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The Gone-Away World (Vintage Contemporaries) Paperback – August 11, 2009
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Gonzo Lubitch and his best friend have been inseparable since birth. They grew up together, they studied kung-fu together, they rebelled in college together, and they fought in the Go Away War together. Now, with the world in shambles and dark, nightmarish clouds billowing over the wastelands, they have been tapped for an incredibly perilous mission. But they quickly realize that this assignment is more complex than it seems, and before it is over they will have encountered everything from mimes, ninjas, and pirates to one ultra-sinister mastermind, whose only goal is world domination.
- Print length592 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateAugust 11, 2009
- Dimensions5.1 x 1.22 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100307389073
- ISBN-13978-0307389077
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Review
“Harkaway delivers plenty of action and surprises.... Likely to be this season’s major conversation-starter.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“A gripping, satirical, postapocalyptic war epic populated with mimes, ninjas, bureaucrats, chimera, and gun-toting nerds.” —New York Magazine
"Very funny and hugely entertaining.... And brilliant. Read it." —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"Bewilders, amazes, entertains.... a Catch-22 for the 21st century.... a work of extraordinary imagination and charisma...genius" —The New York Observer
"Leaves the reader gasping for both adjectives and description. It's a powerful and accomplished first novel that weaves elements of romance, mystery, SF/F and—yes—thriller together in a way that leaves no doubt that the master storyteller gene really is something that can be passed along." —January Magazine
"Vivid and exciting. Harkaway manages to meld a vision of war more germane to today's world, and take it to its most horrifying, apocalyptic conclusion." —Charleston City Paper
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The lights went out in the Nameless Bar just after nine. I was bent over the pool table with one hand in the bald patch behind the D, which Flynn the Barman claimed was beer, but which was the same size and shape as Mrs. Flynn the Barman's arse: nigh on a yard in the beam and formed like the cross-section of a cooking apple. The fluorescent over the table blinked out, then came back, and the glass-fronted fridge gave a low, lurching hum. The wiring buzzed—and then it was dark. A faint sheen of static danced on the TV on its shelf, and the green exit lamp sputtered by the door.
I dropped my weight into the imprint of Mrs. Flynn the Barman's hams and played the shot anyway. The white ball whispered across the felt, came off two cushions, and clipped the eight cleanly into a side pocket. Doff, doff, tchk . . . glonk. It was perfect. On the other hand, I'd been aiming for the six. I'd given the game to Jim Hepsobah, and any time now when the power came back and everything was normal in the Nameless Bar, I'd pass the cue to my hero pal Gonzo, and Jim would beat him too.
Any time now.
Except that the lights stayed out, and the hollow glimmer of the TV set faded away. There was a small, quiet moment, the kind you just have time to notice, which makes you feel sad for no good reason. Then Flynn went out back, swearing like billy-o—and if your man Billy-O ever met Flynn, if ever there was a cuss-off, a high noon kinduva thing with foul language, I know where my money'd be.
Flynn hooked up the generator, which God help us was pig-powered. There was the sound of four large, foul-smelling desert swine being yoked to a capstan, a noise pretty much like a minor cavalry war, and then Flynn let loose some of his most abominable profanity at the nearest porker. It looked as if it wanted to vomit and bolted. The others perforce followed it in a slow but steady progression about the capstan, and then pig number one came back around, saw Flynn ready with another dose and tried to stop. Lashed to the crosspiece and bundled along by its three fellows, it found it couldn't, so it gathered its flabcovered self and charged past him at piggy top speed, and the whole cycle accelerated until, with a malodorous, oinking crunch, the generator kicked in, and the television lit up with the bad news.
Or rather, it didn't light up. The picture was so dim that it seemed the set was broken. Then there were fireworks and cries of alarm and fear, very quiet but getting louder, and we realised Sally Culpepper was just now turning on the sound. The image shook and veered, and urgent men went past shouting get back, get clear, and ohshitlookatthatfuckerjesus, which they didn't even bother to bleep. In the middle distance, it looked as if maybe a figure was rolling on the ground. Something had gone absolutely, horribly awry in the world, and naturally some arsehole was present with a camera making himself 10k an hour hazard pay when he could have been rolling up his arsehole sleeves and saving a life or two. I knew a guy in the Go Away War who did just that, dumped the network's prized Digi VII in a latrine trench and hauled six civilians and a sergeant from a burning medical truck. Got the Queen's Honour back home and a P45 from his boss. He's in an institution now, is Micah Monroe, and every day two guys from the Veterans' Hospital come by and take him for a walk and make sure the medal's polished on its little stand by his bed. They're sweet old geezers, Harry and Hoyle, and they've got medals of their own and they figure it's the least they can do for a man who lost his mind to giving a damn. Harry's kid was in the medical truck, you see. One of the ones Micah couldn't reach.
We stared at the screen and tried to make sense of what was on it. It looked, for a moment, as if the Jorgmund Pipe was on fire—but that was like saying the sky was falling. The Pipe was the most solidly constructed, triple-redundant, safety-first, one-of-a-kind necessary object in the world. We built it fast and dirty, because there was no other way, the gone-away world and then after that we made it indestructible. The plans were drawn up by the best, then checked and re-checked by the very best, and then the checkers themselves were scrutinised, analysed and vetted for any sign of fifth columnism or martyr tendencies, or even a serious and hitherto undetected case of just-plain-stupid, and then the contractors went to work under a scheme which emphasised thoroughness and adherence to spec over swift completion, and which imposed penalties so dire upon speculators and profiteers that it would actually be safer just to throw yourself from a high place, and finally the quantity surveyors and catastrophe experts went to town on it with hammers and saws, lightning generators and torsion engines, and declared it sound. Everyone in the Livable Zone was united in the desire to maintain and safeguard it. There was absolutely no chance that it could imaginably, conceivably, possibly be on fire.
It was on fire in a big way. The Pipe was burning painful white, magnesium, corpse-belly, nauseating white, and beside it there were buildings and fences, which meant this wasn't just the Pipe, but something even more important: a pumping station or a refinery. The whole place was wrapped in hot, shining smoke, and deep in the heart of the furnace there was stuff going on the human eye didn't know what to do with, weird, bad-news stuff which came with its own ominous soundtrack. On the screen something very important crumbled into noise and light.
"Fuuuuuuck," said Gonzo William Lubitsch, speaking for everyone.
It was a funny feeling: we were looking at the end of the world— again—and we were looking at something awful we'd never wanted to see, but at the same time we were looking at fame and fortune and just about everything we could ever ask for delivered by a grateful populace. We were looking at our reason for being. Because that thar on that thar screen was a fire, plus also a toxic event of the worst kind, and we, Ladies and Gentlemen, put your hands together, were the Haulage & HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company of Exmoor County (corporate HQ the Nameless Bar, CEO Sally J. Culpepper, presiding) and this was the thing that we did better than anyone else in the entire Livable Zone, and therefore anywhere. Sally was straightaway talking to Jim Hepsobah and then to Gonzo, making lists and giving orders.
She set Flynn the Barman to brewing his chews-through-steel espresso, and at last even Mrs. Flynn was up off her on-board cushions and moving at flank speed to make provisions, prepare tallies, and take letters for loved ones and estranged ones and people glimpsed and admired across the floating ash of the Nameless Bar. We ran to and fro and bumped into one another and swore, mostly because we didn't have anything important to do yet, and there was hubbub and brouhaha until Sally jumped up on the pool table and told us to shut up and get it together. She raised her phone above our heads like the thigh bone of a saint.
Sally Culpepper was six feet tall and much of her was leg, and on her right shoulder blade she had an orchid tattoo inked by some kid a quarter-inch shy of Michelangelo. She had strawberry lips and creamy skin and freckles across her nose where it'd been rebuilt after a bar fight in Lisbon. Gonzo claimed to have slept with her, to have had those legs wrapped around his hips like conjoined Italian calf-skin boa constrictors. He said she left him all but dead and grinning like a crescent moon. He said it happened one night after a big job, beer running from the rafters and everyone shiny as an egg yolk with success and soap-scoured skin. He said it was that time when Jim and Sally were trying not to be a thing, before they just gave in to the inevitable and got a place together. Every time we all met up, me and Gonzo and Sally and Jim Hepsobah and the others, Gonzo'd throw her a wicked grin and ask her how her other tattoo was, and Sally Culpepper would smile a secret smile which said she wasn't telling, and maybe he knew what that other tattoo looked like and maybe he didn't. Jim Hepsobah just pretended he hadn't heard, because Jim loved Gonzo like a brother, and love like that recognises that your buddy can be an ass, and doesn't care. We all loved Sally Culpepper, and she ruled us with her transparent lashes and her milkmaid's face and her slender arms that could drop a punch on you like a steam hammer. So there she stood, and there was a reasonable facsimile of calm and attention, because we knew that if the call came it would come on that phone, and we knew she had five-offive reception here, and that was one of the reasons why the Nameless Bar was our place of business.
So we stopped hunting for lost socks and packing bags, and fretting that we'd somehow miss the starting gun, and settled in to Mrs. Flynn's provender. After a while we got quietly chatty and talked about small domestic chores, like cleaning gutters and chasing bats out of the loft. When the phone did ring (any time now), we could go and be heroes and save the world, which was Gonzo's favourite thing, and perforce something I did from time to time as well. Until it kicked off, we might as well not fuss. And then the Nameless Bar went quiet again; in little groups and one by one we fell silent as we beheld a vision of awful destiny.
The vision took the form of a small child carrying a snot-crusted and elderly teddy bear. It marched out into the room with much gravitas, surveyed us all sternly, then turned to Mrs. Flynn the Barman to gather in details for the prosecution.
"Why was it all dark?" it demanded.
"The power went out," Mrs. Flynn the Barman said cheerfully.
"There's a fire." The child glowered around the room.
"These are loud men," it said, still annoyed, "and this one is dirty."
It indicated Gonzo, who winced. It considered Sally Culpepper.
"This lady has a flower on her back," it added, having found conclusive proof of our unsuitability, then sat down in the middle of the floor and helped itself to a cheese and bacon roll. We goggled at it, and tried to make it go away by rubbing our eyes.
"Sorry," Mrs. Flynn the Barman said to us in general. "We don't let him in here normally, but it's an emergency." She eyed the child without approval. "Sweetie, you can't eat that; it's been on the floor near the dirty man."
Gonzo would probably have objected to this, but he didn't seem to hear her; he was still gazing in mute horror at the kid in front of him, and so was I, and so was everyone else. It was unquestionably a human toddler, and from the context certain conclusions had to be drawn which were uncomfortable and even appalling. This infant, swaddled in a bath towel and presently attempting to jam a four-inch-diameter granary bap into one ear, was the Spawn of Flynn.
Now, the fire on the Jorgmund Pipe was deeply unsettling. It represented danger and opportunity and almost certainly deceptions and agendas and what all. It was, however, well within our common understanding.
Things burned, things exploded, and then we came along and made them stop. A breeding population of Flynns was another proposition altogether. We looked on Flynn as our personal monster, a safe, disturbing ogre of corrosive profanity and sinister glassware. He was ours and he was mighty and we grew great by association with him, and proof of his dangerous overmanliness was to be found in his fearless sexual trystings with the vasty Mrs. Flynn, but we didn't really want to live in a world entirely composed of Flynn-like beings in their serried ranks, vituperative and grouchy and unwilling to take an IOU. That was a new order even the bravest of us would find inhospitable, and the glimmer of it, the Spawn of Flynn, was even now throwing pieces of mushed-up cheese at Gonzo's boot. Mrs. Flynn the Barman, oblivious, finished whatever domestic task she was about amid a flurry of folding cloths and wiping, and trotted out. The Spawn of Flynn blithely ignored his mother and took a chomp from the side of the soiled roll.
"Crunchy," said the Spawn of Flynn.
Sally Culpepper's phone made a little chirrup, and everyone pointedly didn't look.
"Culpepper," Sally murmured, and then, after a moment, snapped it shut. "Wrong number." We all made faces to suggest we weren't fussed.
For a while, the Nameless Bar was filled with the sound of a small child eating and a lot of rough and tough-talking men and women thinking perturbed and unfamiliar thoughts about time and mortality and family. Then the quiet was broken, not by a phone call but by a sound so deep it was very nearly not a sound at all.
You heard it first as a kind of aggressive quiet. The whoosh and snarl of the desert all around us was still going on, but somehow it was subsumed by this deep, bass silence. Then you could feel it as a coldness in your knees and ankles, an unsteady, heart-attack feeling of weakness and vibration. A bit later it was audible, a thrumming gnognognogg which echoed in your lungs and let you know you were a prey animal today. And if you'd ever heard it before you knew what it was, and we all knew, because when we'd first met it was the noise we'd made together: the sound of soldiers. Someone was deploying a decent-sized military force around the Nameless Bar, and that meant they were emphatically not kidding about security. Since it seemed unlikely that they were deploying in order to arrest us, and since in any case if they were there would be absolutely nothing we could do about it, we all crowded through the big pine door of the Nameless Bar to watch them arrive.
Outside, it was cold and dry. The night had set in, witching-hour black, and the sands had given up their heat, so a chill wind was gusting across the wooden rooftops of the bar and the outbuildings, and the gloomy shacks and clapboard homes which made up the no-hope town of Exmoor, pop. 1,309. Off against the brow of Millgram's Hill was our section of the Jorgmund Pipe; a single shadow-grey line lit by Flynn's bedroom window and the work light in the paddock, and every now and again by the gleam of another lonely little house along the way. It ran in both directions into the dark, and somewhere on the other side of the globe those two lines met and joined, surely at a place which was as vibrant and alive as Exmoor was not. On the top of the Pipe, every few metres, there was a little nozzle spraying good, clean FOX into the sky; FOX, the magic potion which kept the part of the world we still had roughly the same shape day by day. No one quite knew where it came from or how you made it; most people imagined some big machine like an egg with all manner of wires and lights condensing it out of air and moonshine, and drip-drip-dripping it into big vats. There were thousands of them, somewhere, vulnerable and vital, and let them never stop. I'd once seen some of the machinery involved: long black lozenges with curved sides, all plumbing and hoses, and rather eerie. Less an egg than a space capsule or a bathyscaphe, except this was the opposite; not a thing for journeying through a hostile place, but a thing which makes what is outside less hostile.
Most people tried very hard to avoid noticing the Pipe. They had euphemisms for it, as if it were cancer or impotence or the Devil, which it was. In some places they painted it bold colours and pretended it was an art project, or built things in front of it or even grew flowers on it. Only in pissant remora towns like this one did you get to see the thing itself; the rusty and despised spine of who we were, carrying vital solidity and safety, and the illusion of continuance, to every nook and cranny of the Livable Zone.
In truth it was not a loop at all, but a weird bird's-nest tangle. There were hairpin bends and corkscrews, and places where subsidiary hoses jutted out from the main line to reach little towns on the edges, and places where the Livable Zone pulled close about the Pipe like a matron drawing up her skirts to cross a stream, where the weather and the lie of the land brought the outside perilously close; but taken all together it made a sort of rough circle girdling the Earth. A place to have a home. Get more than twenty miles from the Pipe (Old JP, they called it in Haviland City, where the Jorgmund Company had its headquarters, or sometimes the Big Snake or the Silver) and you were in the inimical no-man's-land between the Livable Zone and the bloody nightmare of the unreal world. Sometimes it was safe, and sometimes it wasn't. We called it the Border, and we went through it when we had to, when it was the only way to get somewhere in any reasonable length of time, when the alternative was a long drive around three sides of a square and the emergency wouldn't wait. All the same, we went in force and we went quickly, lightly, and we kept an eye on the weather. If the wind changed, or the pressure dropped; if we saw clouds on the horizon we didn't like, or strange folks, or animals which weren't quite right, we turned tail and ran back to the Pipe. People who lived in the Border didn't always stay people. We carried FOX in canisters, and we hoped it would be enough.
....
"It's time to eat," Ma Lubitsch says, a broad expanse of apron topped by a summit of greasy peanut-coloured hair. Old Man Lubitsch doesn't hear over the buzzing of his hives, or he doesn't care to join us, because his baggy white figure remains out in the yard, tottering from one prefab bee house to another with a can of wispy smoke. Ma Lubitsch makes a noise like a whale clearing its blowhole and sets out knives and forks, the delaminating edge of the table pushing into her belly. Gonzo's mother is big enough that she takes up two seats in church and once near-killed a burglar with a rolled-up colour supplement. Gonzo himself, still able to count his years without resorting to two hands, has his father's more sparing construction.
One of my first memories, in all the world: Gonzo, only a few months before, staring into my face with a stranger's concern. He has been playing a game of indescribable complexity, by himself, in the corner of the playground. He has walked from one end of the sandpit to the other and rendered it flat in a particular place, and he has marked borders and bridges and areas of diffusion and lines of demarcation and now he needs another player and cannot find one. And so he turns to look about him and sees a small, lost child: alone in a moment of unfathomable grief. With presence of mind he directs his mother's attention to the crisis, and she trundles over and asks immediately what is the matter and am I hurt and where are my parents and where is my home? And to these questions I have no answer. All I know is that I am crying.
Gonzo answers the disaster by approaching the white ice-cream truck at the far gate, purchasing there a red, rocket-shaped ice with a sticky centre, and this he hands me with great solemnity. Ten minutes later, by the alchemy of sugar and artificial flavours and the security they represent, I have joined Gonzo's incomprehensible game and am winning—though perhaps he is going easy on me—and my tears are dry and crusty on my smock. During a momentary ceasefire, Gonzo informs me that this afternoon I may come to his house and meet his father, who is wise beyond measure, and partake of his mother's cooking, which is unequalled among mortal men, and even feed biscuits to the Lubitsch donkeys, whose coats are more glossy and whose eyes are more lambent than any other donkeys in all the wide world of donkeykind. Ma Lubitsch, watching from a small distance, recognises by the instinctual knowledges of an expat Polish mother that her family has grown by one, and is not perturbed.
In her oven gloves and enveloping apron, Ma Lubitsch gazes through the French windows a bit longer, but Gonzo's father is now chasing a single errant bee around the hives with the smoke gun. Political dissent among the bee houses is not permitted. Ma Lubitsch makes a seesaw turn, stepping from one foot to the other once, twice, three times to bring herself back to the table to dish up, swearing the while in muttered Polish. The infant Gonzo, mighty with filial affront, dashes out to rebuke and retrieve the Old Man; I follow more slowly, five years of age and cautious with brief experience; appearances deceive. Honest faces lie and big boats sink where small ones ride out the gale. But ask me how I know, and I will not be able to tell you.
"Ma says lunch," Kid Gonzo says firmly. Old Man Lubitsch holds up a single gloved hand, a sinner lost to apiarism, requesting indulgence. The bee is on the flagstone in front of him, presumably coughing. It appears for a moment that Gonzo will stamp on it, rid himself of this impediment to family harmony, but his father is fast for all that his face looks like faded wool, or maybe it is just that Old Man Lubitsch understands the value of strategic positioning: he swoops, his body blocking Gonzo's line of attack, and, lifting the bee in gentle fingers, he pops it into hive number three.
"Lunch," Old Man Lubitsch agrees, and for a moment I believe he smiles at me.
We return to the house, but Gonzo's mother is not mollified.
Things are strained. They have been strained since before I arrived, since Gonzo's older brother Marcus went to soldier, and neglected to duck on some forgotten corner of a foreign field that is forever Cricklewood Cove. Lunch is Ma Lubitsch's small white witchery, her article of faith—if she can provide Gonzo with hearty nutrition and a solid, dependable centre, he will be well-fitted to the world. He will conquer, he will survive, he will feel no need to seek adventure. He will not leave her. For Ma Lubitsch, lunch defies death. Old Man Lubitsch, however, knows that sometimes, for reasons which are obscure even to bees, the hive must disgorge its children and see them set upon the wind. And so he prepares for the moment when this son either finds a queen and starts a family, or flies and flies until he cannot continue and falls to the dirt to become once again a part of the mossy meadow carpet all around.
Ma Lubitsch doesn't speak to her husband during the meal. She doesn't speak from the first potato to the last flake of chocolate icing, and she doesn't speak over coffee, and she doesn't speak as Gonzo removes himself to the creek to fish. It seems that she will never speak to him again, but when I return unannounced for a forgotten tackle box, I glimpse her, the enormous body racked with sobs, cradled in the arms of her tiny mate. Old Man Lubitsch is singing to her in the language of the old country, and his shadowed, sharp little eyes lay omertà upon me, dark and deep; these are secrets between men, boy, between the true men of the heart. I know it. I understand.
It is this image which comes to mind later whenever Gonzo is about to embark on some act of unconsidered heroism: a bird-like man in white overalls lending his strength to a shattered mountain. Gonzo fishes. He catches two tiddlers of uncertain species, and throws them back when they appear unhappy. I never tell him what I have seen, and when I turn around, five years have passed.
Excerpted from The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway. Copyright © 2008 by Nick Harkaway. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Product details
- Publisher : Vintage; unknown edition (August 11, 2009)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 592 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0307389073
- ISBN-13 : 978-0307389077
- Item Weight : 15 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.1 x 1.22 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #573,544 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,390 in Dystopian Fiction
- #6,962 in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction (Books)
- #28,945 in Literary Fiction (Books)
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About the author

Nick Harkaway is the author of Gnomon (William Heinemann, October 2017), as well as The Gone-Away World, Angelmaker (for which he won the Oxfam Emerging Writers Prize and the Kitschies’ coveted Red Tentacle) and Tigerman. He has been described variously as 'J. G. Ballard’s geeky younger brother', 'William Makepeace Thackerary on acid' and 'a British mimetic speculative godgame novelist'. The Blind Giant, his only full length non-fiction work, examined the interaction of technology and humanity and how best to live in a world where gadgets have become fundamental.
Nick lives in London with his wife and their two children. He publishes occasional articles on Medium, and is mildly noted for extensive and profane political Twitterings. Hosting a conference at London’s Science Museum for the European Space Agency in September 2016, he took a rueful moment aside to tell a supportive audience: “In meinem Herz, ich bin Europäer.” He loves Borges and Calvino, Proulx and Winterson, Gibson and DeLillo. Other important influences include Benjamin Zidarch, Vittorio Innocenti and Susana Balbo.
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So as the movie came to what was OBVIOUSLY the conclusion, I was waiting with bated breath, almost literally, to see if it would end that way, if this movie that so far had been so great, so much better than expected, would win or lose -- would provide me with the ending that would make this a great movie, or would wimp out and destroy everything that had come before.
When the ending came, it made me gasp with surprise, start laughing out loud, and get tears in my eyes. THAT was how great and perfect the ending was: so great and perfect that it actually elicted real-life emotion for me, not about the characters in the movie or about the ending itself or anything so prosaic as that, but rather real-life emotion (surprise, that is) that was sprung forth by the fact that something SO good, so perfect, so wonderful, could exist in pop culture.
We are so used to watered-down, mass-market, half-effort, almost-great things (if not things that are worse) that we have, I think sometimes, lowered the bar for what constitutes greatness. It used to be that one had to win five Super Bowls to be considered great. Now, a quarterback can be considered great even if he never makes it to the championship. It used to be that the entire world watched as man stepped on the moon. Now, the Kardashians out-rate a man stepping out of a space capsule and falling to earth. It used to be... well, you get the point, and the point is that so many things are mediocre that the few things that are good are elevated to greatness merely by not being bland. It's as if the entire world was painted beige and so we were forced to give awards to off-white simply because it was slightly less so.
Which makes rare gems so much the more startling, and amazing, to me, rare gems like "Safety Not Guaranteed" and now, this book.
I can count on one hand the number of books I consider truly great. They are: Catch-22. American Gods. Slaughterhouse-Five. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. And now this book, which might push one of those off the hand on which I am counting in order to create a second space for Harkaway's book.
I cannot remember, ever, in my life, a book that delighted and surprised me and amazed me so much. This was a book that began on a hot roll and picked up steam and heat with each word, each sentence, each paragraph, each page. This book careened and caromed through its story and my head with a vulgar life that shouldered aside every notion of what a book should be, what a story must be, and replaced it with image after image of THIS book.
You can get the plot from the synopsis, or from the 132 other (as I write this) reviews of this book. I'm not going to recap it because the plot, which is head-and-shoulders above almost every other book you will ever read, is not even the most amazing thing about this book.
The real problem with reviewing this book, in fact, is deciding what IS the most amazing thing about it. Reviewing this book is like trying to describe two circuses performing amidst an amusement park where a series of rock concerts are taking place, and you have cotton candy to eat while this all goes on. Or a giant pretzeldog. Whatever. Don't get hung up on the snacks. That's not the important thing. I mean, of course, snacks are important, but I feel we're getting needlessly bogged down here in discussing them.
Also: the circuses are entirely staffed by supermodels.
THAT is this book. There is so much going on that it's hard to know where to look and all you can really do is stare and take it all in and hope that the details lodge in your mind for later picking at and remembering and recapping and enjoyment, that you can take them with you so that as you sit at your desk listening to someone drone on and on, or as you are stuck in traffic, or as you are drifting off to sleep (at your desk or in traffic) you can turn your mind to the supermodelcircusamusementparkconcert that is this book, and remember it and smile and work on it again, until you can get home and continue reading it.
The language: Harkaway uses words like his characters use the hard and soft styles of fighting, changing up here and there and constantly keeping you looking for the next wave. He makes up words. He makes references you'll have to google. His vocabulary is about 37th grade, and yet it works: it's the only way this story COULD have been written, in a way that makes you have to tumble around and grapple with the language itself, but it's enjoyable. It's like wrestling your six-year-old as you tickle him: you're laughing and sweaty and happy and realize that this, THIS! is how you want to spend your day.
The characters: OH MY GOD there are about 150 zillion characters, and that's not even counting the characters who are other characters, but here's the thing about that: each character is so fully realized, with backstory and quirks and language and companions, that you cannot forget them, or even mix them up. You'll be able to tell Tobemory Trent from Assumption Soames sixty years from now, and if you and I read this book and then sixty years from now I were to run into you and not even know you and simply say "Pa Lubitsch" you will talk about the bees and that will lead you into remembering Ma Lubitsch's three-point turn and then you will get sad as you remember Marcus Lubitsch but then you'll remember how that turned out so maybe it wasn't sad after all, and you'll have walked twenty paces past me, remembering all these people that are somehow as real as you and I even though they're not...
...and that's kind of the point of the story? Maybe? One of them? One of the nice things about this book is it seems to have points while not needing them, to be able to make a point while not making a point...
...and I'll be looking back at you, too, and we'll both shake our heads and realize that this book has stayed real -- it has been reified, as it were (read the book to get that reference!)-- for us all those years, so real that the mere mention of it will cause us to forget we are living in this world so that we can live in that.
The characters are a sprawling happy mess of people that are instantly memorable and fully recognizable by name, rank, serial number, and catch-phrase. I can remember every single one of them right now, and I am the kind of person who is pretty sure that Iron Man's secret identity is "Robert Downey, Jr."
The plot! OH YEAH THERE'S THAT TOO. And it's not the plot you think. Yes, there's a war and it's sci-fi and there's a fire rescue where they use bombs to put out a fire and there's a fight which involves ducks (but at least the narrator recognizes that's improbable) but none of that is actually the plot, unless it is, and is just one of the many plots. Reading this book is like reading 75 other books all joined together to band as one, like if Voltron were a book. (Full disclosure: I'm not sure exactly what Voltron is, but I think I've got the concept right, maybe? Is it like a bunch of little robots banded together to be one big robot? Or cars that form a robot? Or people? I'm not supposed to know that. I'm 44 and 44 year olds don't need to know what banded together to become Voltron. It's sufficient that I have the concept right.) If a bunch of books all banded together to make one superbook, they would be this book. Each character is a book in and of him- or herself, and each of them inexorably moves the main book forward, too, so that you never feel bogged down or think "OH GOD ANOTHER BIO OF ANOTHER CHARACTER," even when that character is a seemingly-innocuous spice merchant in a war zone who also comes to matter, too.
That's probably the most amazing thing about the plot(s), is that they feel slapped together, almost, like they were just written a page at a time without worrying about what came before or what came after, only then as you go on through the story you begin to realize just how this all fits together perfectly -- and it's not like you're waiting and saying "Well, is that part going to come back around?" because it just DOES and then you think "OH MAN IT DID!" and you're great with it.
That's what kept happening in this book. I would be reading it and then hit a part and think "OH THAT IS PERFECT!" and I would laugh out loud at how great it was that something like this could exist, that a book so perfect and so right and so wonderful to read could have just come into my life.
I didn't want this book to end, because it was too good to ever come to a halt. I wish I was reading it right now. I wish everyone was reading it right now, so that we could all look up and meet each other's eyes and say "I know, RIGHT!?!?!" with exactly that many question marks and exclamation points put in there, which is the perfect expression of surprise and delight -- surlight, or deprise, I should say, or maybe combining words isn't enough. Maybe we need to invent a new emotion for books like this, for moments like this in the culture when someone transcends the mediocre, jumps above the merely "good", looks down as he sails high above the "great" and simply keeps on going to join, up in the heavens, that stratospheric realm where so few creative types ever even get to visit. Nick Harkaway lives there now, and I hope he sends us a postcard from his new residence because that postcard would, I imagine, be simply awesome.
The first chapter is dense and I had a hard time making sense of what was going on. There are hints of a recent war, a gigantic world-spanning pipe, and the corporation that owns it. A nameless narrator introduces a motley crew of contract truckers (mercenaries ?) who all have memorable names. Even though our narrator is an active member of this crew, he goes unnamed for so long it makes you suspicious. The chapter ends with the crew accepting a job to mend the pipe for the corporation.
The next couple hundred pages explain everything that came before the first chapter. Because it starts at the beginning it makes a lot more sense. Early on, there is an enchanting episode with characters I loved immediately, relished every minute spent with them, and then felt quite cross with the author when they faded away. Losing that magic made the rest of the journey harder, but the pace picks up when it gets back to the first chapter and moves forward from there. Along the way there are gems to be picked up and admired like:
"What I am about to tell you," says Professor Derek the following day, "may make me sound like a crazy person. So I need you to remember, to bear in mind very carefully, that I have an IQ of such monstrous proportions that if, for the sake of argument, I were totally insane -- if the palace of my intellect were a scary ivy-covered mansion in Louisiana with peeling paint and dead flowers and a garden full of murdered corpses planted by a man named Jerry-Lee Boudain -- I am so much more intelligent than anybody else you will ever meet that there would be no way for anyone to tell."
"My body," Ronnie Cheung says, "is a lethal weapon. Yours is a sack in which you keep your vital organs."
More cogently, Gonzo spent three weeks at his new job and decided, "If I stay here I will be found at fifty-five, naked under two secretaries with my feet tied to the bedposts and a lemon in my mouth, and I will be dead and fat and no one will cry except the shy woman living opposite who has always had a crush on me but could never tell me and who might have saved me from myself, but didn't."
"James Vortigern Hepsobah," I say, and it goes right into his face from all the way across the room, "you need to ask that woman to marry you. She's your beating heart and every drop of blood in your veins, but in the small dark hours before the dawn she worries maybe she's not enough. So stop being a prick and do the thing."
Top reviews from other countries

The narrator is one of a group of former special forces operatives who now act as mercenaries, mostly protecting the giant pipe around which the liveable world is built. The pipe contains a substance that neutralises the dangerous fallout and enables people to live in relative safety in its vicinity. The story opens with a massive fire breaking out on the pipe and the narrator and his friends - including his charismatic best friend Gonzo - being called in to put out the blaze. The story then goes back to the pre-war world to fill in four hundred odd pages of backstory.
Harkaway always has good ideas, writing imaginative and bold books that make you think. But this one in particular is overwritten - there's just too much wordiness. He's an author who never uses a one syllable word when a really obscure one with five can be found. That gets wearing when it's done constantly throughout a very long book. The sci-fi concepts are hard enough to get your head round without also having to revert to the dictionary every other sentence. There are also sections that I just skim read and didn't feel any poorer for having done so. I reckon it could have been edited down by two hundred pages and been the better for it.
Buried in all the verbosity there is a good - in fact, a very good - story trying to shine through. Bizarre at times and never what you'd call believable (even within the expanded criteria for believabilty allowed for sci-fi and fantasy), but if anything that adds to its charm. I really liked the main character, and the supporting characters are also likeable and amusing. I cared about what happened to them, and I was prepared to wade through a lot of text to find out.
I would cautiously recommend this book - it's one to read when you're in the mood for something a bit more challenging. If you want an easy read, something light and escapist, it's not the right choice. But if you have a bit of time and mental energy then it's ultimately rewarding.

Who is it for? People who like all of the above.
Who is it not for? People who get irritated with all of the above, who prefer hard sci-fi with the emphasis on linear plot and plausible detail. Don't read it. It isn't for you, you'll hate it.
Is it perfect? No. Is it derivative? I did have a fleeting deja vu moment but I couldn't place it and decided it didn't matter because I was having so much fun. Is it a really thrilling read? Yes, it was. Comparisons to D. Adams, Heller, Vonnegut etc. are justified, so if you enjoy these authors or similar, you should enjoy this.
A few very minor typos - nothing major.

The set up in the first chapter is very good and then we digress into the backstory. But this digression is a massive part of the book. Once it returns to post apocalypse times the story speeds up. I came to this after reading Harkaways excellent Angelmaker and throughout most of it I felt disappointed. I loved that book and found myself skim reading sections of this one. The reason for this is that the prose is so verbose it can get in the way. There is an entire page at one point which describes how our hero wields a hammer to knock some tent pins into the ground. It's a bit too much. The humour is dark and it's not a laugh out loud kind of humour. However, the final third of this book really redeemed it for me. The twists and plot came to the fore and I began to really enjoy the book. The character of Gonzo, our nameless hero's best friend is well written and Harkaway shows a skill for character and plot development.
Books can be outstanding for one of three reasons. Firstly the way it is written, think of Gabriel Gaez Marquez for instance. The style of writing is just beautiful and elevates books to greatness. The second reason is story. Some books the story is everything and the book becomes brilliant because of that. The final reason is ideas. Gibson does this a lot. Harkaway tries to do all three with this book and fails because of it. It's good, but frustrating and I can imagine some hating the book and not getting even halfway. It is a long book and when my kindle told me I had 9 hours left of reading time I considered putting it down. However, the final third does pull it together. Harkaways second novel is better, at least for me it is. This is a slow burner and one that you have to be very patient with.

There isn't much else on the market that reads like it, and although his followup 'Angelmaker' is more focused it lacks (perhaps intentionally - a book like this would be difficult to top scale-wise) the huge ambition that this book does. Arguably this ambition is also what trips 'The Gone-Away World' up at times. Harkaway seems to have wanted to cover everything in one book, and touch upon as many genres as he can while he was at it! He introduces characters frequently, each more outlandish and fantastic than the last, and also twists so much out of the premise(s) that the book starts to veer out of control in the last couple of chapters. There is a major plot twist in the book that is reminiscent of another book that I've read, and the ending is a tad underwhelming for me, but apart from these gripes I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed 'The Gone-Away World'. I highly recommend it: it's sprawling, filled with very many subplots, multi-genred, a bit messy and a bit chaotic but never dull!

Even thinking about it several months later makes me a little bit sad.
This author should be forced to write books more often!