The Book Club: M. John Harrison

Best of the Spectator

The Spectator

News Commentary, News, Daily News, Society & Culture

4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 9 July 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

My guest this week is the writer M. John Harrison, who joins me to talk about the rerelease of his 1992 novel The Course of the Heart – a deeply strange and riddling story of grief, friendship, memory and occult magic. We talk about why this book is so personal to him, what he learned from Charles Williams and Arthur Machen, turning his back on science fiction/fantasy and returning to it – as well as how probably the most acclaimed of all his novels, Light, came about after Iain Banks told him he wasn't having enough fun.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Spectator's Book Club podcast.
0:10.2	I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator, and my guest this week is the novelist, short storywriter and critic M. John Harrison.
0:17.8	But it's not a new book we're talking about primarily. His 1992 novel,
0:22.5	The Course of the Heart, has just been reissued by Serpent's Tale. And it's described by its
0:29.0	publishers as a cult classic. Mike, I don't know whether you take that as a qualified compliment
0:34.4	or as a thing to be aimed for and celebrated? I don't know.
0:39.7	How do you read cult classic, this book?
0:43.1	I do actually read that as an opportunity.
0:46.8	You know, it's taken a while for... That book has always boiled up underneath and never quite surfaced for some reason.
0:53.1	So I'm glad to see it surfacing rather than boiling up.
0:57.9	Do I like the idea of being a cult author?
1:02.1	Yeah.
1:03.0	Yeah, I quite do.
1:04.8	Well, is this book, you said you like to see a bubbling up,
1:07.3	is it something that's particularly important to you or particularly personal to you?
1:11.8	Yes. I started it as early as 1983. I do a lot of work on a book before it becomes anything like a book.
1:21.5	Lots of note-taking, lots of tryouts, lots of experiments. And I've been doing those for, well, certainly since 1983,
1:31.5	that's the earliest note I could find. So I was working in parallel on climbers at the same time.
1:39.5	So basically, I, for me, those two books are the most, one of the most intense periods of work I've ever done.
1:47.4	And the two of them took, in parallel, they took 10 years.
1:53.1	Climers actually took slightly longer because I started to collect the material earlier on.
1:59.0	The course of the heart was, to a degree, in a weird way,
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 22 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Spectator, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Spectator and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.