Sharp Words

9 out of 10

Take two parts China Miéville to one part early Ben Elton, and blend with a large spoonful of Douglas Adams analogies. Sprinkle with ninjas, pirates and mime-artists, and serve to readers of speculative fiction who have a warped sense of humour.

Nick Harkaway’s debut novel The Gone-Away World is one of the most imaginative and humorous books I’ve come across for quite a while. It’s a novel that takes the big things - love, war, corporate greed, and the end of the world - and blends them with the mundane - apple cake, Tupperware, Ford Focuses (Foci?), and games of pool in a dingy bar - in what is for me a highly successful and entertaining way.

It’s hard to describe this novel without giving away more of the story than I generally like to do. It’s also pretty hard to classify, hence my ‘recipe’ at the start of this review. This is cyber-punk sci-fi fantasy with a dark and twisted sense of humour; it’s an exploration of identity and reality; it has ninjas and pseudo-pirates (and immediately get kudos points from me because of that), and pig-powered electricity generators, and an aged Tupperware-wielding martial artist, and a troupe of mime artists (white makeup and all). And not everything is as clear-cut as you might think it is.

The story starts some time after the end of the world as we know it. The Gone-Away War has been and gone; the inhabitable parts of the world are kept that way, free of shadows and monsters, by the Jorgmund Pipe - a pipe that circles the earth spewing out the miracle gas FOX which keeps back the dangerous Stuff. Within this protected girdle, people live their lives in a society ruled by the Jorgmund corporation, its bureaucracy, and capitalism.

The unnamed narrator is hanging out in a bar in the middle of nowhere with the rest of the Freebooting company that he works for, when the Pipe catches fire. Putting out fires is what the company does best, and a summons soon comes for them to put out this Big one. And then the story shifts back twenty years or more, to the narrator’s childhood, with the tale of how he met his best friend and fellow freebooter, Gonzo Lubitsch.

Years of donkeys, martial arts, apple cake, student political activism, trouble, job-hunting and the mysterious Project Albumen culminate in our hero ending up in a little country named Addeh Katir and located somewhere near Pakistan. Thanks to corporate greed, Katir has gone from being a peaceful idyll to a place where half a dozen groups are sort of not really at war with one another, and a lot of sheep are getting blown up in minefields (the couple of pages discussing this had me laughing myself silly). This not-war escalates into the Gone-Away War when a special kind of bomb makes things just Go Away… and after the Gone-Away War, nothing will ever be the same again.

The Gone-Away World could potentially be divided into several sections of story, each dealing with different parts of the narrator’s life… but that would be a very simple way of doing it, and the story flows reasonably well from one section to another. After the Gone-Away War, we next find our hero working on the great machine which lays the Jorgmund Pipe. Once more though, a corporation takes over, and after a brief lull of peace for our hero, we’re back to the events which kicked off the start of the novel, with the freebooting company putting out the fire. But things go a bit wrong, and that (about two thirds of the way through) is where this story gets seriously weird for Gonzo and our hero and everyone who knows them.

And that’s where I’m going to leave the ’story outline’ portion of this review (which is getting too long anyway), because I don’t want to give any spoilers. It’s a plot, though, which throws in more than a few surprises - some of which it is possible to see coming, others which took me unawares. For me, it was a decently structured plot - although much of the first portion is in a sort of flashback, it flows decently into the later parts. I liked that catching up with the events at the beginning of the book did not mean the end of the story with nothing but exposition to follow; there’s plenty more action to come.

The characters are interesting, too - the primaries are well-realised and the secondaries are all well-rounded. Even characters who only appear a time or two are given their own little bits of story, their own quirks and needs. I didn’t actually notice for a long time that the narrator wasn’t named, which is a good indication that I’d really got into the story. He’s a sympathetic character who ends up in situations mostly not of his own making, and I couldn’t help but want things to go right for him.

In summary: this is quite an ambitious and complex novel, full of dark jokes and semi-satirical comment about war and capitalism and ninjas. Read it.