"High-octane" - ironically for a book about a world tenuously sustained by a mysterious Pipe - is a word that seems to have been waiting for this book to come along and claim it. Our unnamed narrator is part of a gang of mercenaries who hire themselves out to protect the Jorgmund Pipe from the many threats that assail it, in order to stave off a re-run of the end of the world. As the book opens, they're being called out to "one last job" - OK, they don't think it's one last job, but it's essentially that familiar plot device. Only having set this up, we're then treated to a 200-odd page flashback explaining how the narrator and his friends got to this point - taking in his first encounter with his best friend in a sandpit, an enormous Polish matriarch, ninjas, an unconventional headmistress nicknamed The Evangelist, cannibalism, university, student protest, government brutality and armed service before we get to the everything-blows-up bit.

This book is completely and utterly insane. It has one of the best first pages I've read in a long time. It could have done with a slightly firmer editorial hand at times. It is a bit uneven in places. It's very, very funny. It's about martial arts, mercenaries, war, friendship and the end of the world. Harkaway just can't let a sentence lie - everything is embroidered, dressed up, tortured, prodded, interrupted and shaken down before a paragraph can claim its final full stop (much as I'm finding myself doing trying to describe it - it's infectious!). Surprisingly, I found this a lot less annoying by the end of the book than I thought I was going to somewhere around page 25.

Somewhere after the humungous flashback, it also features possibly the most audacious plot twist of any novel that I have ever read. To be strictly honest, it doesn't 100% come off - there were still a few "but... but.." questions in my mind - but really, the sheer chutzpah in even trying goes a long way. The other really excellent thing in here is the central 'monster' concept: I'm overfond of complaining that books with scary things in often let themselves down by describing the scary thing, giving it a shape that is altogether more familiar than the black vagueness forming in your imagination. This book does not fall into that trap. It also features a rather charmingly old-fashioned, 'fade to black' approach when dealing with sex scenes, which I found rather charming. No Bad Sex prizes for this man.

I enjoyed this enormously, and in fact more than I was expecting to, but it won't be everyone's cup of tea. I'd recommend it to fans of dystopian fiction, but especially those that are very fond of words for the sake of words and can forgive the numerous longeurs and unpackings that go on: Harkaway clearly read Orwell's rule of using as few words as possible and laughed until his sides split. ( )

The man says he never met a word he didn't like and this book follows that maxim down a very twisty road indeed. It's literally all over the place, and while the gonzo writing style makes it notable, it also makes it fatiguing to read. A very skilled writer, a book well worth reading if you have the fortitude! ( )

http://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2009/05... ( )

I loved this book so much that I posted a pre-review review, urging you all to go out and buy the book. It has been a long time since a book made me want to shout out loud and dance around my hotel room, but this book did.

It is the story of the survivors of the Go-Away War, a war fought with bombs that didn't make things explode, but instead made them go away. The reasoning goes something like this: matter needs information to tell it what to be - whether it should be a table or a pumpkin or a schnauzer. Strip away that information and matter becomes just Stuff; shapeless, formless and harmless. In theory, these bombs just dissolve that bit of information and your enemies - and their cities, their houses, their furniture, their children - become so much dust in the wind. Problem is, things never work out in theory quite the way you expect. As nature abhors a vaccuum, Stuff hates to be formless. It yearns for that bit of information.

Our nameless narrator and his best friend, Gonzo Lubitsch, are on the front lines of this war and its aftermath. They are principals in the Haulage & HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company, men and women who aren't afraid to step into the breach. When they end up working for Jorgmund, the corporate behemoth that controls much of the post-war world, there is bound to be trouble.

The book is part kung-fu epic, part sci-fi romance, part philosophic screed on what it means to be human, plus post-apocalyptic adventure and frenetic, laugh-out-loud hilarity. The twists and turns in the plot leave you questioning everything that has come before. I don't know how else to categorize it - a well-read friend described it as 'Pynchon with dashes of P.G. Wodehouse and Alexandre Dumas.' The fact that it's a first novel just floors me. I will be devouring the next book Nick Harkaway publishes as soon as it hits the shelves - sooner, if I can manage it. ( )

Set partially before and mostly after the "gone away" war, this clever post-apocalyptic novel is about what happens when the world goes crazy. Everything from mimes to ninjas to centaurs make an appearance, and, as strange as it sounds, they all fit perfectly into the story. Harkaway has a real knack for making the ridiculous believable. Everthing fits into place by the end of this highly imaginative book. ( )