The Gone-Away World

The gone-away world /Nick Harkaway. -- New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
497 p. ; 24 cm.
ISBN: 9780307268860
1st American ed.

1. Adventure fiction. 2. Dystopias. 3. Love stories. 4. Science fiction.

823.92

Wu Shenyang, Master Wu of the Voiceless Dragon School of gong fu has a dry wit. He tells his English students in Cricklewood Cove to study the chi of Ella Fitzgerald and gong fu of Isaac Newton. He has them practice to the music of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers and Mozart. He tells them there are no Secret Teachings, no Iron Skin Meditation to turn aside weapons, no Ghost Palm Strike that cannot be avoided or deflected. “The truth is not hidden. It is simple.” But to humor his students he’s willing to tell them a story and make up a Secret Teaching. He also tells them to beware of his sworn enemies, the ninjas of the Clockwork Hand Society.

A decade or so later, these fighting skills are very useful to the SpecialOps forces (of which the narrator is a member) bogged down in a proxy war in Addeh Katir. It’s a small middle-eastern county and an Elective Theater in a very muddled conflict (or un-war) between the six powers involved. If the motives are vague, the high explosives are not. When the narrator is gouged by shrapnel (friendly fire variety) he is sent behind the lines to a blissful encounter with a very beautiful, if not particularly skillful, nurse named Leah. But romantic bliss is interrupted by the fortunes of war. In defiance of the Geneva Accords, someone attacks using poison gas. When news of this atrocity reaches the ears of the government at home the order comes down to use the new secret weapon in retaliation. While the new bomb is not a nuclear device, it does operate by using some basic forces of the universe, but not with a messy explosion—it just make the enemy (and anything surrounding it) Go Away. The enemies, the landscape, the atmosphere just cease to exist. It’s quite a surprise when the bombs go off. It’s followed by another surprise. The enemy also has these bombs, and soon large parts of the planet cease to exist.

Harkaway gives credit to three authors for his story: P. G. Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Alexandre Dumas. But, to me, his exuberantly witty prose, social commentary, and strong characters read like Charles Dickens.