Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Gone-Away World, 15 Nov 2008
I've never read a book with so many genres put into one. It's set in a post apocalyptic setting, where the world is being held together by something known as the Jorgmund Pipe. Within a certain "zone", safety is acquired, whereas outside of this zone, there are all sorts of nasties! Basically, this is where the book begins, I've simplified this to put it into as few words as possible, but the story is actually very well thought through, and the execution, although not perfect, is to a very high standard. The book begins in the middle of the story, and the first half of the book is spent catching up to this point - joining our unnamed teller, and his hero pal Gonzo through some highly humerous situations from childhood and university, to war and pig powered pubs. The second half of the book, ironically enough, tells the second part of the story--carrying on from where the book starts (it really isn't as complicated as it seems).
It is Nick Harkaway's first novel, and quite frankly, it shows due to his tendancy to go off on a tangent. This isn't always a bad thing, but the manner in which he does it makes the story drag out. Often I found myself reading up to 60 pages off-topic which could have started with a description of a persons face--and at least 200 pages of the book could have been taken out for this very reason. It's not always a bad thing to stray from the path to give a deeper understanding, but it needs to be controlled, and there are some places that you needn't got. This is something that experience and time will achieve.
If you can push your way through the mundane parts of the book, then there really is something quite special in between the ramble. It really is quite wonderful, very original, and the start of a very promising new author. There is no defining genre available here--whether you like science fiction, fantasy, mystery, romance, pornography (well, not so much pornography, but everything else is here), there is definitely something here that everyone can enjoy, and it may even open your eyes to new possibilities and new genres that you never knew you'd like. Sorry if I've rambled on, I guess Harkaway did have an influence on me after all.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Consider the world, unraveled, 18 Sep 2008
Imagine a future world where a chemical solution is the only thing that keeps us from the ghastly mutated barbarism of the Gone Away World.
Now imagine the wacky, quirky upbringing that led to such a future, and an absurdist autobiography filled with ninjas, cowardly revolutionaries, apocalyptic monsters and the Go Away Bomb. Nick Harkaway's "The Gone Away World" plants him firmly in the center of clever, forward-thinking fiction, as a sort of postapocalyptic Robertson Davies.
One night in the Nameless Bar, there's a blackout. Nothing new -- except the TV shows that the Pipe -- a vast network of hoses and lines that keeps the Livable Zone that way -- has caught fire.
Along with his pal Gonzo Lubitsch and a bunch of random bar weirdos, the narrator sets out to save the day. But this takes him back to his earlier life -- a strange childhood mentored by the quirky ancient martial-artist Master Wu, mutating into Angry-Young-Manhood complete with dissatisfaction and lots of sex. He's arrested as a revolutionary ringleader, and joins up with the cake-esque named Zaher Bey.
And then came the War that transformed the world into a place of monsters, darkness and utter weird. And in the present day, his road trip takes a sudden and bizarre turn when Gonzo shoots him. And as the narrator struggles to find what is going on at the heart of the mysterious Jorgamund Company, he learns of who has masterminded all the most horrific events of this twisted world...
Nick Harkaway is one of those rare authors who can capture the surreal in a single observation -- a woman's hair, a phone call, a big mean dog. So in a book with "shark things with legs," people melded with horses, and ninja assassins, one can expect that things are going to get pretty strange. And "The Gone Away World" explores how that strange world came to be.
Admittedly it starts off in a rather scatterbrained, manner in the first chapter, but levels out when it goes back to the narrator's shared history with Gonzo. But despite all the weirdness, Harkaway's writing has a curious, contemplative dignity that reminds me of Robertson Davies on crack ("may giant badgers pursue him for ever through the Bewildering Hell of Fire Ants, Soap Opera and Urethral Infections), but also has splatters of shocking vividity ("high towers and pale houses. The wind carries a murmur from its streets").
Seriously. Where else can you find a man proclaiming that he is "such a totally terrifying concentration of nerdhood" that he's "cracked the code for human social behavior using mathematics"? And it doesn't seem totally absurd?
And the Gone-Away world is the strangest place of all -- it's got ninjas, mutants, revolutionaries and mystery corporations that Just Have To Be Bad, all interlinked. But Harkaway doesn't neglect the poignancy inherent in a world that has been wrenched out of shape -- we get to see the sad, ruined creatures that have lost not only their human bodies but their minds as well.
The relationship between hero-stud Gonzo and the narrator is what really drives the novel onward, and there's absolutely nothing typical about their weird, slightly awkward friendship. Harkaway peppers the book with other oddities -- extremely mysterious women, odd bar-people, and the delightfully quirky little old martial-arts master who molded the narrator. Ah, Master Wu, we will not forget you soon.
"The Gone Away World" sounds like the title of a suburban-ennui tale, but it's actually the tame description of a wildly surreal postapocalyptic thriller, with plenty of unusual twists and deliciously odd characters.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best SCIENCE FICTION novel of the year?, 6 Aug 2008
I briefly skimmed some of the previous reviews and never once saw the term Science Fiction which struck me as odd because, if you want to pigeon-hole this picaresque novel then that's exactly where it fits. Let me see now, a super-weapon is used in a military action which then triggers a world war where everyone uses it. The super-weapon deletes an area (I'm simplifying here) and what's left is a world where reality is linked by a tenuous ribbon surrounded by a zone where lurk monsters, things that look human, and things that used to be human. Our narrator is one of a gang protecting an anti-super-weapon which sort of turns things back to normal (I'm still simplifying).
That is, of course, the macguffin on which our author hangs his very tall tale dressed in witty imaginative prose. The real story is that of our unnamed narrator and shortly after starting we have a flashback of his life which takes us up to the halfway mark when the world changes. Two thirds of the way in there is an amazing awesome twist which is both logical and almost impossible to see coming except with hindsight and transforms your perceptions of what went before.
At this point I put the book down and yelled, "You bastard," at the author.
Despite my five star rating, the book isn't perfect being at least about ten per cent too long. Harkaway is too in love with his own inventiveness, wit, and command of prose so that he goes off on irrelevant tangents, though, be warned, not all of the tangents actually are tangents. He's a sneaky sod that way.
One reviewer mentioned Iain Banks without specifying which head Mr Banks was wearing -his mainstream fiction head or his science fiction head. It could be the former writing the latter with dashes of Vonnegut and John Irving thrown in; but this is misleading because Harkaway is his own man with a very distinctive and engaging voice.
In the meantime this is my tip for the best SF novel of the year. Hey, if Doris Lessing can wear that label with pride...
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