In 2007 the Guardian published a feature in which 50 writers each chose a book they thought was unjustly neglected. This was right after I got back into reading, having hardly read any fiction since university, and it was massively influential for me. As a direct result of this piece, I read Alasdair Gray, José Donoso, Ishiguro's greatest achievement, The Unconsoled, Craig Nova, Elizabeth Taylor, Aidan Higgins, Michael Bracewell... and many other books and writers I'm still into today. But it was Phillip Pullman's plug for The Balloonist by MacDonald Harris that ended up being the biggest deal for me. I've since read all 17 of Harris's novels and his short stories, and I'm now slowly going through the oeuvre for a second time. So despite already owning an old trade paperback edition of his second (and first really good) novel Mortal Leap, I had to buy this reissue when I stumbled across it the other day.
It's absolutely worthy of being brought back into print, 60 years after its original publication. In its probing — or maybe grappling or pummeling would be better words — of the nature of identity and selfhood, of what it means to be , it sets up arguably the principal theme of Harris's fictions. And as in much of his later fiction, there's an action background in which stuff — explosions, sunderings, the picaresque — and the question of whether anyone is ever fully, or maybe even at all, in control of their destiny. All of his books play off the practical against the intellectual, the carnal against the existential, and sets the tone. And like all his books, it's written with seemingly effortless elegance, in a tethered, pragmatic prose that never ascends into "tea-party fairy" (the young narrator's description of Proust) territory.