I have read The End of Everything and other M. John Harrison books, both conventional rock-climbing memoir and way out space opera.

IMHO if you like Harrison's prose and the atmosphere, keep going. Even if the plot is hard to make out. IHMO, If you are reading M. John Harrison for the plot, then you're in the wrong book.

I can see how some would be bored or baffled by this book, or even dislike it intensely. If you didn't like his other books, then this one is more in that vein, and in some ways more so. If so, you probably won't enjoy this one either.

He has said "A good ground rule for writing in any genre is: start with a form, then ask what it's afraid of" (1) He is deconstructing, not constructing, stories.

The End of Everything has an anti-plot, is set in anti-places and contains at least character that is anti-person.

If it's not for you then that's perfectly OK. I don't pretend to understand why it won an award, but I liked it. Probably. It's hard to be sure. And that's something out of the ordinary.

There are though, themes or images that are of a particular time and place (2026, South coast of England). Most notably Boats taking people across the Channel to some-place uncertain but "not here". If you are somewhere else then that image might not mean anything to you, but the resonance with current UK political discourse must be deliberate. And it helps to "get" it.

In the same way that his last book The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020) was about the fallout, the curdled nostalgia and communication failures of the post-Brexit moment. (2) Maybe. If it's "about" anything other than aquatic humanoids, dodgy jobs and fairy tales, IDK.

1) https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/jul/20/m-john-harri...

2) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/19/the-sunken-lan...

M John Harrison becomes first science fiction author to win the Booker