First contact (+ fallout)

The Coffin of Honey
by Geoffrey D. Morrison

Toronto: Coach House Books, 2026
$24.95 / 9781552455180

Reviewed by Kenna Clifford

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Geoffrey D. Morrison’s sophomore novel The Coffin of Honey begins swirling on the beach-shore of Kerala, some years after environmental collapse and capitalist accelerationism has split the world into two opposing corridors. 

It details the day an impossible pill-shaped visitor, something unlike anything the human race has ever known, introduces itself to a minor Marxist politician Varughese during a videotaped speaking event and opens a door to a new world, both literally and figuratively. Or, the novel begins somewhere on Chesapeake Bay in Maryland some years before, when a wealthy teen surfer-boy is ordered by his father to keep a journal. Or, the novel begins somewhere in the head of a young Iranian poet, Forough Hyrcania Pluviôse, after ripping up her ruba’i, tossing them to the wind and vowing never to write again. To call each of these moments a beginning would be equally apt, as much as the end of the novel, or somewhere in the middle. 

Glitteringly fractal, the narrative plays like a rigorous study on its own narrative, imperial history and artistic praxis, all surrounding a fictitious manifesto by The Bell Letterist detailing an “interdimensional will to the aesthetic.” West coast writer Morrison has successfully written a deeply Marxist work of speculative fiction, drawing from apocryphal stories of Alexander the Great, The Rubáiyát, and the history of C.I.A. intervention in foreign affairs to vividly capture the shape of a possible future less speculative than the presence of alien life may suggest. 

Morrison masterfully breaks the narrative into its own apocryphal telling and re-telling through collections of paperwork and archival databases, delivering the narrative’s course of events in flashes of impression. It’s easy to see early comparisons of Morrison’s work to that of Borges, especially “The Aleph,” or Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” as it works through its own narrative folds, and fascination in translation; and with the metaphysical.

Portions of the novel are written from the perspective of the young poet Forough’s artistic inclination, as a disembodied voice attempting to understand the phenomena of ‘the swimmers’ through durational cinema and poetry. Forough questions whether writers and artists haven’t been prodding these same questions of scientific understanding, politics and poetics by attempting to capture “the barely articulatable endlessness of endlessness, which feels important even though you don’t know what it means? Can’t know what it means. Can only gaze down into the twirling pool of nihil and stutter a conjunction.” 

What results is a conversation on the interplays between how art and humanity wrestle with language, the auratic, politic, and action; the “dialectic of plain stillness and sweet transport,” which the swimmers ultimately come to represent. Much like Morrison’s previous novel Falling Hour, each of his characters are constantly speaking and writing themselves into existence.

Though Forough’s, and subsequently the novels questions, are ones which writers and artists are often afflicted—the exhausting and sometimes seemingly inert task of intimating meaning through creation under the pretence of political strife—each character is still struggling with it in their own rite, searching for a sense of definition, language, and placeness. Varughese is often both frustrated with and undermined by his lack of fluency in other languages than his native Malayalam; Forough similarly is tasked with the impossible duty of bringing poetry to those seeking to humiliate and incriminate her; C.I.A. operative [X, his name eternally covered in black redaction marks] is entranced by self-determined narrativization and weaponizes chat board troll rhetoric to further his goals.

It is also through the lens of those who have lived through this world, sometimes their whole life and sometimes on the tail end of violent, revolutionary cusp, that we come to understand the sociopolitical weight of this alien arrival. Forough and her mother’s strained relationship displays the effect of colonial violence on the body and mind; similarly, the Bell Letterist’s recollection of a childhood friend:

When they were afraid of us we ceased to be ‘children’ and became ‘youths,’ or worse, ‘youth’ uncountable—Iqbal was a boy who would surely annoy them as a man, and so they chose to smother him in honey, entomb him in sweetness, he would be neutralized in a way that made them look wonderful, I have been saying ‘they’ because in a sense it was their whole society that wanted this and bask in the magnificence of their charity….

The novel is intensely researched—equally on the history of imperial conflict as 4chan mods and ‘the dark enlightenment.’ Though the novel at times feels almost egregious to its description of the western ‘Helloland’, a reader would struggle to define anything in the novel as explicitly satire, or irony. Descriptions of martyrs tasked to wade through the infohazard wasteland of a post-dead internet; sonnenrad-waving alien sex cults; or a brass mickey mouse battle medallion warm and worn from the thumbing of a drunk navy man are presented as understandable progressions of a well-researched set-up, which roots itself in already germinating neoconservative thought.  

Though, the ending of the novel struggles to find narrative closure for each of these individual points. Each of these elements are weaved beautifully throughout the majority of the narrative, yet struggle at the final blow. The novel’s final sequence comes off as more a final delivery of science fiction pulp, a need for a never-ending story to come to a final page count, than a natural progression of each arch and conflict. 

The Coffin of Honey may come off as referential and long winded as ever (Morrison is ever-committed to his well-documented love for the long sentence), yet the world that is built throughout the novel remains textural and ever-present. Morrison also commits to offering the reader a narrative which is equally rich as imaginative of its love, its joy and its futurity as it is its degradation and its word count. It is through the lens of those who have lived through conflict, sometimes their whole life and sometimes on the tail end of violent, revolutionary cusp, that we come to understand both the phenomena referred to as ‘the swimmers’ and the weight of their arrival.

Despite the narrative scope, and the frequently metatextual, multilingual nature of the story it weaves, The Coffin of Honey remains staunchly humanist, entertaining. It begs for a read, and then another. It asks the reader to situate themselves within the context of their own world through learning about others (which as a language teacher, I’m inclined to believe Morrison included with intent; suggesting that with revolution must come openness, willing to transform). It is a novel that implores the reader to look on, keep reading, keep doing; and it reminds us that under the foot of deep imperial violence there is still possible meaning to be excavated and poems to be written. Comparative to science fiction, revolution also requires world-building, and like all good leftist thinkers, Morrison is not simply interested in diagnosis, but imagination.

[Editor’s note: in support of his book, Geoffrey D. Morrison will launch A Coffin of Honey at Iron Dog Books, at 2671 East Hasting. May 14: 7-8pm.]

Kenna Clifford is a writer and filmmaker based in so-called “Vancouver, B.C.” They are the founder and editor-in-chief of Semipermeable Press. Kenna’s creative nonfiction and reviews are published by RANGE, The Dry River (Crybaby Press), Inkyard Press and SAD Online, as well as on the blog Speculative Fiction. Kenna likes to write about desire, culture, art, and memory—and especially the places where all those things touch. [Editor’s note: Kenna has reviewed recent books by Natalie Southworth, Brian Wilford and Mirielle Gagńe for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster