I’m recollecting impressions some time after reading this novel, but each of MJH’s work has stuck with me for years since reading. The most memorable side of his writing is, for me, his male narrative perspectives. These aren’t always, but commonly locate in disaffected outsiders with a skewed sense of morality, of which Light offers an extreme, disturbing example.

The opening scene is blurry in my memory, but essentially portrays one of the main characters, Michael Kearney, murdering a woman on a pool table after picking her up for sex. I had the sense from the brazen way in which the act was described that Kearney does so with the classic mindset of a serial killer wanting to taunt police, the world, inviting them to try and catch him. Yet it’s not the police he’s being chased by. It’s an imaginary floating skull he calls the Shrander and yes, he’s completely insane.

This is probably the most hostile of encounters in this character’s arc (that I can remember), so Light isn’t necessarily starting as it means to go on. Instead, MJH establishes a context by which the rest of this character’s actions can be judged. He returns to ex-wives, ex-lovers and treats them relatively well (compared to murder) even as he seems constantly on the verge of abandoning or killing them. He does, however, intervene in their lives in disruptive, aggressive ways, and these ways aren’t necessarily flagged as abusive. And, when he is nice, it’s like he’s imitating the behaviour of someone nice, rather than actually wanting to be nice.

In other words, he’s a nutter (or a psychopath, or a sociopath – I can’t remember the difference, but I’d guess this character’s murdering spree coupled with an emotional void suggests both).

The mould for this character starts, for me, in Climbers, MJH’s fictionalised memoir (of sorts) of climbing in northern parts of England. The male cast list is all a little bit mad, continually risking death in the climbs they engage with, struggling through failing relationships and processing the death of climbing partners. The overriding element in the main character isn’t sociopathy. It’s an extreme form of detachment, observation, as if the thinking mind is so dominant, he’d rather observe everything around him in minute detail until he’s seen the weird, the magical, hiding in the everyday.

If it is a memoir (of sorts), then there’s a self-exploration at work in how these male characters extrapolate on the page. And who hasn’t overthunk stuff until they forget what’s going on around them? But the end of the road for such detachment, when taken to extremes, might be paralysis, inability to act when instinct, social expectations might want such.

And so, on the one hand, the narrator throws up some incredible observations of people, of landscapes, weather, even the little urban moments [1] or vivid, memorable descriptions of indoor climbing centres. There’s always a sharpness and a weirdness at work, so you’re sure you’ve read every word, understood it all, but the pictures begin to abstract or deconstruct in strange ways if you think too hard about them.

And on the other hand: a character able to witness or commit extreme immoral acts without intervening is a problem. The passivity when another climber dies, suggests a nascent form of the detachment that evolves in the later books. A character who doesn’t seem scarred by such events is a liability, socially.

One of the stronger examples in MJH’s work is in The Course of the Heart. The main character exists on the periphery of a group of closer-knit friends, all of whom experienced something weird in their early twenties, but all it did was give them the memory of the experience of something weird, which they have to process and live with.

You meet these characters decades later, when they’re (supposedly) grown up. Perhaps they’re at a stage where they ought to know better, but there’s none of that, as if the encounter with magic has warped them and the only difference between them is the extent they’ve gone to try and understand themselves. The male narrator, however, has trapped himself in a kind of belated loop, never settling, never forming solid attachments, never quite growing up.

The weird encounter in their twenties was enabled by a deranged older wizard figure, a charismatic Crowley-esque cult leader. When the protagonist re-encounters the wizard, the book begins to reveal that aspect of self I’m talking about. The narrator is dragged into one of the wizard’s contemporary ‘rituals,’ involving a businessman and an underage girl.

The scene that follows, if you sharpen your moral faculties enough, is utterly disturbing, not least for the fact that you might have forgiven the narrator his lesser foibles for the damage he carries from earlier experiences. But the ritual is described with such detachment, it’s easy to believe nothing untoward is happening. Yet the narrator isn’t incapable of feeling, he’s just incapable of acting, and the scene ends with him throwing up in a bucket, as if his body knows what’s right even if his brain doesn’t.

By comparison, Light is an enjoyable romp, serial killer notwithstanding, a space opera with cosmic-scale politics and factions. There are a few plot threads, most of which begin to come together toward the end, though not fully. Maybe that’s why MJH wrote the other two books in the Kefahuchi Tract series. I suspect it was also a way of letting go of the damaged male protagonist thread and allowing other types to surface.

So, what I’m trying to capture here is how, for me, MJH’s writing – taking in short stories, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again and even, to an extent the development through the Viriconium series – offers an exploration of a certain kind of male identity. His writing increasingly takes this identity’s way of inhabiting the world in extreme directions from the starting point of what I see as the risks of carrying such richly imagined worlds around in your head that you forget to treat the real world or your body (and there’s a lot of physical self-neglect in these male characters) as a morally and physically demanding things.

Light offers the most extreme version of this in the books I’ve read by MJH, but he’s also, thankfully, only one narrative thread among several and he gives way to the more interesting ones as the story progresses. I’d say that’s a moral necessity also: these characters, by their own parameters, inhabit anti-narrative-progression traps, given the moral lines they cross. They can’t escape, they can only follow the inevitable into more and more destructive or morally compromising situations.

I guess that sums up something of the attractiveness and repulsion in MJH’s work. There’s no imposed Christian morality, no hope of redemption or catharsis. Most of the books, to my mind, present a materialist, atheist pragmatism. That in itself might be the moral argument here: without some kind of belief in a moral framework, these characters are doomed to play out repetitions of psychological damage without the possibility of change, leaving an increasing stain on the world around them.

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[1] There’s an important one MJH has talked about, located in a cafe and describing the overlay of the cafe’s reflection in the misting shopfront glass over the scene outside. I’m slightly forgetting the details here, but I think he transposed this scene firstly into one of the texts in the Viriconium (A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium) and kept it as-is in the retitled version (A Young Man’s Journey to London). I love that MJH is able to move these moments between worlds so effortlessly, but it implies he’s always sitting slightly outside of reality, like one of his protagonists.