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    The Gone-Away World
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    The Gone-Away World
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    The Gone-Away World
    Audiobook22 hours

    The Gone-Away World

    Written by Nick Harkaway

    Narrated by Matt Bates

    4/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    The Jorgmund Pipe is the backbone of the world, and it's on fire. Gonzo Lubitsch, professional hero and troubleshooter, is hired to put it out - but there's more to the fire than meets the eye. A story of love and loss; of ninjas and pirates; and of a friendship stretched beyond its limits. But it also the story of a world, not unlike our own, in desperate need of heroes - however unlikely they may seem.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherW. F. Howes Ltd
    Release dateApr 3, 2014
    ISBN9781471262760
    Unavailable
    The Gone-Away World

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    Reviews for The Gone-Away World

    4/5

    621 ratings58 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      The narrator's tone is a cross between that of Pushing Daisies, Spider Jerusalem, and Kurt Vonnegut. Trippy, stylized, rambunctious and weird, with a highly political undertone. Years ago, mankind's most fearsome weapon was invented: the Go Away bomb. Simply put, it removed its targets from existence. Completely. But what was supposed to consequence-free proved to have fall-out beyond mankind's wildest nightmares--or rather, *comprised* of mankind's wildest nightmares. After months of fighting back intangible enemies and twisted chimera, a savior appears. The Jorgmund corporation has produced FOX, a liquid that dematerializes the unreal. With FOX constantly spraying above and about them, the remnants of humanity can go about their daily business as though nothing has changed.

      When the pipe that sprays FOX is attacked, only the ragtag group of ex-covert ops soldiers that comprise the Haulage and HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company can save the day. But before this, the Company's shining hour, we flashback to their childhoods and training. And that's where the fun really begins. Zaher Bey and his band of raucus, piratical revolutionaries; the nature of corporations; martial arts training; belling ones windows against ninjas; the gritty horror and boredom of war; falling in love; a fleet of desperately loyal mimes--all this and more!

      There are some serious twists and turns in this book. Literally 350 pages in, the entire story is turned on its head--and I bought it completely. It made perfect sense. The twists, betrayals, paradigm shifts and last-minute reveals continue right until the very last few pages. THIS BOOK IS VERY EXCITING!




      SPOILERY SENTENCES THAT I LOVED FROM THE LAST PARAGRAPH:
      "The world we knew is gone for good this time. The new one is beautiful and dangerous. It is *us*."
    • 1/5
      Oct 2012 - I read 6% of the ebook and I'm just not interested.I'm intrigued by the Go Away War and the people that aren't people, but I'm also just a little too confused by all the tangents that seem to happen in the middle of paragraphs. Maybe I'll try again another time, but it isn't the book for me at the moment.
    • 3/5
      At first I thought it was messy but weirdly compelling. Then a long background story about the best friends (the narrator and his friend Gonzo) from childhood to adulthood but this is absolutely not boring. But confusing.
      The world they grow up in is a world we recognize, but then. A war.
      A war with a weapon promised to be clean. But killing can not be clean, in minutes madness is worldwide. Something new, something old, life continues. This world is fairy tales a horror. Humans talent to find "normality" in the strangest time's makes for a serious and hilarious story.
      ?
    • 5/5
      WTF. This book sucked my brain out for several days. I had to read it very fast, as the library wanted it back, but it's such a polysyllabic impressionistic stew of a book that I don't think that mattered. Some of the other reviews sum it up well. Part Philip K. Dick with a bit of Stanislav Lem, part Dickensian social satire, Catch-22 meets Lake Wobegon Days: the book is insane.I will go and read another of this author's novels, but not for a while, when I've got my breath back. It takes stamina, but it was worth the ride.MB 15-xii-2021
    • 5/5
      I loved this book. The Gone-Away World is a rip-roaring apocalyptic adventure story delivered in almost (but not really) stream-of-consciousness style. It is complete with danger, love, mystery, tension, ninjas, mimes and... well, I'll say no more because I don't want to spoil it for any other readers. Suffice to say that it's a wild ride with lots & lots of hilarious and heart-breaking digressions along the way. Once Harkaway begins to wrap things up, the denouement pulls it all together beautifully.
    • 5/5
      What was this book?

      I started out reading a blokey kind of adventure story kind of thing then suddenly I'm in the middle of science fiction, both very good I might add...but what the...??.

      But as you read you can feel the landscape slowly changing as you go along but it's not quite clear where we are going. Was he making it up as he went along? It definitely did not feel like a planned out piece of work but somehow that added to the tension.

      After a couple of chapters that bordered on zombie hunting territory then we end up on what is one of the best delves into what constitutes identity. In fact I thought it was all about identity....or was it?

      It was a bit like 26 capitals in 21 days but it was so well done. It's been a while since I had to catch my breath in a book but here it is, this one did.

      It seems a but unfair to even try to summarise this book because the reading experience is not singular in any way but I can say that it is superb, spacious and very wide in both scope, intention and achievement.

      Don't not read this book, it is a sizeable undertaking but make room for it.
    • 5/5
      This is one of the most extraordinary and inventive books I have ever read. The author just lays on layer after layer of strange, and manages to make it work by the sheer audacity of keeping going.

      I'm deliberately saying nothing about content because much of the pleasure of this book comes from discovering the world it creates, so I don't think I can say anything descriptive without taking something away from that. Just read it!
    • 1/5
      Annoying! We are left hung in the middle of a crisis in the first section, so the author can take us leisurely into the past lives of his characters. Drawn out so long, I abandoned them all.
    • 5/5
      I seriously loved this book.
    • 5/5
      Nick Harkaway is a master of painting zany inside a deep meaningful novel. A truly unique experience and one of the few books that might actually read completely different upon a reread (which I will do someday). I loved the humor. I loved the characters and I loved the story. Read this story and let it take you in completely unexpected directions. Just when you think you have a grasp on where it is heading he hits you with a mallet.
    • 4/5
      This is a science fiction book, but that is only a cover - its really about war, and how war affects a person - the atrocities a soldier has to perform. Its also a very dark comedy. Between the mime troupe, the very evil stereotype corporation, down to the crew on the Haulage & HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company of Exmoor County. And Martial Arts - not just any, but "House of Voiceless Dragon", a very secret martial arts style that is being systematically being wiped out by an enemy with a grudge lasting eons.Its also story about choices - how your past influences you choices for the future. The story of Gonzo and the nameless narrator, best friends since early childhood, and still together a number of years later.The Nameless War is also a symbol for all that is loss in war - dreams, names, people - those who come out of war, both civilian and soldier, have always lost part of themselves.All of this shouldn't work. But it does, and it is brilliant.
    • 5/5
      I got this via SantaThing last year and it finally made it's way to the top of my TBR queue. I'm not finished by a long shot and I'm still calling it early that it's going to be a favorite. Whomever picked this for me nailed it.Gloriously weird and undefinable. Genre-bending and summary-defiant. A truly outrageous Jem. Sort of a joyous dystopian, coming-of-age, buddy roadtrip book that's just a torrent of color and detail kind of in a vein close to Tom Robbins, maybe. Features ninjas and pigs as power generators and just...fantastic. Read it.
    • 5/5
      I hated every second. i loved every second. This is not usually my particular cup of tea but I read an excerpt and then needed to know what happened. This is a case where the eBook worked in the author's favor because I did not know how long this story was going to be, because I would have probably backed away, SLOWLY, when I saw the size of the actual book. There were times I wanted to give up, where I rued my own lack of imagination in that moment, but Harkaway gets you back in, he pulls you back, inch by inch, slowly. I thought I would hate the ending; I ended up loving the ending. And now, I cannot wait for Angelmaker.
    • 5/5
      It seems like the post-apocalyptic/dystopian genre is becoming more popular lately. The bulk of these, as tends to happen, are perhaps not awful, but tend to run along similar lines, with similar characters and similar worlds; and some of these in turn spawn another wave, and etc... In any case, there are plenty of post-apocalyptic novels out there, some of them very good and well-written, classics even; most of them the usual redundancies, or vapid variations on a theme...

      Agh, no. Bad! No ranting! Sorry. Sorry.

      Anyway. This is not one of those books of the second type, if not exactly a classic. Its characters, writing, and world are entertaining, often comic, but not to the point of silliness. Sure, there are no end of improbable elements--evil ninjas, nightmare creatures made real, feats of heroism and villainy, and a talking mime (spokesman for the peripatetic Matahuxee Mime Combine). Which surely leaves out quite a bit, but just read the book. Anyway, like I was saying, the ridiculous cooperates nicely with the serious (death, un-war ["...some kind of hyper-violent peace in which people will die."], regular war, friendship, family, alienation, genocide, moral dilemmas...questions of identity, humanity, reality...and so on. (Yeah, the author has a degree in philosophy.) Anyway, there are goodly helpings of shenanigans and bravado, intermixed with loyalty and loss, spiced with wit and generously laced with truth. [A little much..? Sorry, it's getting on lunchtime.]

      So, yeah. It's worth your time. I promise. It's a fun ride, and chances are you'll learn something as well.
    • 5/5
      The world is a crazy place. Money and politics can lead to war and every war creates new technological advancements. During the Gone-Away War the worst possible weapon is created; a bomb that makes everything go away. It takes away the information from everything it touches. Little did the scientists know that the world would try and correct itself with new information pulled from the imagination. The narrator takes us on a wild and amusing journey through his life both past and present, but is it his life?This is an anti-war, dystopian, martial arts, alternate universe, unreliable narrator novel with mimes and pirates. The author manages to pull all these threads together to create a very enjoyable story. Nick Harkaway is the kind of writer that you would love reading no matter what he writes. His writing is descriptive and humorous. I admit I like Harkaway’s second novel "Angelmaker" more than this one. If he keeps improving with each novel I can’t wait to read his next one.
    • 4/5
      Not sure how to really categorize this book. I enjoyed it quite a bit. It was some kind of mix between Vonnegut, Heinlein, and Dumas....or something. I'm hiding the review because there were other reviews I read that had enough spoilers in them to send me in the direction of the novel. There is a twist in the book about 2/3rds of the way in and the narrator is unnamed. That is enough to give away the twist, not really before it happens, but while it is happening - which is bad enough.
      I thought that the twist of the narrator being "new" was handled about as well as it could have been - but I'm still thinking about whether or not it was necessary. I guess it probably was to humanize the new people. The structure and the pacing of the novel were good enough to keep me moving along and there were many funny moments. I think it could have dug deeper in the satirical without making such easy jokes as laughing at corporate culture. That is too easy to satirize. However, I give it an enthusiastic thumbs-up.
    • 5/5
      This is the kind of book that might sound slightly more bonkers than it actually is when described. Because yes, these six hundred pages ARE filled with ninjas, pirate monks, college freedom fighters turned into porn stars, mutant bees, mysterious mimes with a political agenda, quarreling spice merchants and a doomsday weapon that just makes the enemy Go Away. And yes, this is a version of post-apocalypse where the only thing that keeps the scraps of humanity from being torn asunder by their own nightmares is the presence of a substance sprayed into the air from a huge pipeline, around which they all live. But Nick Harkaway’s stroy telling talent is such that the all-over-the-place type of imagination here never falls into the trap of plain silliness. Rather, this is a pageturner dealing with themes like dignity, humanity and the price for freedom and safety. Funny at times, though,absolutely. But also moving, gripping, and ever so slightly creepy. Gonzo Lubitsch and his friend, our narrator, are part of a trouble shooter team, specialising in dealing with leaks on the Jorgmund Pipe, the backbone that’s crucial to keep the monsters at bey and the slim ”normal” zone liveable. But the leak they are set to deal with now is bigger than anything they’ve dealt with before – a raging fire at one of the main stations. As if that wasn’t enough several of the towns in the area have had their population just anish without a trace. And right before borading the brand new trucks given to them as part of the assignment, our narrator gets a phone call – warning him not to take the job. But how could he stop larger than life Gonzo, the best friend he’s lived in the shadow of his entire life?Despite not having the time to devour it like it deserves, I had a great time with this unusual and though-provoking brick. At one point towards the end I felt worried it would never manage to bring it all home in a satisfactory fashion. But then it does, steeply but without feeling stressed at all. My only minor complaint is that I would have wanted to know a bit more about some things, that just feels a little brushed over. In a book of six hundred pages, that’s actually something in itself!
    • 3/5
      A previous LibraryThing reviewer put it concisely: "an affable, gabby, and overlong sub-Pynchon cartoon." I was trying to put my finger on just what was so irritating about it. Harkaway's writing is not even a pastiche of Pynchon: he'd be quite happy to be as erudite as Neal Stephenson and as funny as Douglas Adams, but instead reminds me of those nerdy types who corner you at parties and hold forth at great length, convinced they're sparkling conversationalists. He aims at wit but comes across as a smartarse; tries for profundity but sounds like someone who owns too many books about ninjas.Anyone who gets sick of the author's style and abandons _The Gone-Away World_ after a few hundred pages is, however, doing him a disservice. There's a major plot twist four-fifths in which makes things much more interesting, and you realise that everything that's gone before has to be seen in a completely different light, accompanied by a nagging suspicion that the author's pulled a fast one, but it would be too tedious to slog back to the beginning and check so you let it slide. Is the game worth the candle? Does this plot twist redeem quite a few passages that made me exclaim, "Oh, just shut up!" out loud while reading them? Probably not. The consequences of the twist are fudged away, we're back to an action-packed finale, and the great existential threat looming over the protagonists is hastily redefined in the last few pages as not that bad and actually quite interesting. So one's perseverance is, sadly, not rewarded.I would have enjoyed this book much more when I was an annoyingly-precocious teenager who wouldn't shut up about his nerdy preoccupations. It's the sort of book I would have liked to have written, back then. I don't have much time for it now.
    • 5/5
      An unusual take on the 'end-of-the=world' genre. Harkaway is to be congratulated for inventing a completely unique world which is peopled by ninjas and mime-artists,heros and monsters of many and varied sorts.It is only the rather conventional end that stops it achieving a full five stars.
    • 4/5
      The Jorgmund Pipe has encircled the Earth since the aftermath of the Gone Away war, an apocalypse that has killed off the bulk of humanity and left the rest living somewhat of a knife-edge existence. The chemical FOX that is sprayed from the Pipe every few metres is the only thing that allows human life to continue with any normality and venturing more than twenty miles from the pipe is a dangerous business. So when the Pipe catches fire it is a major catastrophe, requiring all the special operations expertise of the Haulage & HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company of Exmoor County. And so the unnamed narrator, his best friend Gonzo Lubitsch, and the other members of the company go into action. But after this all-action start the narrative changes pace completely as the narrator reverts to an account of his childhood, adolescence and early adulthood from his first meeting with Gonzo at the age of five, only reverting back to the action again as the narrative approaches the Gone Away war itself and the building of the Pipe. And once the narrative catches up with itself and we return for the second time to the fire on the Jorgmund Pipe, things start getting a little strange (actually, a lot strange). There's a twist in the tale that I definitely didn't see coming and the seemingly strange structure of the book suddenly makes sense.Along the way Harkaway brings in a whole raft of larger than life characters: Master Wu, the head of the House of the Voiceless Dragon from whom the narrator learns kung fu; the ninja assassins tracking him down; the modern day pirate Zaher Bey plying his trade on the lakes of the fictional Asian country of Addeh Bey. And it all takes place on the stage of a world which is subtly different from the one we know, a world where Cuba has joined with the U.K. to become the United Island Kingdoms of Britain, Northern Island and Cuba Libre, and where it's a little uncertain even where the action is taking place (Britain - probably? US - maybe?).So a fun roller-coaster of a read that keeps you bowling along with it, and at the end proves to be much more of a thoughtful book that you thought you were getting into at the beginning. It's not a grim and depressing apocalypse either: considering that most of humanity has been destroyed only a few years previously there seem to be rather more expensive shops selling designer clothing that might normally be expected. More action that I would normally read, but recommended nonetheless.
    • 3/5
      Another wild, intricate, thoughtful, and humorous epic from Nick Harkaway, or rather the original one, that I just happened to read second. It was interesting to see some of the unusual elements that were big parts of Angelmaker begin to form in this one. This one caught me by surprise a few times, and was some of the most delightful war/apocalypse fiction I've read that doesn't glorify war.
    • 5/5
      How to describe this book?

      Well, first, the style is amazing. Abigail Nussbaum called it "a relentless barrage of Neal-Stephenson-on-acid style verbiage," which is pretty much it. I haven't enjoyed anything Stephenson has written since Cryptonomicon, but The Gone-Away World reads like what you'd get if you took the old Stephenson (the one who wrote Snow Crash and The Diamond Age) and cybernetically enhanced him -- made him better, stronger, faster, weirder, funnier, British, etc. (Though Harkaway lacks Stephenson's trademark techno-didacticism.) It's possibly the most enthusiastic novel I've ever read -- not enthusiastic in a obnoxious or pollyanna way, but rather possessed of a true ability to charm, an intoxication with itself that is remarkably infectious.

      Despite that, and despite the fact that the book is packed with big action setpieces and colorful characters, it's often remarkably boring and tedious. Why? Because of a basic tension between the tone and the content -- a tension that is apparently deliberate and kind of interesting, but nonetheless problematic. The basic mood of the book is a kind of youthful, gung-ho exuberance, a complete involvement in whatever crazy (mis)adventure the protagonist and his chums have most recently gotten themselves into. The book strives to make every such experience feel real, even hyper-real, using its showy prose not to create distance but to remove it. Again and again Harkaway's narrator describes things in the following terms: in movies (or in fictional stories) this sort of event usually feels like this, but it's happening to me right now in real life and instead of feeling like that, it feels this other way instead. It's a book that wants to distill the experience of thrilling, bracing impact -- downing a shot, taking a punch -- to its essence and then stretch out that essence to 500 pages of purely impactful narrative.

      One problem with this approach is simply that impact is fundamentally a localized rather than extended sort of experience. There's only so many times a book can tell you to get off your ass solider because the shit is hitting the fan RIGHT NOW and this is fucking REAL before it begins to seem like the boy who cried wolf -- before you start to wonder why all of this fan-hitting hasn't dealt more damage to the narrative status quo. A story in which the shit is always hitting the fan should be a chaotic, entropic one, one in which the usual rules of storytelling fall by the wayside as they, like everything else, become FUBAR. But Harkaway's story, though thematically concerned with chaos (and with the end of the world), is defiantly orderly. In many ways, it's a conventional and traditional adventure story -- Harkaway names Dumas and Conan Doyle in his acknowledgements -- and a proudly cheesy one, filled with ninjas and kung fu and creatively onomatopoeia'd explosions and hidden identities and lovable wise old senseis and crazy Shyamalan twists and romantic episodes that read like teen boy wish fulfillment and video-game-ish chimeric monsters and even-more-video-game-ish fight sequences. And that's the basic contradiction of the book. The narrative voice is the constant patter of a drill sergeant telling you how real everything is and how this isn't like a movie and how the book isn't pulling any punches, which sounds tedious but is actually wonderful because this particular drill sergeant is a hypereducated mad genius of charm and rhetoric. But before long you realize that the narrative is in fact not real but cartoonish, that a Hollywood movie is exactly what it's like (Harkaway worked as a screenwriter for many years before writing this, his first novel), that the book always pulls its punches and that in fact the relentless entertainingness of the drill sergeant voice is a fundamental part of the way it pulls them.

      Harkaway, it seems, wants to make cheesy adventure stories new again by writing them better than anyone has before, by applying more virtuosity and subtlety to them than anyone has ever thought warranted. And the virtuosity and subtlety really are there, but try as they might they can't cover up the fundamental fact that the story is a unsubtle one, high in sugar and low in nutrition, whose teen-boy Awesomeness may simply not deserve Harkaway's literary flourishes. The thinness of the content is only made more clear by its contrast with the brilliance of the presentation. Harkaway is the writerly equivalent of a chef who tries to "reinvent" macaroni and cheese by preparing and presenting it in the most gourmet way possible. In the end, it's still mac and cheese, and you end up liking the noble silliness of the endeavour more than you like the actual food, feeling more fond of the chef than you do of his creation. After finishing The Gone-Away World, I felt like I loved Nick Harkaway a lot more than I loved his book, and I eagerly look forward to the day he writes something that fully lives up to his talent.

      (Despite all the carping above, I rated the book five stars, because really, how could I not? Imperfect as it may be, it deserves nothing less.)
    • 3/5
      An impressive first novel, but it didn't resonate with me personally. I don't like war settings, which was most of the middle chunk of the book. There were also a few too many words.... Sometimes it was baroque, other times, broke. Very impressive descriptions of scenes and events that defy description, like war and shifting realities. Also, there were several "gone-away" worlds, which lent depth to the book.
    • 4/5
      The Livable Zone girdling the planet is maintained by a huge Pipe that pumps out the mysterious compound FOX…but now, the pipe is on fire. The narrator and his friends, a group of former military special forces soldiers turned contractors, are tapped to put out the fire. Along the way, the narrator muses about how the world got to this point, going back over his entire life growing up with his best friend Gonzo, joining the military, and being on the front-lines when the Go-Away bombs were deployed. The Go-Away bombs were supposed to make whatever they landed upon simply go away—that is, cease to exist in any meaningful way, as opposed to being destroyed as by a conventional bomb. But it turned out that messing with the fabric of existence was the biggest mistake humanity ever made and all that loose Stuff—former matter, now identityless—floating around out there started interacting with human consciousness in some terrifying ways…thus the need for the the Pipe and the magical FOX which neutralizes the Stuff. And thus we come full-circle, as the team of friends works to put out the fire. The only problem is, in the process, some raw Stuff spilled right down the fronts of Gonzo and the narrator and now the narrator’s wife and friends are acting like they don’t know who he is and our narrator starts to wonder just what FOX is, after all, and who really owns the Pipe.Complex, fast-paced, and ever-so-twisty, The Gone-Away World¬ is impossible to categorize except to say it’s a heck of a lot of fun. Part mystery, part espionage novel, part coming-of-age story, part apocalypse, and 100% engrossing. You won’t know quite what you’re reading, but you won’t be able to stop.
    • 5/5
      It's impossible to summarize this book. Most of the time that I was reading it, I had no idea what it was actually about, and I really had no clue where the story was going. At times this was frustrating, but the writing is so much fun, the characters are so great, and the small episodes along the way are so crazy that I found myself racing through the book. The writing is hilarious, and there are ninjas, mimes, pirates, and all sorts of crazy things. There is a major plot twist towards the end that totally blew me away, and then when I finally got to the explanation for the plot twist I was even more blown away. As I got to the end, I realized that what I was afraid was a totally random conglomeration of zany events actually turned out to be a finely-crafted and complex plot.The only reason this doesn't get 5 whole stars is that I can tell this is a first novel. A very ambitious first novel, but there are some uneven places, some plot inconsistencies (for instance, even though the book starts when the narrator is 5, he never mentions the existence of his parents until the very end of the book; and the geography of the post-apocalyptic world is not explained very clearly).
    • 4/5
      Put together ninjas and pirates and apocalypses in one book and you’ve got my attention. This particular apocalypse involves a weapon that causes tears in the very fabric of reality, so needless to say the book starts strange and gets stranger. But add a cynical but biting approach to bureaucracies and their capacity for inhumanity, and some great one liners and interesting plot twists, and this book has much to recommend it. It reminded me of Jasper Fforde in some ways. At times I think the length made it a little hard going, but overall it was an original and mostly enjoyable story I’m glad to have read.
    • 4/5
      Dizzying blend of action and science fiction with smarts and heart, and twists and turns that astonish throughout. Ancient Kung Fu orders do battle with modern‐day armies, half‐man, half‐mutant monsters, creators of the ultimate doomsday weapon...and mimes. Serious fun.
    • 5/5
      With all the promotion accompanying the publication of this book the story probably needs little introduction? However just in case: it is set in Britain in the not very distant future. We join the story and after the Go-Away War when civilisation relies upon and lives within reach of the globe encircling Jorgmund Pipe; and who knows what inhabits the regions beyond its reach? Problem: the pipe is on fire and professional trouble-shooter and all-round hero Gonzo Lubitsch and his crew are hired to extinguish the fire - but there is more to the fire, and the pipe than it seems. As we follow Gonzo and his best friend (our apparently happily married narrator) in their exploits the story takes us back to their childhood and the time before the Go-Away War; we learn of the origins of their friendship, follow them to university and through military service and their subsequent involvement in the Go-Away War. Then we follow the story again post War, and this is when we learn of the effects of the fall-out, as well as more about the mysterious Jorgmund Company; we gradually understand the disastrous mess of a world which the Jorrmund Pipe appears to dominate and sustain. But what really makes this book something special is the quality of the writing. It is writing of such eloquence it simply demands to be read. Nick Harkaway (son of spy thriller writer John le Carré aka David Cornwell) juxtaposes the ordinary and the absurd with such naturalness that we almost don't question it; we might just pass it by if it were not so hilariously, funny at times; such is the writer's skill. Every page is a pleasure and one wants to dwell on and enjoy each word, but one is torn between lingering at leisure and becoming absorbed in the detailed byways the story regularly takes and the urgent desire to learn what happens next. One thing we can be sure is that what happens next rarely predicable. As the story unfolds we encounter a wide range of unforgettable characters in addition to our two main protagonists. I'll mention just one as it will also give an indication of the time setting: our narrator's boyhood martial arts instructor the octogenarian Mr Wu of the Voiceless Dragon School, born in the 1930s, a wise, subtle and unassuming man who is relentlessly pursued by his family's arch-enemy the Ninjas, and whose very young female assistant sleeps on his couch. In addition to an array of interesting characters we should add a parade of weird and wonderful creatures. The Gone-Away World is an amazing tale; it is a fantasy, an odyssey, an epic; it is story of upheaval and disaster, of nightmare monsters becoming reality, of loyalty and friendship, an adventure encompassing tense drama contrasting more leisurely pursuits, a story which takes us along the way, with unhurried confidence, on many detailed diversions and anecdotes, a story which jumps from the mundane to the surreal, even miraculous. But all the while the full comic potential is fully exploited, and it is all the funnier for the masterful writing, for the wry humour is as often found in the choice of expression, the turn of phrase, as in the ongoing events. That our likeable and unassuming narrator remains nameless is not inconsequential, it is crucial to the plot; and his loyalty to his friend Gonzo despite some most surprising events might also prove to be the salvation for what is left of the world.It . has been likened it to A Clockwork Orange, Catch 22 or Brave New World; it is reminiscent at time of A Hitchhikers Guide . . . Whatever comparison may be made, one thing is beyond question: it is without doubt an eminently enjoyable read and a cracking and original escapade. If all you are interested in is a quick fire story which quickly gets to the point and wastes no time you may in truth find this a laborious read. However if you enjoy reading for the shear pleasure of reading, if you enjoy the sound of words, if for you the adventure of the journey is as important as arriving, you are sure to enjoy The Gone Away World.
    • 5/5
      Amazing imagination, not the best execution with plot, kind of like Jack Vance but more engaging.
    • 4/5
      If you mixed together Mad Max, The Matrix and Saving Private Ryan then stirred in the literary juice of Great Expectations, Catch 22, a pinch of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels and perhaps even a bit of Monty Python and then asked Quentin Tarantino to write it you might expect to end up with something like this. Except that the author is not Tarantino, it's Nick Harkaway and he very much does his own thing his own way. And what he does is very good.The caveat on this recommendation is that you need a lot of stamina to make it all the way through The Gone Away World. It is worth the effort. Nick Harkaway is a very funny writer - which is part of the problem. He seems to KNOW that he's funny. He has way too much fun with his elaborate prose which can mean that every character is outrageously, self-indulgently eloquent. Long digressions drop out of nowhere, taking you further away from the plot (it seems at the time) and the whole thing can be very frustrating, verging on incomprehensible ... but hang in there, it turns out that every word counts. Once you give in to the book's verbose style and enjoy it on its own terms you'll find a marvellous, wacky, cinematically action packed and intricately plotted novel about, well, many things, not least the end of the world.