This delightful, insightful, stubbornly peculiar “anti-memoir” by Mike Harrison is my book of the year so far; I can’t see anything overtaking it, frankly.
The writing is as luminously sui generis and haunting as his best work, although there’s so much in that category to render the superlative clumsy. Wish I Was Here is also fictively tricksy, memory standing in for the undeniable, unreliable narrator, the weight of evidence such that each of us is essentially no more than palimpsest, dense overlays of misrememberings and dismemberings. Perhaps it’s a book about writing, about not writing, about an escape to and from writing: I don’t really know, and don’t need to know; I just absolutely loved its brilliance and its ghosts.
I’m very much looking forward to seeing the author at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this coming August.
Wish I Was Here was published by Serpent’s Tail in the UK in May 2023.
Brian Lavelle 