The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway

The Jorgmund Pipe is on fire, and Gonzo Lubitsch and his Haulage & Hazmat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company have been employed to deal it.

The Jorgmund Pipe – what it is, who created it, what it transports and why it exists at all – is the whole raison d’être of The Gone-Away World, the debut novel from Nick Harkaway.

Part science-fiction, part war story, part love story, part mystery-thriller and – perhaps more surprisingly – part comic novel – it weighs in at an impressive 544 pages and I suspect that most people will either love it or hate it. There won’t be much in the way of middle ground.

Nick Harkaway is plainly a man in love with the English language. He’s also a master of off-centre, deadpan humour and the owner of a beguilingly unhinged brain. The end result is something like ‘P G Wodehouse Does Mad Max’.

Initially, he seems to be almost incapable of telling a straight story and you wish he’d just get on with it and stop enjoying himself so much. The early chapters are strewn with wildly eccentric minor characters and apparently irrelevant plot diversions all hedged around with verbal riffs and show-stopping one liners. A personal favourite – of many – is:

Captain Carsville is a fantasist who lives war as movies. He’s something between a running joke and a sucking chest wound.

Gradually however the disparate threads and characters begin to converge, and Harkaway proceeds to weave them deftly into a narrative that is by turns moving, terrifying and hilarious. Along the way we meet the Matahuxee Mime Combine, the Found Thousand, the Voiceless Dragon and Old Man Lubitsch’s giant killer bees.

It’s almost impossible to try to explain what the book is about without giving away far too much of the plot. Suffice it to say that the world as we know it has ended, but mankind has been rescued by Jorgmund and its Pipe. Gonzo and his motley assortment of friends run their business from The Nameless Bar, which is where we first find them – about to go out and tackle the blaze which is threatening mankind’s tenuous hold on ‘the Livable Zone’. Before they can do so, however, we have to find out how they fetched up there in the first place . . .

Harkaway’s characters – even the bit part players – are strongly drawn, with a deft hand. He’s particularly good with the women, who while not quite as eccentric as the men, are infinitely more practical (which is, of course, exactly how it should be). His descriptions of the chaos of warfare are both vivid and disconcertingly matter-of-fact, and he possesses that very rare gift – the ability to make the small hairs on the back of your neck rise up.

He is in fact that old fashioned creature, a natural story-teller, and The Gone-Away World is – for all its linguistic pyrotechnics and modern allusions – a stonkingly well-told adventure story. It has, refreshingly, a beginning, a middle and an end. Granted, the middle is at the beginning and the beginning is in the middle, but the end is firmly in the right place, and by the time you get to it you realize that most of those extraneous characters and irrelevant plot diversions were neither extraneous nor irrelevant. Everything fits.

It’s a tour de force which will either infuriate the living hell out of you or hold you spellbound.

Mark me down as ‘Spellbound’. Eventually.

The Gone-Away World is published by William Heinemann Ltd. 2008. 544pp. ISBN 10: 0434018422. ISBN 13: 978-0434018420.