It’s not surprising for a first novel to be overly long and a bit self-indulgent. It’s pretty much expected. The new author is compressing his life lessons into a story while stretching his creative muscles, finding his stylistic voice and generally learning his craft. But Nick Harkaway — son of John le Carré, the superb espionage novelist — has raised the bar for self-indulgent, overly long first novels in his debut. He’s stretched his own creative muscles far beyond the breaking point. And he still has a lot to learn about craft.
THE GONE-AWAY WORLD is a plodding, frustrating mess — frustrating because there is an imaginative, satiric spark sputtering deep inside this pile of paper. But Harkaway snuffs it to death under a ton of meandering verbiage.
The story takes place in a post-apocalyptic world. The lights flicker off and on in the Nameless Bar while the first-person narrator (equally nameless throughout the entire novel) plays pool with his friends. Then the news flashes over the TV: There’s a fire along the Jorgmund Pipe, and that’s a serious problem.
The Pipe is all that separates the Livable Zone from the mutants and monsters that resulted from the Go Away War. That sad outcome of various political and sociological mistakes took its name from its featured weapon, the Go Away Bomb. Unlike other explosive devices, the Go Away Bomb sucks information out of matter and energy. The fallout is called Stuff. And Stuff is so hungry for new information that mutates any organism it lands on while absorbing its thoughts, dreams or any other types of data.
The antidote to Stuff is FOX — inFOrmationally eXtra-saturated matter — a gunk which, when sprayed into the air, meets the Stuff and neutralizes it. The Pipe sprays FOX across the Livable Zone and protects the area for humans to eventually reinhabit the planet.
So the narrator and his friends, all members of the Haulage & HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company, are recruited into action. They set off to plant a huge bomb at the epicenter of the fire, creating a vacuum that will eliminate the air feeding the flames. And leading the team is the narrator’s lifelong friend and sometime hero and mentor, Gonzo
Lubitsch.
The opening chapter, with its satiric, Vonnegut-esque tone, takes a while to get going. But by its end, we feel like we’re off on a wild, rollicking adventure to save the world. Wrong! Instead, Harkaway brings the narrative to a grinding halt and subjects us to the childhood upbringing, education and various practical training of both the narrator and Lubitsch in a flashback that lasts more than 275 pages. Along the way, there are countless tangents involving martial arts, ninjas, pirates, politics, mimes, war and on and on and on. And that’s just the first few miles of this rabbit hole we’ve fallen into.
We eventually get back to the crew and the mission to save the Pipe and humanity. And the fire is quickly extinguished to allow for another few hundred pages of rambling meditations on yet another set of various philosophical problems. Then, after almost 500 pages, it finally stops.
Harkaway’s style ranges from smart-ass wiseguy to cultured, literate observer, often within the same paragraph. Taken in small doses, it can be highly entertaining and hilarious. But stretched out and repeated as long as it is here makes it nearly impossible to follow and just plain exhausting to read. Harkaway either forgot or never learned that brevity is — and always will be — the soul of wit. And his obviously prodigious imagination is strangled to death as a result.
Oh, and that dust jacket: You can’t help but notice that it’s covered in pink felt. It possibly refers to the pool table in the Nameless Bar. But we never see that pool table after the first chapter, so this costly design idea, like many other elements of the novel, is strangely unjustified.
Harkaway is not alone in mistaking ponderousness for profundity. It’s an alarming tendency among too many authors today who feel they must take 900 pages to say the equivalent of 200. (Call it Neal Stephenson Syndrome — but that’s another rant for another time.)
Too bad. With the kind of weight-reducing regimen that was once known as editing, THE GONE-AWAY WORLD could be the stuff of cults. It still might be, but only for those cultists with way too much time to kill.
In his acknowledgments at the end of the book, Harkaway thanks his various friends, family and influences, and concludes with: “Well now. On to the next one.” Ah, okay. But when you next see his name on a book, pull out a tape measure. And if the width is an inch-and-a-half or more, pass it by, regardless of what material the dust jacket is made. —Alan Cranis
Related posts:
- World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
- How the Dead Live
- End of the World Blues
- The World of Jules Verne
- The Mysterious World of Sherlock Holmes
