Shaw has had a bit of a rough time, including some sort of unspecified breakdown, but is gradually trying to put his life back together, in a fairly gradual and unspectacular way involving moving around various dingy rooms in shared houses and a succession of odd jobs, culminating in some ill-defined work for a guy called Tim who has an office on a rickety old barge moored alongside the Thames. Tim maintains a website called The Water House whose purpose is unclear but which seems to revolve around documenting weird water-related occurrences in the London area and beyond.
One of Shaw's first assignments is keeping an eye on a court case involving a guy called Patrick Reed (no, not that one), up before the beak for some minor public order disturbance related to some weird sightings he has claimed to have: specifically, the appearance of strange rapidly-growing green finned creatures in the toilet bowl whenever he has a piss. It's not clear what Shaw is meant to do about any of this except gather information that may or may not end up on The Water House. Shaw also spends some time with a psychic called Annie Swann, who may or may not be Tim's wife, or possibly ex-wife, or possibly sister, and who spends most of their sessions passed out in some sort of trance.
Shaw has a girlfriend, Victoria, with whom he has a very casual, arms-length sort of relationship. As if to illustrate this she relocates from London to Shropshire to renovate her recently-deceased mother's hous, in what we're invited to infer is somewhere in the vicinity of Ironbridge. Our viewpoint shifts to Victoria's for this section of the novel as she oversees various building and repair work, while at the same time getting to know her neighbours and some of the people of the town. And a rum bunch they are too, from Pearl, who lives next door and runs a local café, to old Ossie who may or may not be Pearl's father, and may or may not have been Victoria's mother's lover at some point in the past, to young Tommie, who keeps trying to persuade Victoria to read Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies.
The house is damp, it rains constantly, and the water makes its way inexorably down to the Severn, but not before flooding some fields behind the houses, where Victoria witnesses the bizarre spectacle of Pearl stripping naked, walking into one of the pools, and disappearing from sight, despite the pool being only a couple of feet deep at most.
Victoria takes a break and travels back to London to reconnect with Shaw, but finds him oddly preoccupied with his job, even while he can't really explain what the job is, although it has recently included a trip to the Midlands (in the rain, naturally) to retrieve something from a garden swimming pool, a pale greenish-white something that twitched and thrashed and needed to be transported away wrapped in a tarpaulin.
Victoria returns to Shropshire and decides to sell her mother's house, but before she can do so she is beckoned out to the rainy garden at night by an unseen voice, and undergoes some sort of watery transmutation. Shaw, meanwhile, is wrapping up his involvement with Tim and The Water House, though not before an extremely bizarre encounter on the barge with Annie and some dismembered human remains in a barrel which may or may not be Tim, and some scrawled writings which seem to allude to an undocumented human sub-speciation event in the distant past. He decides to properly re-engage with the world and tries to make contact with Victoria again, but receives no reply.
It's important not to to be ashamed, at the end of a book like this, to sit back and go: well, what was all that about, then? Presumably at least some of it is intended to represent actual real stuff happening to actual real people (yes, yes: real within the book's own fictional version of the world) and equally some of it is intended not to be real, like the various characters disappearing from the narrative via physically impossible means into some watery netherworld from which they do not return. Whether "not real" here means "imagined or hallucinated by one of the main characters" or "explicitly supernatural" is probably up for grabs and depends on the reader as much as anything.
What does seem clear, and Harrison has said as much in interviews, is that the mysterious emergence of the water-creatures, possibly a genetically distinct sub-species of humanity and possibly (via some possibly supernatural means) able to assume the form of regular humans for some period of time, while those same regular humans sleepwalk around too preoccupied with their own petty concerns to notice the world changing around them, is intended to be an allegory for Brexit in particular and the rise of right-wing populism and fascism more generally.
It's oddly reminiscent of the only other Harrison book I've ever read, Climbers, despite the disparity of the subject matter: central character a bloke leading an odd rootless existence, slightly mysterious past, slightly vague narrative, general air of post-Thatcherite decline and decay. Both books are somewhat outside of what most people would think of as Harrison's principal genre, science fiction, although that definition is notoriously slippery.
Anyway, I enjoyed it very much, even though I could not say that I knew what was going on 100% of the time, and it could be argued that there are quite lengthy sections where not very much is going on at all. Harrison has a very distinctive prose style which won't be for everyone, but sometimes it's good to have your mind stretched. The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again won the Goldsmiths Prize in 2020, an award which is meant to reward the writing of genre-bending or experimental fiction. It's the first winner that I've read, although Jim Crace's Harvest and all three of the Rachel Cusk novels (Outline, Transit and Kudos) were nominated at various times.
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