Kurt Vonnegut Jr! T. Coraghessan Boyle! Joseph Heller (maybe)! Tom Robbins! and now it appears that Nick Harkaway can be added to the list of humanistic, cynical, insanely creative authors who truck in wild & wooly tales that blur the boundaries between reality & fantasy and are filled with enormous digressions, bizarre conundrums, slippery plot twists, and the kind of dark irony that feels like a surprise smack to the head.

>the following review contains the occasional spoiler, sorry< More...

It is probably good for both of us that GR reviews have a character limit. For me, so there is a limit on my copyright violations. For you, so you won't have to read every line that I found amazing, remarkable, thoughtful, or funny. It took me two reads to compile my thoughts on The Gone-Away World, and I'm not sure we're done with each other yet. It's one of those kinds of books that offers more each time through. Not the lull of a comforting, familiar read, but the folds of the "ah-ha!" kind o More...

dear jasmine,
you and i are so diametrically opposed in all things literary. i swear i am not rating this on the lower side just to retaliate for your not loving winshaw legacy. if the truth be told, it's higher than a three, but i feel like i give out a lot of fours, and i think i may have failed this book rather than this book failing me. failing like the way i am going to fail this computer class - i.e. - spectacularly. it had a lot of things to make me respond positively - there were some tru More...

The Gone-Away World is a book that I enjoyed thoroughly, yet wasn't excited by. I'm not sure why - it had many of the attributes that I usually love. A certain sense of surrealism, of humour, of a meandering storyline, and threatening things just out of the edges of my vision. Yet I finished it feeling satisfied, but not thrilled. What did it need to take it to the next level? Or am I being too demanding? Is this feeling of deep-down satisfaction, in itself, testament to what I've read?

This is a More...

(FOR THE SHORT REVIEW SKIP TO THE BOTTOM)

Not since "Catcher in the Rye" have I felt that a book was written specifically for me. Not that much is really shared between them, except they are those rare books that brim with complete and utter awesomeness. They were also that exact book I needed to read at that exact point in life.

Upon reading the cover flap I thought I was in store for something a bit pulpy and moderately derivative. This is something I usually don't mind since I am very fond of g More...

Disclosure: I received this book through the Amazon Vine program in exchange for an honest review. I read and reviewed this book in September of 2008.

My synopsis: The narrator of The Gone-Away World - whose name we are never told - takes us on a wildly entertaining trip through his life and how it intersects with the rest of the world when a new weapon has unspeakable consequences. Often laugh-out-loud hilarious we are taken on a tour of his past until, a bit over half-way through the book, a st More...

If I had asked someone to write a book tailored specifically to my interests, attention patterns, sense of humor, and favorite writing style, while including a unique plot, unpredictable and engaging characters, and a post-apocalyptic setting unlike one I've ever seen before, they might have come up with Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World. Certainly, they could do no better. The Gone-Away World falls exactly into a certain category of novels that is impossible to describe. I could try: It's abo More...

DAG. Nick Harkaway is well into his third pint and his eleventh story when he looks around and realizes he's got half the bar hanging on his every word, and THAT's when he leans back a little, stretches his legs, and gives you a three-page backstory on a minor idiot whose chief role in the book is getting punched in the head. Because, and this is a rule, so pay attention: punching an idiot in the head is funny, not to mention satisfying, but the road that an idiot travels on his way to getting p More...

This is a book I loved so much and is such a big sprawling creation that it's hard to do it justice. Here are the essentials: our unnamed narrator is part of a search and rescue team that's been hired to put out a fire on the one thing saving normal human life around the earth: the Jorgamund Pipe.

Why is the Pipe so essential? Not too long ago in the Gone-Away war, a new weapon was used that has made what we know as straight reality disappear and something called Stuff replace it. Stuff takes th More...

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 b More...

I selected this book because it was on offer for $6 if I spent $50 at Angus and Robertson. There were 5 other books to chose from and they all looked equally unpromising. I hated the cover the blurb screamed "long, infantile sci-fi and a waste of time" but I never pass up the opportunity for a cheap book - especially if the sticker price is $38.99. I read it anyway and was completely sucked in! It's a bit of an existential mind-fuck, comparable to the novel "Vurt". Wild, stupid, fun, completely More...

“The Gone-Away World” (Knopf, $24.95, there no page numbers: too long) has a confusing hero and plenty of wheels within wheels, but Nick Harkaway is simply too in love with his own cleverness in this wordy, overlong work that has mile-wide holes in the plot.

Harkaway is amusing for a while, and his premise that the world has been unalterably changed by a war that has divided the planet into “safe” and “unsafe” is interesting – but his grasp of geography seems no firmer than his grasp of incidents More...

first of all, the cover is pink. and fuzzy. i'm not sure what this is supposed to signify, but you shouldn't be put off by it.

on the surface, this book is a sci-fi, post-apocalyptic sort of story, but like all really good books, it's much more. the sci-fi is a sort of back drop more than the reason for the story's existence. i will admit that it comes off a bit cheesy at first (read the publisher's review), but after a short while i found the characters interesting, and found myself rooting for More...

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 More...

I was initially excited to read this book because I love post-apocalyptic fiction and because the first reviewers of the book seemed to think it was a wonderful work of fiction. The publishers gave Harkaway a little over $535,000 to write the book, so I was hoping that there was a reason for it other than that Harkaway is the son of famous author John le Carre.

Unfortunately, I found myself thinking the publishers got a raw deal since the problems I had with the first 2 pages continued throughou More...

Very few wildly plotted, manic, Dickens-meets-Pynchon-the Matrix-Drunken Master, post-apocalyptic, comic ninja novels turn out to be that good or satisfying. Usually they can't hold it together or aren't as funny as they think they are or telegraph all their surprises and plot twists about a hundred pages before it happens. This book avoids all those traps. I'm tempted to say things like "it's the best post-apocalyptic comic novel you'll ever read," or something else along those lines, but then More...

Crazy pirate ship of a book. Hilarious descriptions/side stories, this reads like a drunken and possibly ill-advised night at a dive bar with ninjas. Took me forever to get through, though. Not because it was bad, but because it sometimes hurt my head. Update: I made Melissa read this book because she's smarter than me and she explained the whole twist thing. I'm crushed. And more confused. Thanks Mo, (I think).

I can't even think of what to say. I love this book, madly. The book is technically science fiction, but in the way that a unicorn is technically a horse.

The writing is brilliant. Scintillatingly infused with joy. It calls to mind Joseph Heller's Catch-22, if Heller had also loved ninja and mimes. Vonnegut, without the detachment. Pratchett without the cloying quality to the whimsy.

Quite simply the best thing I've read in quite some time and easily the most enjoyable book I've ever read. Ever. More...

Dalla lettura della trama mi ero preparato a catapultarmi in un universo assurdo. Il primo capitolo inizia bene. Con i nostri eroi seduti in un bar sperso in mezzo al nulla (nel vero senso del termine).
Ecco che vengono reclutati per una missione e
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BAM
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per circa 150 pagine facciamo un salto indietro di una trentina d'anni per seguire gli antefatti. Se si trattasse solo degli antefatti della guerra del Nulla potrei anche capirlo (ma non per 150 pagine) ma ripercorrere tutta la vita dei due More...

The Jorgmund Pipe is on fire. It shouldn’t be, because it was designed to be the most resilient structure ever built by humans; but then again, the very notion of things that should or should not be looks kind of quaint in this future. The Pipe is vital because of what it carries around the world: a substance called FOX that keeps the Unreal at bay. The fire must be put out, and who better to do so than the people who constructed the Pipe in the first place? That small band of people are hired b More...

Originally published on my blog here in July 2009.

The first chapter of The Gone-Away World describes an unusual post-apocalyptic scenario: the Earth has suffered a complete warping of reality, where places disappear and people turn into monsters, except where the mysterious Pipe pumps Stuff into the air to stabilise normality. The next 350 pages of the novel describe how this disaster came about, through the eyes of a faithful sidekick. Although this sounds like a typical science fiction scenari More...

I think I struggled with this because I read it right after finishing Angelmaker, which I adored, but which is, to my mind, infinitely better than this. Which is also nice - goodness knows how many second books aren't as good as a debut, so I'm relieved in a sense.

Also, I read about 2/3 of this in one go, then the final third a couple of weeks later, and I had huge difficulty getting back into it.

Whilst there are wonderful concepts, interesting characters and blinding bits of prose, I completel More...

Wow, just an amazing book. Long, but very hard to put down, and I spent multiple nights not getting as much sleep as I should have. Interesting start of one chapter in the "present", then spending 2/3 of the book giving background, history, and context up to the "present", and the rest then follows. I think I liked that formula, since things were so different and hard to understand in that first chapter, and yet in reading through the past you knew where things had to end up. In the final 1/3, m More...

The Goneaway World is a novel that aspires to be a whole bunch of things at once. It's a breathless adventure story, with pirates, ninjas, mad scientists, and covert military units. It's a coming-of-age story about a young man and his best friend. It's a sardonic satire, criticizing the excesses of capitalism and militarism in a Kurt Vonnegut-like style. It's a post-apocalypse story. It's an absurd, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy-style romp, complete with a crack unit of mimes. It's a metaphys More...

While not as good as his second novel, Angelmaker, this one is just as inventive and entertaining. Harkaway gives us another doomsday scenario; here the catalyst is a weapon that will simply make the enemy go away. Once unleashed, it seems very efficient until the gone-away victims start returning in grotesque, threatening forms. Only a mysterious substance called Fox, carried in a pipe around the world, keeps the remnants of civilization safe, and as the book opens, the pipeline is threatened b More...

Opening: "Chapter One. Where it all began; pigs and crisis; close encounters with management. The lights went out in the Nameless Bar just after nine."

This is a book which is extremely hard to describe. It is a comedy, except when it's not. It's a treatise on the foolishness of war, except when it's not. It's a serious book, with ninjas and mimes.

It's also extremely hard to put down, as my finishing it at 2 am will attest.

While it has the humor of a satire or a mad comedy (and sometimes both a More...

Where do I even start on this mind bending book. At times I wanted to throw it at the wall, at other times I was glued to it. It starts off so slowly and is written in a very complicated style that takes a bit of getting used to.

Even now after finishing it Im still not entirely sure whether I loved it or hated it. The books beginning is the worst it drags at times and you feel that most of the plotlines are unneccessary but as the book continues every tiny sub plot and main plot tie together so More...

While giving the appearance of being a dystopian science-fiction anti-war novel, Harkaway's debut is ostensibly an anti-corporate screed that goes far beyond any narrow sense of genre and incorporates a vast array of themes. The structure, plot and characters owe a great deal to Thomas Pynchon, but the book is a literary page turner the likes of which Pynchon had never produced until Inherent Vice, and the ending is far more satisfying than the bulk of Pynchon's work. Like his father, John Le Ca More...

This book presents itself as a rather well written sci-fi novel about the end of the world. After a few dozen pages, I realized the prose was far too good to limit it to just that.

The Gone-Away World begins after "the event", something appropriately world-shattering that the bleakness seeps through after the first 5 pages. It begins as if to detail some grand adventure, then rewinds to the child hood of the narrator and begins from there. Harkaway violates the major rule of writing with correct More...