By Nick Harkaway
Our narrator starts his story a little while after the apocalyptic Go Away War has reduced most of the Earth to a terrifying ‘desert of the unreal’ populated mostly by monsters and creatures conjured, literally, from the nightmares of ordinary people due to the fallout of ‘Stuff’ produced by the Go Away bombs. There are also a few pockets of ‘the new’, folks who find themselves alive, but only just, and who are not monsters, just fiolks who want to be left alone to live a life.
Everyone else inhabits the ‘Liveable Zone’, a narrow stretch of land encircling the globe, in the shadow of the Jorgmund Pipe, a huge feat of engineering that produces a constant supply of FOX, the only thing capable of neutralising ‘Stuff’. But the Jorgmund Pipe is on fire, and only one team has the skills, equipment and big brass balls to go and put it out – the motley crew of the Haulage & Hazmat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company of Exmoor County.
The story then switches to the unnamed narrator’s childhood and takes us piece by piece through his life. We are introduced to Gonzo Lubitsch, our narrator’s lifelong best friend and confidante and in whose shadow he spends most of his time, all the way through school, the after hours Kung Fu lessons with Master Wu from whom he becomes expert in The Way Of The Voiceless Dragon, then college, and the life of the politico student, protests and plots all in order to get girls into bed, until he is busted by government agents looking to quell any possible revolution. This leaves a question mark on his file which makes him unemployable until he eventually ends up in a mysterious branch of the military where he works on a new weapon – the Go Away bomb – which works by altering the fabric of reality so that your enemies disappear, or simply, Go Away.
And so, inevitably, conflicts escalate and the bomb is used leaving the world in the sorry state we were first introduced to at the beginning of the book and where we follow our nameless hero through the immediate aftermath of the war until events bring us right up to date and we can continue on our way. Which is great because, without giving the game away, there’s a stunning twist right in the middle of the book and from then on we spend the second half enmeshed in a fiendishly complicated conspiracy plot involving almost every character we met on the way and adding in mysterious mime troupes, rolling hippy communes, ninja assassins and Old Uncle Tom Cobbley and all until everything resolves, more or less neatly, at the end.
It’s a stunning debut, of that there’s no doubt, but it’s also uneven and patchy in places and you get the impression that Mr. Harkaway threw every idea he’d ever had into his first book, just in case they didn’t give him another go. He uses his narrator’s digression as a major story-telling mechanic, and while you can get away with quite a lot of rambling by doing that, after a while it becomes self-indulgent, and ultimately, really irritating. Genre is layered on top of genre and there is homage and pastiche at every turn, but you can’t help getting the sense that, in parts, the author is being far too clever-clever when he needs to just get on and tell the damned tale. Don’t get me wrong, it’s beautifully written, extremely engaging and often laugh-out-loud funny, but it could have been all of those things in 100 or so less pages.
The blurb tells us it’s a stunning futuristic vision, equal parts raucous adventure, comic odyssey, geek nirvana, and cool epic, an electrifyingly original tale of love, friendship and the apocalypse – and it is all of things – but it is also like looking after someone else’s pre-schooler; good fun most of the time, but ultimately very wearing and you can’t wait top give him back.
Don’t let that put you off though. Buy it, read it, enjoy it and keep your eye on Mr Harkaway, he’s good now, but he will no doubt get better and better as time goes on.
The Gone Away World is published by William Heinemann and is available from Amazon
Nick Harkaway will, eventually I guess, build a website here
Don’t forget to watch my interview with Nick Harkaway elsewhere on this site