I do a lot of reading, and I read a lot of Good Books. Many of them, because I do my homework and read reviews and go by the recommendations of people I trust, are Very Good Books. Nick Harkaway’s debut novel is that rarest of things, a Bloody Amazing, Brilliant, Splendid Book. In The Gone-Away World we have a rambling (but never flabby), charming, funny, scary, bleak and very clever story, and it’s a really juicy read.

The Gone-Away World is a war story. The larger-than-life characters and their larger-than-life adventures in the Gone-Away War reminded me strongly of Joseph Heller’s classic war novel Catch-22. Harkaway shares Heller’s love of the ridiculous, of the surreal, the ability to find the absurd in both the mundane and the terrifying experiences of war. There are some seriously memorable characters, characters like Ronnie Cheung, military instructor and serious hardass (trademark insult: “bumhole”); Master Wu of the Voiceless Dragon School, Tupperware-fascinated martial arts teacher, and enemy of Ninjas everywhere; Ike Thermite, leader of and spokesman for the Matahuxee Mime Combine, and Zaher Bey, piractical but surprisingly well-educated and undoubtedly charming resistance leader, whose dressing gown is chosen to match his Rolls Royce.

Harkaway has a wonderful ability to convey the tension and banality that co-exist in war:

There was a bad moment when four large shapes showed up on the infrared, moving in a rapid arc towards the rear of the Nameless Bar, and two sets of heavy weapons came online and tracked them: shwoopHUNKdzzzunn! and Sir, contact sir! followed by Soldier, if you fire that weapon I will stick it up your and guboozzznn as the turrets moved, probable field of fire going through Flynn’s living room and the saloon. Of course, the probable enemy was the desert pig generator system, currently labouring to produce enough power to run the kitchen and the TV all at once. So the pigs hovered on the brink of spectacular annihilation for a few seconds, and then were classed as zero threat, the guns went zugug-slrrmmmback and back to first positions.

The Gone-Away World is science fiction too. Channeling a wide range of influences and inspirations, from Mad Max to The Matrix, from Brave New World to Snow Crash to spooky horror, it paints a vision of a near-future world which, by our narrator’s account, starts out fairly close to our own before diverging in to the messed-up hellhole we encounter at the beginning of the book.

The Gone-Away World is also a comic tour-de-force. It made me laugh out loud regularly, and made me smile on almost every page, either at the dialogue, the descriptions or just the incisive use of language. Harkaway has given us some brilliantly realised characters, and a narrator with his own distinctive sense of humour to describe the lunacies of the world in which he finds himself. Only a handful of authors can make me laugh as much as this book did – Mil Millington, Tom Sharpe and Terry Pratchett – so Harkaway’s in esteemed company. Our narrator likes to go in to detail, and neither he nor the characters he describes are shy about taking the long way around to get to their point, but you don’t mind because the journey is so very enjoyable. The comedic potential of everything is fully explored:

A war zone is a bad place to be a sheep. It’s not a good place to be anything, but sheep generally are a bit stupid and devoid of tactical acumen and individual reasoning, and they approach problem-solving in a trial and error kind of a way. Sheep wander, and wandering is not a survival trait where there are landmines. After the first member of the flock is blown up, the rest of the sheep automatically scatter in order to confuse the predator, and this, naturally, takes more than one of them on to yet another mine, and there’s another woolly BOOM-splatterpitterslee-eutch which is the noise of an average-sized sheep being propelled in to the air by an anti-personnel mine and partially dispersed, the largest single piece falling to earth as a semi-liquidised blob. This sound or its concomitant reality upsets the remaining sheep even more, and not until quite a few of them have been scattered over the neighborhood do they get the notion that the only safe course is the reverse course. By this time, alas, they have forgotten where that is, and the whole thing begins again. BOOM.

The Gone-Away World is a love story, an adventure story, a coming-of-age story, a thriller and much more besides. It’s immaculately and very cleverly plotted, with twists that you won’t see coming but which make perfect sense in hindsight, and it maintains an impressive degree of momentum throughout. It’s even more impressive for the fact that it’s a first novel: when I think of equally impressive debuts of recent years – White Teeth, or Vernon God Little, to name a couple – they are books that have made a splash and won awards (as well as readers), and I can certainly see The Gone-Away World doing both. Bravo!

P.S. Owing to a total lack of research on my part, I didn’t discover until after I finished the book and wrote the review above that Nick Harkaway is John Le Carre’s son. I am pleased about this, as it means I can say with certainty that my reading or reviewing was not influenced by the fact that John Le Carre is a literary god, making Nick Harkaway the de facto son of god!

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