three Cambridge students under the direction of a man called Yaxley, an occultist of the Austin Osman Spare variety — not Spare's genuine visionary force, but his grubby London penumbra: the bedsit magician, the self-anointed adept, the man whose rituals smell of damp carpet and onanism. Yaxley initiates a rite that is never fully explained, and the explanation is withheld not as a tease but as a structural principle: the narrator, who is also one of the three students, never fully believes.

He lives alongside the consequences of what happened in that field without ever conceding that the magical framework is real. He sees the things Pam and Lucas have conjured — the figures they bring through, his own anima figure encountered in a Cornish quarry and later on the edge of Settle in Yorkshire — and declines to act on any of it. He takes their comforts and will not support them. This is perhaps Harrison's most precise and most devastating achievement.

The narrator manages, just barely, to maintain an ordinary life — a career, the texture of the everyday — and his refusal to commit feels not like cowardice exactly, though it is that too, but like the thing that keeps him walking around. He is, without knowing it, Camusian: he accepts the absurdity without requiring it to resolve, and the cost of that acceptance is paid perhaps entirely by Pam and Lucas, but perhaps not entirely either.

The other two cannot manage this. They are marked, in ways that become progressively more disturbing, by whatever Yaxley opened. Harrison describes their deterioration with clinical attention to the flesh — illness that seems to originate somewhere prior to pathology, the body registering damage that medicine cannot locate. Pam and Lucas pursue what they come to call the Coeur, a kind of imaginal realm, and here Henri Corbin is the relevant thinker. Corbin's mundus imaginalis is a serious metaphysical claim — the imaginal as a real intermediate world, neither purely mental nor physically material, standing between the sensory and the purely intelligible.

This is not a peripheral idea: the Pleroma and its relationship to the fallen material world is NeoPlatonic at root and runs as a continuous current through western occult thinking from Plotinus through Crowley to Corbin and Jung. Harrison does not endorse it. But he takes it seriously enough that its failure — or the cost of its partial success — registers as tragedy rather than delusion.

The geography of the novel is one of its great virtues. Harrison is remarkable on the landscapes of post-industrial England: the Pennine towns in their winter weather, the canal between Camden Town and Regent's Park, Carnforth, the M62 corridor, Manchester Piccadilly, damp Yorkshire farmhouses, the cancer ward at Christie's Hospital, overgrown gardens full of builder's rubble. A west Cornish quarry used as a dump by local farmers doubles as a location for dogging couples, and Harrison does not look away from either function.

These places are rendered with the accuracy of someone who has been there and sees them for what they are — their otherlike beauty, their naturally indifferent but strange still-life is-ness. They are not either welcoming or hostile. They resist picturesque. They are simply themselves, and their plainness makes the novel's more disturbing passages land harder. There is incest in the book, more than once, and sexual content that is always actively unpleasant, along with a detailed record of a slow death from cancer rendered without mercy. The book wants you to look at its wounds. It is not an easy read.

Sometimes, in the past, when I worked with very emotionally disturbed patients they would mutilate themselves in quite horrible ways and show us the wounds. A psychiatrist I worked with told me that, in his opinion, this was their attempt to assault us.

There were moments reading The Course of the Heart when the thought arrived, unbidden and unwelcome, that the Devil might be real and might be behind all this ghastly awfulness.

Readers whose hope that the world can be a good place is not particularly strong should probably not read this book.

And yet the protagonist ends by remembering his friends with real affection. He was always loyal and loving to them and did not let them down. So, there is a ray of light and some of the descriptions are sublime.

Harrison has a peculiar painterly technique of writing, which I admired and enjoyed. He drops in overheard snippets of conversation which are entirely irrelevant to the story. It was almost impressionistic pointilism or something. And then you wonder whether in the full synchronistic mapping of the universe Pam and Lucas are attempting, those bits of conversations are actually meaningful in a way you'll never wholly grasp.

Despite the quality of the prose, the undoubted philosophical and artistic reach, the refusal to sell itself cheap — and these are real achievements — I won't be keeping it on my shelf, in case what's inside it starts to leak out.