Subtitled “an anti-memoir”, Wish I was Here (2023, UK) is actually, well, a memoir. It’s M John Harrison writing about certain periods of his life, and how he thought about it then, or at least how he imagined he thought about it then, and how he thinks about it now. It’s not about his writing per se, although his writing career is often mentioned. Nor is it his life, although that does provide the book’s narrative arc.

Harrison was born in the Midlands – Rugby, to be exact – to a middle-class family but struggled to find a career. He moved to London, he became a writer, he fell in with the New Worlds crowd. He moved north, he became a climber. He moved back to London, his writing career benefited. He moved to his current address, where he can now look back in relative comfort to a life that had few periods of relative comfort.

None of this is especially surprising, or offers any real insight to what he writes and why. But Harrison here is writing about his life much as he writes about the peripheral characters and events in his novels, and it’s plain how the two are related. There’s little doubt now Harrison is one of the finest writers UK genre has produced, and if his position in the wider UK literary scene is less certain it’s only because of anti-genre snobbery. But they’re gradually coming round and, as Harrison celebrates his 80th birthday, the quality of his fiction is becoming more widely recognised.

Myself, I’ve always admired his writing, although I’d like to reread all those novels I read back in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, as I think I’d appreciate them more. (Happily, I have copies of all of them, although many are in storage.) I was surprised on reading The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020, UK) last year, and Wish I Was Here, how readable his prose is. I mean, I’ve always felt he had a superb ear for dialogue – it’s so effortlessly realistic – but I’d formed the impression he was a difficult read. He’s not. Wish I Was Here demonstrates this in abundance. It’s so straightforward that it actually suggests it’s anything but. If that makes sense.

Every time I read a novel by M John Harrison, I want to go back and reread all his previous novels. Wish I Was Here is not a novel, but it has the same effect. Much as Harrison revisited his memories to write this “anti-memoir”, I want to revisit my memories of his books, the ones I read ten, twenty, thirty, forty years ago. And explore them afresh, admire them all over again, perhaps for different reasons. Which is the whole point.