The Gone-Away World, by Nick Harkaway


I didn't really know anything about this book until the proof arrived on my desk. It looks like there's been a certain amount of hype around it, if only because of the size of the advance and the fact that 'Nick Harkaway' is the son of a famous author, but clearly it hadn't registered on my radar. However, the proof was interesting (and lavish) enough to make me want to take a look.

Normally, publishers proofs are just oversized paperbacks, often cheaply bound, and often with no cover artwork, just cheap slightly-thicker-than-a-normal-page covers. Not this one, though. this was a hardback. Which came in a presentation box. With a (slightly) personalised letter which, amongst other things, said that this was only the first run of proofs - implying that there'll be more traditional set coming along at a later date. I have a rough idea of how much these things must have cost to put together, and while it isn't an awful lot, the 161 copies they've produced must have set the publishers back a fair bit. They clearly have very serious hopes for this book - I can't remember ever seeing so much money spent on a proof campaign, and given that this is a first novel I find it even more surprising.

Or at least I did, until I started reading the book. Now, William Heinemann is not an imprint I normally expect to be publishing this sort of book. Their fiction output is normally on the Kathy Reichs-edge of things, along with a fair few regional sagas. To be fair, they have produced some lovely bits of more literary work in the past few years, such as Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow and Q by Luther Blissett. But the only works of science-fiction I can think of from their list - and The Gone-Away World is s-f, even if they don't really want it to be - are the Night/Day/Twilight Watch books by Sergei Lukyanenko. And although those are alright, in their own way (well, alright, the first one was - I didn't bother with the others), they aren't interesting. They aren't very clever. And they certainly aren't the kind of thing that has much of an audience among people who don't normally read books that could be easily pigeon-holed as 's-f'.

All of which is to suggest, obviously, that I think Harkaway's book is all of those things. Despite the fact that it will be positioned as literary fiction, this is a sci-fi book. Post-apocalyptic, geeky, full of unneccessary ninjas and wild diversions and crazy science - I totally believe that it stands up as a mainstream book, and I think it will do well, but it could just as easily be sold to the small-but-loyal SF community. I think I prefer this method of marketing, though, the one that will reach the people who read Oryx and Crake or The Book of Dave and didn't flinch. If the book is good - and it is - then why stick it in a ghetto? Some people will be put off by the subject matter, but many more will read it and enjoy it, although they would never have picked it up if it had a generic SF cover.

Having said that, I haven't seen the actual cover yet - so I'm making a lot of assumptions based on the proof campaign, and the blurbs that have been released and so on. If it turns out that the end product has a badly-created CGI cover of exploding buildings and mutants and so on, all of the above was wrong. Actually scrap that, in-between first writing that paragraph and now, the cover has appeared on Amazon. S'alright, actually. Bit bland, but doesn't do the terrible-sci-fi thing, which is good.

Anyway, the book is really rather fun. Hard to talk about without giving much away, to be honest, and given that the twisty bit in the plot in many ways defines the book - for better or worse - I don't really want to spoil it for anyone. It opens very strongly with a chapter setting the scene and introducing us to a few of the main characters, and then jumps back to the (unnamed) narrator's childhood and works forward from there. I think it would be safe to say that this is not a normal childhood, and as the character gets older things become more and more off-kilter. There are some lovely bits of prose in here, although they can sometimes get swamped amongst the pop-culture references and occasional slightly-too-clever sentence/paragraph/chapter/book construction issues. Some people will hate the twist because it sort of comes out of nowhere, although in fairness I did go 'oh, of course' when I got to it. I think one could argue that it breaks the spine of the book, to be honest - what comes after the revelation doesn't feel as important (or fun) as what came before, but at the same time it also provides a purpose to a novel that, otherwise, could have just been a fun picaresque runaround.

Anyway, I liked it more than well enough, and I think it'll do well. Enough to justify the expense? No idea, but then I'm not a publisher. I finished it just before going on holiday, and read a very very nice proof (I did say that already, right?), which was called 'Iggy'. Sadly, Iggy isn't an especially major character in the book, but there you go. Someone out there has one called 'Gonzo', and I wish I did. The book is published in June, ISBN: 0434018422.