The End of Everything

(...)

Here and there Harrison deliberately injects phrases that frame his text as text – not unlike in Empty Space. These and other techniques help to evoke what R. Scott Bakker would describe as one of the features of the semantic apocalypse: things don’t make much sense. That’s especially so for the characters in this novel, because, from a meta-perspective, and with the help of some interviews, the academically inclined reader won’t have much trouble making sense of the senselessness. In a way, this book is a very straightforward, and, as such, a very successful, portrayal of our times.

Such a style might not appeal to everybody, and the novel is more weird than it is an item for your beach tote bag. At the same time, if you can let go, and just decide to let the prose and the scenes wash over you, it might be breezy indeed. It makes for an interesting contrast: while you can easily glance over sentences and speed-read a whole lot of books, just scanning some operative words and not missing the story at large, The End of Everything is the opposite: if you speed-read, you miss the sentences, the small stuff in the scenes, the mood. And as Harrison has managed to weld mood and theme together, if you miss mood, you miss the content.

(...)


Full review on Weighing A Pig...