M. John Harrison On Early Adaptation Interest & Why He Almost Added ‘A Film’ To His Booker-Winning Novel’s Title

With interest in a big-screen adaptation, M. John Harrison has told Deadline he wanted to call his Booker Prize-winning novel ‘The End of Everything: A Film’, but got cold feet at the last minute.

Harrison won the Booker for ‘The End of Everything’, to give his book its final title. It follows a beachcomber living on the English coast after a disaster has struck. He finds a mysterious object in the sea and brings it inland.

As well as spurring book sales, there is always sharp interest in adapting Booker titles. ‘The End of Everything’ has distinctive landscapes and characters as well as mysterious shape-shifting alien entities called the iGhetti.

Fresh from winning the prestigious literary award, Harrison told Deadline that he visualized scenes from the book as he wrote them, and noted, as have others, that his novel has a cinematic quality.

“When I’ve constructed a scene, when I turn it into words, I can see it. And I was, in fact, going to subtitle this novel ‘The End of Everything: A Film’. I lost my nerve at the last minute, but I now really wish I’d done it, because it’s got the structure of a kind of middle-European film, with the right provenance to be very watchable indeed.”

The book is published by the Serpent’s Tail imprint, marking its first Booker win. Similarly, it was the first win for 81-year-old Harrison who served as a Booker judge in 2022.

“We do have some interest, it hasn’t gone far enough to be able to talk about [in detail], but there is interest in doing something,” the writer told Deadline when asked if an adaptation was in the works.

Harrison would rather his book came to screen as a movie than a series. His take is it would be a European-flavored film, with someone of the ilk of late and pioneering Hungarian director Béla Tarr at the helm.

“I think for me, personally, if it were to happen, that it would be a film. And it would remind you either of a difficult French film, or a Béla Tarr film,” Harrison said.

The author is an avowed movie fan, but whether he would be involved in any adaptation of his lauded book is not clear. “I watch lots of films, I love films,” he said. “But it’s like art, I see a lot of paintings, but I don’t know a great deal about how they’re painted and therefore I wouldn’t feel entirely comfortable being involved in a process like that.”

He added that he could envisage how the book might work on screen, and how an adaptation could win his approval. “There are ways that that that book would have to be done to be made into a film that made me excited – that continued my excitement from writing the book – but I have faith that I might find somebody who could do that.”

Booker Chief Executive Gaby Wood has also noted the filmic qualities in ‘The End of Everything’ and has said: “Readers will also recognize many tropes from cinema: the disaster movie, the road movie, the couple on the run, the noir heroine with a gun in her bag, the apocalypse.”

Harrison pushes against classifications such as science fiction although that is the genre his work, stretching to 13 novels, is placed in. Booker’s Wood noted that he is the first winner “to have emerged from the bona fide SF world.”