It's terribly easy to find yourself adrift in your life; and equally easy to find a reason to take control. Both happen under the hood, when we're living not looking. One moment, you're in a quiet job that requires little more than your presence. In the next, you realize that your quiet life has taken you to the edge of a roaring waterfall of event and decision. Life catches up when you're not looking.
As Nick Harkaway's new novel, 'Tigerman' begins, Sergeant Lester Ferris is so immersed in his easy duty on the isle of Mancreu that he thinks of himself most of the time as the Sergeant. A veteran of the recent British adventures in the Middle East, where he acquitted himself well, he's now a bit long in the tooth for fighting, but the perfect ambassador / sheriff / counsel-at-large for an island where most nations abandon law and let the shades of gray cast long shadows. There's an occasionally frenetic American, a fascinating Japanese woman scientist, a volcano that might explode and obliterate the island. Crime is above board here. And there's a boy, somewhere between ten and fifteen years old, brilliant, a treasure trove of comic-book fantasy.
'Tigerman' is nothing less than superb from the first word to the last, thanks mainly to well, all aspects of the novel, but let's start with the prose. Harkaway writes in a combination of buttoned-down British snark when he's with the Sergeant, and with the exclamation points and saturated colors of the comics when he's with the boy. He's consistently funny, embedding his sentences with irony and jokes and endearing insights into his characters. Put simply, this book is great fun to read.
The engaging prose is in the service of great characters, crafted with subtlety and depth, but capable of the kind of surprises that those in our lives often send out way. Lester —l; the Sergeant, really —l; is the kind of fellow you want on your side whether it's in a bar for casual conversation or creeping into the lair of drug-dealing thugs. He takes those around him quite seriously but himself not in the least bit —l; at first. The core of the novel is the Sergeant's relationship with the boy, whom he sees as needing a father. As the sergeant allows himself to consider himself in this role, he grows even more engaging. The boy is a straight-up seven-alarum mystery, full of bustle and hustle, flitting in and out of the criminal margins of Mancreu, and the Fleet, moored just off the island.
There are lots of ways to describe the plot of this novel; it's a crime thriller with some fun and imaginative bits of speculative fiction around the edges. It's a superhero origin story, rendered in gritty realism. But mostly it's an ultra-engaging story, the very definition of a ripping yarn with characters you truly care about and enjoy being with, who find themselves in a mix of criminally hot water and emotional bonding. You can (and will) forget all the comic book movies you might have seen this or any summer when Harkaway turns up the heat and heart for impeccably crafted action set pieces. Then he manages the neat feat of one-upping himself in a manner no reader will expect. Harkaway effortlessly inhabits the comic book space of color and dynamics but manages to bring with him all the interior strengths of the great novelist.
'Tigerman' has a sort of timeless feel to it, and that's to its benefit. Nick Harkaway has managed to craft a novel that offers all the so-called guilty pleasures of comics and movies, using the not-in-the-least-bit guilty skills of a great novelist. Prose proves to be more powerful than any special effect, and story bond a father to a son or a reader to a novel.
09-08-14:Alastair Reynolds 'On the Steel Breeze'
Everything and More
Our lives are full of self-contradiction. We want adventure and we want security. We need our family but must have the world, or better, the universe. But having everything clearly has its problems as well.
In 'Blue Remembered Earth,' Alastair Reynolds gave his characters pretty much everything. The people of our earth made it past the troubled next dew decades, emerging, with the help of technology. into a sort of utopian state. The talented but troubled Akinya family helped blaze the way, but the generation that made the most difference fumbled when it came to passing the torch. The finale of that novel ushered in a new level of everything.
The children of those who had barely achieved adulthood in 'Blue Remembered Earth' still have it all, and more. Chiku Akinya, the daughter of Sunday Akinya, has fallen pretty far financially from the heights achieved by her ancestors, but she still has enough to have it all. In a brilliantly written bit of gene-splicing, Reynolds, with a twist of the literary skills required for great 21st century fiction, turns his heroine into three versions of herself. One will stay behind and lead a life of safety and relative contemplation on Earth, one will journey to a nearby inhabitable planet on a single-generation starship, and one will seek adventure in solitude trying to solve a family mystery. And all three will watch their worlds crumble.
'On the Steel Breeze' masterfully avoids pretty much every problem that is presented virtue of its being the middle book in a trilogy. While the back-story matters greatly, this novel starts anew with new characters, and feels fresh. It's a ripping yarn in its own right that builds fiercely to what follows but leaves the reader satisfied with what has come to pass. This is not to say that you won't want the follow-on now. But the ebb and flow of story is handled with great literary finesse. Reynolds manages to find a nice balance between a story that is a part and a story that is a whole.
"On the Steel Breeze' does a fine job at expanding the scale of Reynolds' universe at both ends of the spectrum. In deep space, readers will find an exciting evolution of the ideas seeded in the first novel. Suffice it to say that as ever, Chiku and her fellow humans know less than they think they know, and not just about what they discover, but as well, about the things they have created. This is great news for readers who seek a sense of wonder, less so for those in space.
On Earth, what we don't know proves to lead to a finely wrought undermining of the diffident utopia described in 'Blue Remembered Earth.' Reynolds very cleverly embraces his own ideas until that embrace has unpleasant consequences for all involved. The friction of a utopia being slowly upended provides for lots of thought-provoking plot complications.
Holding this all down, keeping the ideas and plot twists engaging are a cast of characters who feel genuinely flawed and occasionally heroic. The three Chiku's are the mainstay of the novel, and as one might expect, they fall into a sibling-like relationship. It is decidedly un-utopian, but very much like a real family. Surrounding family; husband and children, feel real, but don't overwhelm the narrative thrust. Eunice is the main "returning" character, and anytime she's the on the page she's a blast to be around.
'On the Steel Breeze' proves to be a real revelation of just how much you can pack into a relatively short novel. Like anyone, like the characters in the novel even, readers want everything. We want far-flung space opera and we want two-feet-on-the-earth futuristic drama. We want family and we want aliens, community and artificial intelligence, hard politics and believable science. 'On the Steel Breeze' is proof you don't have to settle for just the world; you can have this world and others, so long as you are willing to risk losing them to the generations who will follow.
New to the Agony Column
09-18-15: Commentary : William T. Vollman Amidst 'The Dying Grass' : An Epic Exploration of Simultaneity
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with William T. Vollman : "...a lot of long words that in our language are sentences..."
09-05-15: Commentary : Susan Casey Listens to 'Voices in the Ocean' : Science, Empathy and Self
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Susan Casey : "...the reporting for this book was emotionally difficult at times..."
08-21-15: Agony Column Podcast News Report : Senator Claire McCaskill is 'Plenty Ladylike' : Internalizing Determination to Overcome Sexism [Incudes Time to Read EP 211: Claire McCaskill, Plenty Ladylike, plus A 2015 Interview with Senator Claire McCaskill]
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Emily Schultz Unleashes 'The Blondes' : A Cure by Color [Incudes Time to Read EP 210: Emily Schultz, The Blondes, plus A 2015 Interview with Emily Schultz]
07-05-15: Commentary : Dr. Michael Gazzaniga Tells Tales from Both Sides of the Brain : A Life in Neuroscience Reveals the Life of Science
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Michael Gazzaniga : "We made the first observation and BAM there was the disconnection effect..."
04-21-15: Commentary : Kazuo Ishiguro Unearths 'The Buried Giant' : The Mist of Myth and Memory
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro : ".... by the time I was writing this novel, the lines between what was fantasy and what was real had blurred for me..."
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Marc Goodman : "...every physical object around us is being transformed, one way or another, into an information technology..."
Agony Column Podcast News Report UPDATE: Time to Read Episode 199: Marc Goodman : Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
