‘Hold off on that scruffy pre-loved copy you thought of buying,’ M John Harrison urged readers last October on his blog Ambiente Hotel, announcing the forthcoming Serpent’s Tail reprint of his 1992 novel The Course of the Heart. At first, I resented this development, threatening as it does to end a long-established tradition of giving a pre-loved copy to friends at birthdays. On the other hand, it is good that prospective readers will now be able to acquire copies of the book without resorting to arcane rituals.

Scarcity has augmented The Course of the Heart’s reputation as a cult classic. Harrison’s advocates tend towards the ecstatic, offering the kind of hyperbolic tributes normally reserved for sacred texts. In 2002, China Miéville named The Course of the Heart one of his top ten books in the science fiction subgenre known as ‘weird fiction’, praising Harrison as ‘a towering genius of modern fiction’. Miéville ascribed the absence of his works from Booker Prize shortlists to the literary establishment’s ‘back-slapping generic snobbery’. The sands of literary respectability have shifted a little since then: in 2020, Harrison was awarded the Goldsmiths Prize for innovative fiction. Although his works still haven’t appeared on a Booker Prize shortlist, he served as a judge in 2022. 

When Harrison started writing The Course of the Heart, he had recently completed the apocalyptic-fantasy sequence Viriconium (1971–85). He has described making a conscious decision to stop writing about people hitting one another over the heads. Although The Course of the Heart entertains the possibility of other realms, it is grounded in a recognisable world, with any genre flourish exploited for effect, not to push the story down a recognised path.

The basic set-up is simple: in the meadows of Cambridge, three students, the unnamed narrator and his friends Lucas and Pam, take part in a ritual with their deranged shamanic mentor Yaxley. The aim is to reach a plane of existence known as the Pleroma, a term from Gnosticism describing a realm of divine perfection beyond comprehension. All we know about the ritual is that it goes badly wrong. The narrator suggests that there was some sort of loss. ‘Lucas and Pam made a lot more of it from the very start,’ the narrator tells us and he seems less outwardly haunted by events than his two companions. We follow the narrator on a ‘search’ for some form of resolution to the misadventure.

Writing in the introduction to the new edition, the novelist Julia Armfield notes that the ‘relative comfort of realism’ that The Course of the Heart seems to offer encourages the reader to expect a ‘mystery novel’ with the promise of eventual resolution. But Harrison quickly dispels hopes of conventional development, let alone closure. At the encouragement of Lucas and Pam, the narrator asks Yaxley to help restore the status quo ante, but he replies that the past is ‘irretrievable’. The Course of the Heart forces readers to accept that if the characters won’t find answers – perhaps because there are none – neither will you. 

One of the book’s themes is the limitation of escapism as a coping mechanism. This is most clear in the case of Lucas and Pam, who, unable to move on from the failed ritual, develop a mythology called the Coeur, backed up by an invented travelogue and documents describing a forgotten European state whose lost empress lives in Pam’s veins. Lucas and Pam devise the Coeur as a way of cheering themselves up, but it evolves into something more persistent. When Pam is diagnosed with cancer, it takes on an elevated significance. ‘We had nowhere to turn. We had to believe something,’ Lucas tells the narrator. But no myth, however powerful or consoling, can halt the decay of cells.

The Course of the Heart is a deeply unsettling work, but it is also an exhibition of verbal mastery. Harrison has talked about the centrality of obsessive notetaking to his process of writing, but he knows which details are worth preserving and which to let go of. Approaching London by train, the narrator notices ‘three sheets of newspaper fluttering round the upper floors of an office block like butterflies courting a flower’. A canal in Manchester is ‘dim and oily, scattered with lumps of floating styrofoam like seagulls in the fading light’. Yaxley is captured with brilliant economy. With his elliptical speech (which may or may not contain profound insights), his reported fear of the British Museum and his tendency to walk around with a copy of the Church Times, which no one has ever seen him read, he seems to be fashioning a persona to disguise the banal reality of his identity. It’s hard to be certain of this, however, as we learn little about Yaxley’s motivations and never discover the source of his income.

Harrison’s novel offers a view of what drives us to seek solace in myths and the consequences of yielding to our yearnings. It seems fitting that The Course of the Heart should resurface in a period marked by a palpable loss of faith in old certainties and a dizzying array of ‘useful fictions’ devised to help us avoid reckoning with the world as it is.