“The Gone-Away World” Frames Reality With Surrealism
Like a lot of my favorite books, Nick Harkaway’s “The Gone-Away World” was an impulse buy prompted by my endless quest to find a cure for the horrific ailment that is fiction-draught-induced boredom. It had a pretty cover and the cover blurb seemed to promise a few hours’ escape from reality, which happens to be something I greatly approve of.
“The Gone-Away World” takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where reality itself has lost its cohesion and where matter refuses to behave rationally but despite this, it is mainly Harkaway’s first person narrator who gives the book its tone of surrealism. It is also the narrator’s voice, cynical and humorous and endearingly self-effacing, that grounds the book and provides it with depth, color and layers.
Unnamed throughout the book, the narrator tells the story of his life and of his best friend, Gonzo Lubitsch. He begins his story in the Nameless Bar and before the first chapter is ended, he has painted a picture of a world fraught with dangers, of companions who have made a career out of heroism and of the frightful inhumanity of the Jorgmund Company, which essentially runs the new world. The story then veers off into the past, depicting our narrator’s childhood and the friendship with Gonzo which will define the course of his future. The world hasn’t ended yet and the two boys grow up side by side, our narrator content for the most part to be Gonzo’s sidekick and loyal companion.
However, it is where their paths divide that Harkaway’s story unfolds and it is a story that is intimately bound together with the events leading up to the Gone Away War and the annihilation of most of humanity. “The Gone-Away World” mixes ancient martial arts with futuristic science, philosophy and politics with secret military projects and warfare with audacious acts of piracy. There is a tribe of cannibals, a Master of a hidden school of gong-fu whose teachings are as eccentrically amusing as they are lethal and a secret society of evil, murderous ninjas. There is love, loss and a delightfully sneaky conspiracy and the evidence of Harkaway’s talent as a writer is that he manages to forge all these elements into a complete and wondrously complex whole.
Not only that, but he also manages to tackle subjects like the frustrating and often pointless escalation of human conflict, the tenuous nature of reality and the question of what makes us human. Readable fiction can be just an escape from reality, but in his first novel, Nick Harkaway passes readability and achieves something like greatness, not because of the web of surrealism he weaves but because mixed in with the fantastical, there is a good dose of reality that stands out in stark, unsettling contrast against the backdrop of his Gone-Away World.
You can grab a copy of The Gone-Away World or read further reviews here
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The science fiction elements of the story sound interesting although I would imagine this isn’t the kind of book you could read on a commute to work in the morning.
Actually, that’s exactly what I did the first time I read it. I have a two hour commute to get to or from work and if I was suddenly transported to an alternate dimension in which there were no books…let’s just say it wouldn’t be pretty!
I guess it depends on what kind of reader you are, though, as it might require a certain degree of concentration.
I find it difficult to get immersed in a book while reading in public so I usually pick a light read, something I can easily jump in and out of, but then again my commute is less than 30 minutes. A 2 hour commute such as yours would be a different matter altogether.