A fascinating, sometimes frustrating and thoroughly original new novel ... This book, a masterly exercise in restraint, unsettling beauty and elliptical writing that can enlighten even when it obfuscates ... This grim but powerful book portrays the many incompatible states of existence, and the baffling collapse of time, that stem from extreme crises.
Harrison, as always, interweaves precise descriptions with disquieting lacunae ... Dreamlike and baffling, The End of Everything elucidates humanity’s disintegrating existence with strange clarity.
There is a grain of ambiguous hope in one character’s declaration that it doesn’t matter that the world has ended...but what I felt when the novel released me was more immediate. I felt the urge to go outside, to run around and shout, not to celebrate the novel’s brilliance (although I think it is brilliant), but simply to prove that, for now, something real still exists.
Harrison’s novels enact dreamy puzzling-through at every level. They dispense with much of the usual narrative infrastructure: linear plotting, legible motive, dramatic resolution. The dialogue is scrappy and oblique ... There’s little point in trying to make it all add up.
I’ve read more than half his novels: not once have I felt I fully understood what was happening, but I keep rushing back for more ... The reader is in the same place with The End of Everything: often bowled over, sometimes baffled, but never, ever bored.
