What Book to Read?

I really enjoyed The Gone-Away World, the first novel by Nick Harkaway, published in 2008. This was a bit of a surprise, as I’m not usually a fan of post apocalyptic science fiction, or ‘speculative fiction’, as the book is sometimes called.

Talking about his book, the author says ‘It’s really, really hard to describe to someone who hasn’t read it. I have trouble. So do most booksellers.’ It is an adventure story, a war story, a martial arts story, a romance, and a parable about the horror of war and exploitation. It’s exciting, and funny, and quite scary at times because what he is describing is something we could quite easily do to our own world.

The novel is set firmly is the science fiction genre, where an extension or perversion of existing scientific principles is used to create a new reality. In this story, scientists have created a bomb – ‘a sort of Holy Grail of bombs’ – with the capacity to make objects and people ‘go away’ by removing the information structures from matter and energy. The technology is used indiscriminately, and large chunks of the world disappear. The scientists had argued that after removing the information, there would be nothing left. However this proves not to be the case, because the ‘Gone-Away War’ is followed by a period of ‘reification’, where matter and energy from which the information has been extracted becomes ‘Stuff’, and Stuff can take the form of human thoughts and hopes and fears: ‘The human conceptual mish-mash is becoming physical, replacing what has Gone Away with dreams and nightmares’.

The world is thus reduced to the ‘Livable Zone’ which has grown up around a pipe which circles the earth – what’s left of it – and pumps out FOX, a substance which neutralizes Stuff. Outside this zone there are ‘new’ people and creatures, some of them monsters, which have been created as a result of contamination by Stuff.

The story starts when the Haulage and HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company is called in to deal with a new emergency that threatens the Livable Zone – a section of the pipe is on fire, and they are being asked to put it out. From there the story goes back and describes the early life of the main characters, their part in the Gone-Away War, how they came to form the company, what happens when they try and extinguish the fire, and ultimately how a world that is different again comes into being.

Overall, it’s pretty easy to accept this surreal world, and even to accept some completely way out characters, not least of whom are Ike Thermite and the Matahuxee Mime Combine. Setting and characters aren’t meant to be realistic. I did find, however, that the circumstances of the central ‘I’ character, who narrates the story, are too peculiar even for this crazy world, and I think this poses something of a threat to the whole structure by over-stretching the reader’s credulity.

On the other hand, having over-stretched credulity didn’t spoil the book for me. It is written with such verve and exuberance that it carried me along through all 200,000 words almost at a sitting. The writing is in the present tense, which helps keep up the pace. Because it is a classic ‘adventure’ story, we can be pretty sure that the good guys are going to win, so there is an element of wish fulfillment. But Harkaway makes sure that we know that ‘winning’ is a pretty doubtful achievement in the sort of world he is describing.

As well as having an intriguing story, there are lots of amusing reflections and diversions. What is the fate of sheep in a war zone, which is a bad place to be a sheep? BOOM. And even the most serious subjects are made funny –sort of. Here are some of the main character’s thoughts on war – or rather – ‘un-war’:

Modern war is distinguished by the fact that all the participants are ostensibly unwilling … A war here would not be legal or useful. It is not necessary or appropriate. It must be avoided. Immediately following this proud declamation comes a series of circumlocutions, circumventions and rhetorico-circumambulations which make it clear that we will go to war, but not really, because we don’t want to and aren’t allowed to, so what we’re doing is in fact some kind of hyper-violent peace in which people will die. We are going to un-war.

This is another of my favourite asides:

In any given situation there are myriad forms of attack. (Actually, there aren’t. A myriad is ten thousand in the Greek arithmetical system and made Archimedes life impossibly difficult. If he’d had decimals, he might have done remarkable things, and we’d all be driving flying cars and heating our bathwater with home fusion, or perhaps speaking Latin and living in the ashes of the Graeco-Roman Nuclear Winter; in any case there are usually several ways of dealing with any given situation.)

I could go on and on, but hopefully you get the picture.

Harkaway says he has, ‘as is customary, borrowed from (read “pillaged”) every story I have ever loved to write my own, but I must bow especially to P.G. Wodehouse, to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and to Alexandre Dumas. It’s not what they did, it’s how they did it.’ I think readers will find all sorts of hints and references to other stories – Star Wars gets several mentions – but the hints I find may well be different to those identified by other people. I find the irreverent tone and forward drive of the story reminds me of Cryptonomicon, a novel by Neal Stephenson (not science fiction, though he is best known for his ‘cyber punk’ stories). The Jorgmund Company, which controls the pipe, reminds me of the Machine in E.M. Forster’s short story The Machine Stops. I think I also detected a faint echo of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. I didn’t identify any specific references to Conan Doyle or Dumas, but perhaps I don’t know them well enough. The pigs, however, are pure P.G. Wodehouse.

I think making connections is a bit of a game for Harkaway. Jorgmund is presumably a reference to Jormungand, the World Serpent in Norse mythology. The Thermite reaction has military uses as an explosive. Does Jarndice – the name of a college – have anything to do with Jarndyce, the name of the lawsuit in Bleak House? This game can become overly cute and annoying.

Harkaway is of course playing a game with his name. He is actually Nick Cornwell, fourth son of the writer John Le Carre. Harkaway seems to be a term used to direct the hounds in hunting – is he directing the reader away from or towards the scent? Is this a reference to the nineteenth century character Jack Harkaway, who embodied ‘the resourcefulness and romantic adventurism of late nineteenth-century penny dreadful heroes’? Or is the name one he picked completely at random, as his father is said to have done for his non de plume? He’s unlikely to tell us.

Please read this book. I’d love to know what other people think of it. I’m looking forward to his next one.

More information about Nick Harkaway can be found here.