Wednesday 24 July 2013

The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway

Harkaway presents us with a hell that is left when the weapon to end all wars instead ends the world as we know it. Humanity in this future is confined to the Livable zone: a thin strip alongside the Jorgmund Pipe which sprays out a substance known as FOX. Outside this safe area there are horrors, people don't stay people, there are mutants, all the dark things we were afraid of in the forests of our imaginations. Our narrator rides with lifelong friend Gonzo and the rest of the crew of roughnecks known as the Haulage and HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Comapny of Exmoor County, corporate HQ the Nameless Bar. They are the troubleshooters of this new world and when the Jorgmund Pipe catastrophically explodes they are the ones sent into fix the breach. But something terrible happens to Gonzo and everything that we readers thought we knew gets turned on its head with a sickening lurch. Narration moves between the past, to life growing up with Gonzo in cosy Cricklewood Cove, school and finding peace with martial arts, across a glittering cast of characters moving across the post apocalyptic landscape of this new world to a terrible truth coiled at the heart of the Jorgmund Corporation. Bewitching and often confusing, but confused is where you should be cos then you start thinking

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