Nick Harkaway

Nick Harkaway's Gnomon is a 666-page magical operation thinly disguised as a science-fiction police procedural. Its settings range from late antiquity to the far transhuman future, with a cluster in London, Greece, and Ethiopia in the 20th and 21st centuries. I found it compulsive reading, and worked through the whole thing in about four days. This was the first Harkaway title I've read, initially sighted in a public library display and long considered as something worth my attention. In an show more appended author's note, the book is characterized as containing "layers of puzzles and references the author has largely forgotten as he moves on to the next and the next," but the web of the story is so tight that it's easy to imagine it being written in any direction: trajectories of plot and character intersect and reinforce each other everywhere, especially since "nothing means just one thing."

The peak of textual recursion in Gnomon is perhaps Inspector Neith's interview with Chase Pakhet, an interdisciplinary scholar who discusses the Frankfurt School and French postmodern theory after confessing a love of pulp fiction "for its cheap trashiness, its wicked women and its unrepentantly vivid sex ... the violence, the moral turpitude, and the absoluteness of right and wrong in a universe that pretends to be shaded with grey" (286). But fractal self-similarity is a key ingredient throughout this book that exhibits the fabric of all being woven on Its invisible design.

Full-on metaphysics and plot spoiler: The book uses the elegant seventeenth-century Janson typeface at the initial level of narrative, but interrupts it throughout with a different sans serif font, which is implicitly given to indicate a relatively virtual set of circumstances, vicariously experienced through recordings of the subjective awareness of an interrogation subject. At various points in the novel, clues gave me to wonder whether perhaps the actuality of the primary typeface story might be a misdirection, and that Janson-type protagonist Neith was "really" an avatar in the computer game Witness mentioned within what seemed to be feigned personal histories. The ending vindicated both my suspicions and the framing that I thought they contradicted.

As I read this book, I was reminded of many other works I have enjoyed, including Philip Dick's Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, Doris Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell, China Mieville's The City & the City, Ian McDonald's The Dervish House, Grant Morrison's The Filth, and the Wachowskis' Sens8. None of these comparisons should be taken to impugn the originality or independence of Harkaway's work here.

"I raised the sleeper, and sealed the sleeper in luminous water with five seals, that death might not prevail from that moment on." (Apocryphon of John, logion 16) show less

Although I came to this novel on the basis of my appreciation of a later work by the same author, it made an eerily good match for the most recent feature film I enjoyed. If you liked the martial arts action, twisted humor, melodramatic pathos, and reality-warping mindfuckery of Everything Everywhere All at Once, you might find that Nick Harkaway's doorstop 2008 first novel actually delivers a kindred experience.

The Gone-Away World contains about half a dozen major anagnorises or revelatory show more plot pivots, each with perfectly adequate narrative preparation and often outright foreshadowing. After getting caught with my pants down by a couple of these, I got really vigilant, paying special attention to what the story hadn't told me at that point, and my effort was rewarded with being able to anticipate the next big surprise by maybe two or three pages. Then as I kept on reading, feeling pleased with myself, I got surprised again! (Well, I sort of saw that coming.) And again! (OMG, how could I fail to have seen that coming!) It was like losing a sparring bout.

The semi-fantastic post-apocalyptic setting is definitely sui generis (although comparisons others have made to Vonnegut have some merit), and it took me a few of the book's longish chapters to get comfortable with the narrative framing. But even before that point I found the prose fast-moving and congenial.

There's possibly an allegory here, certainly a parable. I had to wonder if Harkaway named "FOX"--"the gunk ... inFOrmationally eXtra-saturated" (259) that stabilizes reality after the Go Away War has totally disrupted it--as a conscious poke at US propaganda media. The book takes aim at even bigger troubles, though, if you want to read it that way. The repeated tacit references to the legend of Andromeda in the final arc were poignant.

On the whole, I liked this novel a lot and found it to be a lively ride. It fell a little short of the tremendously high esteem I have for Harkaway's Gnomon, but that's hardly grounds to dismiss it. It is perhaps, as I've seen some suggest, more accessible than the later book, while still delivering a considerable taste of what the writer has to offer. show less

From mad post-apocalyptic sci-fi with ninjas to gangsters and spies with clockwork death-bees to post-colonial environmental disaster zone with super-hero, Harkaway's books are actually gradually becoming more and more grounded. I mean, they've not quite landed yet and may rocket for the moon with the next one for all I know, but Tigerman's got more plausability going for it than the others while still having wild and mad corners. It takes about half the book for the cogs to all mesh and the show more elements to combine and the set-up to pay off into an unputdownable narrative. Part of the is the subtle complexity of his prose, which looks like the sort of smooth-as-polished-glass stuff that flies by under the eyes, but actually arrests the brain with slightly demanding constructions and ideas, conveying the trickiness of tricky relationships, whether personal or political or social or global. A literary writer of pulp entertainments. I think he's still developing, and perhaps has a way to go, but it'll be very interesting to follow his journey.

Edit on reread: God that bit at the end was pompous. My review, not the book. show less

Lester Ferris' army career is coming to a close. A former sergeant in the British infantry who's seen too much action and has now been given a supposedly quiet posting as brevet-consul for the imminently doomed island of Mancreu. The island is about to be destroyed due to a potential environmental disaster involving chemicals and a volcano. While a NATO protection force oversee the leisurely evacuation it's Lester's job to basically see and do nothing and especially ignore the mysterious show more fleet of ships anchored just off-shore. He's there just to provide a friendly face and act as a kind of local policeman for the community that remains. This he's done admirably especially with the boy. A street-smart kid who's addicted to comic books. A boy seemingly devoid of family and reticent to expand on himself is quite content in spending time with Lester who has become rather attached. So much so that he's begun making discrete enquiries as to what will happen to the boy when the current situation is all over. So when the boy is badly beaten the two conspire to enact a vengeance on the perpetrators that will set in motion a chain of events that will change everything.

This is a gripping action-adventure tale that uses comic-book superhero tropes while examining large scale political issues as well as familial relationships of a father/son dynamic. The characters that inhabit this world are wonderfully put together with depth for each of them and the odd nod and a wink to the stereotypes that often feature in these kind of tales. There are enough fun moments along the way to keep the mood light and the pace,while not frantic, moving along at a fair rate of knots. It's another book that differs from the author's previous two and I'm very impressed by his scope and versatility and one I can now safely add to my favourite authors list. As the boy would put it "This book is full of win!". show less