This book has been chosen as a Great Read.
Author: Nick Harkaway
Knopf, 2008
Best ebook deal: A1 Books
| C4 Ratings.....out of | 10 |
|---|---|
| Language..... | 8 |
| Entertainment..... | 10 |
| Depth..... | 6 |
This book, in short, is phenomenal. If you like funny, badass, post-apocalyptic, dystopian sci-fi novels, just go get it and start reading. If you need a bit more convincing, here we go.
The Gone-Away World begins as your typical post-apocalyptic novel. Our Heroes are ensconced in a Nameless Bar at the edge of the recivilized world. There’s a tattered pool table, bad beer, and a backup generator powered by pigs tied to a capstan. Suddenly, disaster strikes in the form of a fire on the Jorgmund Pipe, it’s wasting FOX, and Stuff is threatening the Livable Zone. Our Heroes move out.
A lot of sci-fi writers plug along from here, giving you the job of figuring out the lingo (other than Livable Zone, that one’s guessable off the bat) and piecing together what happened to the world and these people. Harkaway instead backs up and, for the next 300 of the novel’s 500 pages, chronicles the lives of his two main characters: their childhoods, their political disillusionment and subsequent military training, and their involvement in the war that made the world gone-away. By around page 300, we’re back to the Nameless Bar, the FOX fire, and the team, and our tale continues from just where we left it.
This is a risky strategy. If the backstory wasn’t sufficiently entertaining, the whole thing could feel like a rip-off, or two stories mashed together. Instead it works flawlessly, and that backstory not only makes a damn good novel in itself, but it sets up the final 40% of the book—wherein nothing less than the world must be saved—to be deeply personal and meaningful, as well as captivatingly entertaining.
There are some (quite forgivable) flaws. All the women in this book are beautiful, and all the men are badasses (and actually most of the women are badasses, too), and they are each either Good or Bad. Occasionally, Harkaway, stretching for a joke, will spin out a full page of wince-worthy prose. The central plot itself is not believable, in a strictly logical sense.
But all this is in the interest of crafting a ripping good yarn, and since that succeeds, you overlook these small problems. If you unfocus your attention at one or two plot points, it’s easy to accept the book’s internally consistent logic, and the characters, despite being slightly cartoonish, are quite lovable.
As for Harkaway’s writing style: it’s baroque, expansive, and comically minded, and it’s pretty much the crux of the novel’s entertainment. He hits a wrong note every once in a while, but 99% of the time, he’s right on the money.
Try a sample from the first chapter:
Flynn hooked up the generator, which God help us was pig-powered. There was the sound of four large, foul-smelling desert swine being yoked to a capstan, a noise pretty much like a minor cavalry war, and then Flynn let loose some of his most abominable profanity at the nearest porker. It looked as if it wanted to vomit and bolted. The others perforce followed it in a slow but steady progression around the capstan, and then pig number one came back around, saw Flynn ready with another dose and tried to stop. Lashed to the crosspiece and bundled along by its three fellows, it found it couldn’t, so it gathered its flabcovered self and charged past him at piggy top speed, and the whole cycle accelerated until, with a malodorous, oinking crunch, the generator kicked in, and the television lit up with the bad news.
If you enjoyed that, get this book. If you thought it was far too long for having not much happen, this book might drive you insane. I don’t mean to say that nothing much happens in the book; a lot happens, and in fact the plot is original and wonderful, and drives you onward with a new twist every time your attention starts to flag. But everything happens in that style, and the narrator explores every avenue of thought open to him, in detail.
Basically, Harkaway crafts a tree of this book, with meandering twigs and branches and limbs all fanning out from a sturdy trunk. A lot of those meanderings are funny and a lot of them are cool, and a very few are bad; but through it all Harkaway never loses sight of his story, and the end result is the most entertaining novel I’ve read in a long, long time.
Similar books
Other post-apocalytpic novels: Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank; Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood; The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
Similar in style: Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson; The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon
