The Bookseller.com

30th August 2008

Nick Harkaway: Apocalypse now

28.02.08 Benedicte Page

The summer's much-hyped début The Gone-Away World (Wm Heine­mann, June)—written by Nick Harkaway, son of spy thriller master John le Carré, and acquired in an expensive, seven-publisher auction last summer—is notably difficult to categorise. When sold, agent Patrick Walsh was describing it as "fantasy for non-fantasy readers", while publisher Jason Arthur termed it "Dickens writing about a post-apocalyptic world." Now Wm Heinemann is opting for "equal parts raucous adventure, comic odyssey, geek nirvana and cool epic".

Harkaway—real name Cornwell, but that would put him in a very crowded section of the bookshelf— says he just let rip after several years working as a film scriptwriter.

"The thing that frustrated me about writing movies was that I'd go to a meeting and people would say: 'We'd like your most original thing. Go crazy! Give it your best shot.' I'd come back two weeks later with a pitch, and I'd get halfway through it and it was: 'Whoa! Stop. LESS original. Give us your NEXT most unusual story!' The film world is cautious and fearful, and you can see why because movies now cost so much. I didn't want to be cautious any more. I wanted to tell a story that was wham! Let's go crazy. Also in film you don't do tone—the director does tone—so I wanted to do playful and fun, and to write an adventure."

My best shot at a plot summary is this: the book opens in the Nameless Bar, where a group of ex-special operatives turned truckers, including the narrator and his great friend Gonzo Lubitsch, are gathered to begin a dangerous mission at the behest of the Jorgmund Corporation: namely to tackle a failure in the massive Jorgmund Pipe which delivers the material needed to keep the world surviveable in its state of post-apocalyptic chaos.

At the end of the chapter, we hurtle backwards to the narrator's childhood in Cricklewood Cove, apprenticeship to martial arts expert Master Wu, attack by ninjas, military service in a foreign war, marriage to Leah and life in the post-war Gone-Away world in which thoughts are made real, and the malformed monsters which haunt the human imagination become living creatures. Then it's back to the Nameless Bar, a new adventure and a big twist.

Harkaway wrote 230,000 words in 12 months. (The novel has been slimmed down, but remains huge). "I wanted to write something expansive and with flair," he says. "Something where you get to show off and have fun. English has got a million words and it must be blatantly obvious in the book, I'm absolutely addicted to the language. I love it."

He built the novel up "like a gobstopper in reverse" from the opening premise—"two guys with a problem"—adding layer on layer and going off on all kinds of "crazy tangents" inspired by curious bits of information and fascinations of his own. "I was reading an article yesterday that said that one of the keys to having a good memory is not that you retain everything, but that you forget unnecessary junk. I definitely don’t."

He is particularly proud, he says, of having produced "the first ever serious novel with ninjas", and is also passionate that writers of fantasy and sf should be given more respect—he particularly admires Iain M Banks, Alfred Bester and Steven Eriksson. "We inhabit a world which we think of as pretty much obeying Newton's laws, and that's not how it works: time does funny things, objects get more mass as they go faster, there is no such thing as a solid point because everything is relative to everything else. It’s mind-bogglingly odd, and the people who do explore that deserve more credit than they get."

Harkaway is relaxed about being known as Le Carré's son. The two are not competitive, he says, and what his parentage has really offered him is "a masterclass in storytelling from the age of five. My father tells stories around the dinner table, and he's very deft with a story, even with the touch he brings to telling a joke."

Authors Benedicte Page Heinemann Nick Harkaway