It would be hard to categorise M. John Harrison as a novelist, and that is just the way he would like it. He may definitely have a foot in the camps of science fiction and fantasy – with fans including Neil Gaiman and the late Iain Banks – but he is not one for being pinned down, whether he steps outside those genres or not. Of his 1989 novel Climbers, he said:

It isn’t about somebody who ‘finds himself’ through climbing, or who ‘becomes a climber’. It’s precisely the opposite of that: it’s about someone who in failing to become a climber also fails to find a self.

And so we have now the self-declared ‘anti-memoir’, Wish I Was Here, whose splendid title tells us we are not in the territory of conventional memoir. The writing confirms this. You will find more autobiographical detail in Harrison’s foreword to the 2019 collection of critical essays about him than here – although you can learn that he lives in Richmond, in west London, has a blind cat, was from the Midlands, and was once told by ‘two or three sweet old ladies’ in Lytham St Annes that, despite his protestations to the contrary, he believed in all the loopy flying saucer nonsense they believed in. ‘You just don’t know it yet,’ they said.

So which was it? Two or three? The point is that it doesn’t matter, since he is not under oath or making a witness statement – and besides, the vagueness has a deeper honesty to the truth. I am reminded of Samuel Beckett’s stage direction at the beginning of the second act of Godot: ‘The tree has four or five leaves.’ (Harrison read Beckett keenly as a teenager.)

You do not need to have read a word of Harrison’s, though, to enjoy this book. It might even help not to have. Approached this way, what you have is a mixture of memory, failed memory, observation and very good advice for writers. Or it may be as much advice for himself: the second person singular can be addressed to the reader of the book as well as its writer, and indeed flicker between the two in the same sentence. ‘When you’re young you collect items that are less mementos than experiential trophies.’ It was only as I sat down to write this review that I remembered that I normally find the ‘you’ that actually means ‘I’ an irritating stylistic device – but not here.

There is not a single false note in this book, and every word has been chosen with care. I suppose this is why it took me a while to read it, though it’s not long, and doesn’t contain obscurities, wilful or otherwise. It uses simple language, but is as rich as cake. Here is Harrison on writing (and I wish I could quote the entire page that follows too, since it is one of the best things that I have ever read on the subject): ‘You swing from being very sure about the thing you’re writing to being very unsure about it and thence to being unsure about everything.’ Earlier, he suggests this for the struggling writer, who of course may or may not be himself: ‘Describe a faded Polaroid, found in an unlabelled envelope, as if someone else took it. If nothing else works, describe the envelope and how you found it.’ And here is the beauty of this advice: you can find it pleasing if – perhaps especially if – you have no intention of writing a thing of any significance, ever.

As might be clear, this is not a work that lends itself to easy paraphrase. Praise from authors as divergent as William Gibson (Neuromancer, etc) and Jonathan Coe (The Rotters’ Club, etc) testify plausibly to the broadness of Harrison’s scope and appeal. If I were to compare this book to anything, it would be to the work of the Portuguese essayist and poet Fernando Pessoa, who made of his various invented personae a kind of map of beguilingly genteel alienation, though this is more a matter of tone than subject matter.

At one point in the book (‘while I was writing this…’) a wasp appears. ‘I tried to hit it with the local freesheet,’ writes Harrison, ‘but I couldn’t reach that high; and anyway I didn’t believe in it as a wasp.’ Oh, you think to yourself, that’s actually really funny. There is much like this.