One of these brilliantly told stories, “The Walls”, begins: “A man, let’s call him D, is seen digging his way out through the wall of his cell. To help in this project, D has only the thinnest and least reliable tools: two dessert spoons (one stainless steel, one electro-plated nickel silver); half of a pair of curved nail scissors; some domestic knives lacking handles; and so on. The cell wall, constructed from grey, squarish cinder blocks about a foot on a side has been carelessly mortared and laid without much attention to detail. But this lack of artifice makes no difference; none of the knives is long enough to reach the last half inch of mortar at the back of each block, and the more D uses them the shorter they get. Each block must, eventually, be loosened and removed by hand, a task which can take several months, and which leaves him exhausted.”

A close attention to detail characterises this story and contributes much to its effectiveness, and yet, like the careless mortaring of the cinder blocks, it makes no difference in the end. Why and how does D have two dessert spoons? What does he live on during these months (which become years)? Who brings it to his cell? We have nothing with which to fill in unstated facts, as we’re used to doing when reading fiction, because the story is consistent only in pulling the carpet out from under its own feet. It is a play of imagination in a void. Its power is that of a dream, in this case a bad one, the kind that keeps repeating itself with variations in an endless loop of frustration.

This holds for all the stories collected in You Should Come With Me Now. Some of them are surrealistic, some are spoofs, some are fables; many are funny, all are inventive; none entirely escapes the loop.

I would describe “The Wall” as a fable. Imitating realism but freed from it by invention, the fable stands off from actuality, judges it, laughs at it, offers warnings and instructions and presents funhouse-mirror reflections of human nature. From Aesop and the Buddhist Jātaka Tales through Reynard the Fox to Borges and beyond, the fabulist speaks with detachment and as if from above. The humour is on the dry side, and catastrophes are recounted without emotion.

Fables don’t entirely satisfy most of us “common readers” of fiction, who seek an involvement beyond the intellectual. Even a story as well written and vividly described as this may leave us feeling that the author has boiled up a fine broth only to throw it out and give us the bones. I think it’s fair, and useful, to say that M John Harrison writes for the uncommon reader.

The exactness, acute self-consciousness and vigilant self-restraint of Harrison’s writing give it piercing authenticity

The collection contains many brief fabulations, some very brief indeed. The wit and effortless elegance of the writing are impeccable. But synopses of plots – ideas for stories, such as writers scribble in their notebooks or on cocktail napkins, however brilliant the conceits – are pretty dry bones.

Such “flash fictions” are spaced out with stories of substantial length ballasted by developed narrative complexities, which I welcomed. Soup at last! The broth, however, lacks variety. Repeatedly, a narrator, whether the disembodied authorial voice or a character in the story, recounts events, mundane or bizarre, without involvement or explanation. The funny things that happen are sometimes very funny, but the humour is dry as ether.

Fiction that abandons cause and effect makes a point about the nature of reality at its own expense. Narrative inconsequentiality offers the imagination limitless freedom, but the paradoxical result of such freedom is predictability. When you see that in this story nothing is going to happen which, by the ancient rules and rites of storytelling, “should” happen, interest wanes. Relationships are without effect, and therefore without affect.

If surrealism is super-realism, and if reality is indeed as vacant as this, no wonder we make up lies about it. Merely realistic or merely fantastic fiction asks us not only to consent to suspend disbelief but to believe that actions have reactions, acts have consequences and moral responsibility exists. Storytelling of this kind seems to be a human survival tactic.

Surrealism is the most cerebral and most cynical of genres, declaring and exhibiting the falsity of reason, the meaninglessness of meaning; it flaunts its courage in breaking the compact, the collusion, on which fiction depends. But such brave defiance runs the fatal risk of boring the reader.

Jennifer Egan and M John Harrison – books podcast Read more

The passages in You Should Come With Me Now that most engaged me and that I most admire are those that describe having a “heart condition” – the physical experience and the medical response. In “Yummie” a man undergoes angioplasty, a violent procedure giving “the feeling of racing feet-first forward on rails under a weird light while your heart is reamed, plumbed, measured to its full physical depth and found wanting”. This is a valid surrealism: existence as a patient in a modern hospital is, in fact, surreal. Here the exactness, the acute self-consciousness and the vigilant self-restraint of Harrison’s writing give it piercing authenticity. Without ever letting down his guard he lets us, in these sections, hear a human voice.

• Ursula K Le Guin’s selected stories, The Unreal and the Real, are published by Gollancz. You Should Come with Me Now is published by Comma. To order a copy for £8.49 (RRP £9.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.