Will Sargent reviewed The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway
Review of 'The Gone-Away World' on 'Storygraph'
2 stars
This book is the literary equivalent of the movie "Sucker Punch" -- the blurb promises you ninjas, friendship, monsters, and betrayal. But by the time it happens, you feel stupider for having watched up to that point, and you can't wait for it to be over.
There are so many things wrong with this book. It doesn't read like a first novel, it reads like a first draft. It starts off with the Pipe exploding, and the protagonist and his friends suiting up and heading out. Then the story stops for five chapters to tell you about his life history.
The first two or three of those chapters, I couldn't figure out what had happened. Where was the story? Why on earth would someone write a child like a bad David Foster Wallace impression? And as I kept reading, I was overcome by a distaste for the protagonist that I …
This book is the literary equivalent of the movie "Sucker Punch" -- the blurb promises you ninjas, friendship, monsters, and betrayal. But by the time it happens, you feel stupider for having watched up to that point, and you can't wait for it to be over.
There are so many things wrong with this book. It doesn't read like a first novel, it reads like a first draft. It starts off with the Pipe exploding, and the protagonist and his friends suiting up and heading out. Then the story stops for five chapters to tell you about his life history.
The first two or three of those chapters, I couldn't figure out what had happened. Where was the story? Why on earth would someone write a child like a bad David Foster Wallace impression? And as I kept reading, I was overcome by a distaste for the protagonist that I hadn't felt in quite some time. There's a German word that I couldn't get out of my head -- backpfeifengesicht, which means "a face badly in need of a fist."
Thankfully, the precious bullshit and overwrought sentences calms down onces he gets into a military academy and things start to go wrong. Once there's an actual plot, then the other characters get a chance to breath as well and they stop quite so much like carbon cutouts... and then they get past the point where we came in (the pipe has blown, they're off to save the day) and it starts getting interesting.
...And then it starts going off the rails again.
The problem is ninjas. In a world which has armies, geopolitical conflicts, mass starvation and a soldier running around in the middle of it, bringing in Wacky Movie Ninjas is like watching The Walking Dead and then having pirates invade. It makes absolutely no goddamn sense, unless they're secretly Fantasy Gone Away Ninjas, which I seriously considered at some point. This is why I think it's close to Sucker Punch -- for all that there are ninjas and hijinks and derring-do, it makes no sense.
It gets worse from that point on.
At one point the protagonist is caught by the ankles, while falling off a building, by someone who's literally just decided to hang out underneath the balcony. No explanation.
There are mimes, all with the same name. I hated them.
The antagonist's rationale makes so little sense that at one point the protagonist even stops to wonder why someone would construct such a mindblowingly wasteful and over-complicated plan for so little result. Never explained.
The resolution is so incredibly stupid that I expected the next page to be a "ha ha, you didn't really it to go down like that" type fakeout. Nope.
I feel cheated out of the time that I spent reading this book, and I think slightly less of everyone who reviewed this book and said it was worthwhile. Still, having read it, I have decided what to do with it now: rather than donating it to the library, I'm going to recycle it so there will be one less copy of this book in the world. You're welcome.