"M. John Harrison - The Horse Of Iron & How We Can Know It & Be Changed By It Forever" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison John M)

The Horse Of Iron &
How We Can Know It
& Be Changed By It
Forever
by M. John Harrison


M. John Harrison's most recent novel, Climbers, (Gollancz, 1989) is a
mainstream novel dealing with the author's strange hobby of climbing rocks. Of it,
Texas ├йmigr├й fantasy writer Lisa Tuttle says: "it is about a group of people with a
particular obsession (even weirder than SF fans) and their ways of
enriching/escaping from/making sense of their ordinary daily lives in sordid
contemporary Britain. It is written in a 'realistic' mode so heightened as to be
hallucinatory. It's brilliant."

M. John Harrison is the most accomplished stylist among British science
fiction/fantasy/horror writers working today. Born on July 26, 1945 near Catesby
Hall, Harrison now lives in Peck-ham in southeast London. His books include The
Committed Men and The Centauri Device (science fiction), In Viriconium and
Viriconium Nights (fantasy), The Ice Monkey (horror), and Hot Rocks (with Ron
Fawcett) and Climbers (climbing). Frankly, it's really impossible to categorize any
of these, as readers of Harrison's work will readily agree. Harrison reports that he
hasn't written much fantasy of late, and that after completing his current
novel-in-progress, The Course of the Heart, he will probably drift exclusively into
the mainstream. I would call that extremely depressing news, but then how does
one distinguish between Harrison's mainstream writing and his horror/fantasy?



Recently I switched on in the middle of a television arts program. Two men
were molding in brass something which looked at first sight like the stripped carcass
of a turkey, that exact, sharp-edged cage of bone which reveals itself so thoroughly
through all the strips and flaps of flesh after Christmas dinner. It turned out, though,
to be something less interesting, a classical figurine, a Poseidon or Prometheus
which systematically lost its magic as the layers of casting plaster were knocked off
carefully with the back of an axe. This was so essentially disappointing -- a striptease
in which, by removing veils of strangeness and alien signification, the sculptor
revealed a value ordinary and easily-understood -- that to replace it I turned off the
TV and imagined this:
Another foundry, somewhere in the night, somewhere in history, in which
something like a horse's skull (not a horse's head: a skull, which looks nothing like a
horse at all, but like an enormous curved shears, or a bone beak whose two halves
meet only at the tip, a wicked, intelligent-looking purposeless thing which cannot
speak) came out of the mold, and all the founders were immediately executed to
keep the secret. They had known all along this would happen to them. These men
were the great craftsmen and engineers of their day. They could have looked for
more from life. Yet they crammed down their fear, and got on with the work, and
afterward made no attempt to escape.
This was how I learned the secret of the horse, which I now give here, after
first holding it across itself like a slip of paper, in a further intricating gesture: