The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway (UK / US).
I gave up reading the Gone-Away World twice, before I had got past the first chapter, and read two other books instead.
The language and the narrative and the plot veer along like Brownian Motion, bouncing off adjacent ideas into whole other areas, characters and situations; until, sometimes pages later, returning to the initial description or idea; which I had often forgotten about. I found this intensely irritating, I wanted to know what was happening, not get dealt a many layered onion of seemingly random descriptions. The irritation was heightened for me by the first chapter throwing the reader in at the deep end, leaving me struggling to understand the world and the characters; usually this is something I would relish, but ploughing through the pages, and still remaining completely confused, annoyed me.
I'm extremely glad I persevered, because after the first chapter the story rewinds to the beginning and starts a wonderful meandering story. Well, in hindsight the main plot is not meandering, but at the time, reading it, I was often left wondering where on earth it was heading next. Once I relaxed, and accepted the verboseness of the story, I began to enjoy it a lot more: I began to appreciated the wittiness, the tangental anecdotes and most of all the characters. Until, by the end I felt completely at home in the book, submerging myself in the language and the world.
Trying to capture the scope of the story is not easy, the story follows the narrator's life, from childhood, through school and university, onwards into conflict and the fracturing of reality; it contains ninjas, mime artists, pirates, gory battlefield chaos, student debates, a Karate Kid style mentor, a crazy scary apocalypse, war, spies, love, hate and hope. Melting pot doesn't really capture how cool this all this, the blurb says "geek nirvana" and maybe, for once, the marketing people are right.
There is an almight WTF?! moment, near the end, that is followed by a twist that initial instict said was just ridiculous. On further cogitation I think that it may be complete genius. I say 'think' because I'd have to read the book again to check, it's of that magnitude. And although you coulld view this twist as a stunt I personally feel it elevates the book, sending it veering to an extremely satisfying resolution that I couldn't see coming.
The Gone-Away World is a difficult book for me to review because there is so much in it, and it conjured such a mixed set of emotions in me, that I'm struggling to encapsulate it in a few words. It's a challenging read, in language and attitude and style, but a book that I'm very happy to have read, it's a book that you can point at and say "this is what Science Fiction can be", and a book that ultimately I loved.
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