Excessive Candour
Imagine This

It is hard to imagine a book this loud, and it is hard to imagine a narrator capable of imagining a book this loud. When we discover after a while that the voice who tells The Gone-Away World is never going to give us a name to call him by—and that, so far as his own behavior in the tale is concerned, he is a man of observant quietude, a quiet eye/I in the midst of the noise of others, a man who speaks up only when decisions must be made on ethical grounds by his beloved cohort of intimates when the fate of the world is at stake—then we begin to whiff a problematic: that maybe The Gone-Away World begins to feel like an imaginary book: that maybe this tail-biting Shandyesque narrative could never in fact have been ejaculated through the pale teeth of a Milktoast consigliere with no name: that Harkaway may be on about something very interesting (or not) in his first novel.

Before the end (for once, no spoilers) we do learn that indeed something very interesting has been happening. Without revealing the central turn of the book, it might be said that a second reading of The Gone-Away World will be of an almost entirely different text.

We begin with what seems to be a riff on very early Thomas Pynchon, much more V in its slang parody of High Demotic Shamble than Gravity's Rainbow:

The lights went out in the Nameless Bar just after nine. I was bent over the pool table with one hand in the bald patch behind the D, which Flynn the Barman claimed was beer, but which was the same size and shape as Mrs Flynn the Barman's arse. ... Flynn went out back, swearing like billy-o—and if your man Billy-O ever met Flynn, if ever there was a cuss-off, a high noon kinduva thing with foul language, I know where my money'd be.

In the bar, which seems to be located somewhere between Arizona and Devon, we soon meet the narrator's childhood friend, his semblable, his alter ego, whose name is Gonzo Lubitsch, and who does sound loud enough and—it must be said—gonzo enough to be the true default voice of The Gone-Away Bird, though it's soon clear he hasn't the mental chops to bring off the Monty Pynchon riffs and runs of its telling. (There is even a parody of the Dead Parrot routine: way beyond the grasp of our stalwart.)

A not-quite alternate universe

Gonzo, it seems, is the hero jock of a gang of hard-drinking entropy-ridden frequent-fornicator freelance truckers on the rampage a la Wild West/Mad Max who do bandaid jobs for Jorgmund, the post-catastrophe megacorp whose world-spanning Jorgmund Pipe emits a reality-congestant spray called FOX ("inFOrmationally eXtra-saturated matter"). Within the reach of this spray is the Liveable Zone, a few miles wide but as world-encircling. Beyond is the Unreal World, as unstable as the Coconico County George Herriman created out of Monument Valley, and inhabited by a lineup of monsters out of the toolkit of fantastika.

Gonzo and his gang—Annie the Ox who talks to puppets, Sally Culpepper with the secret tattoo, Jim Hepsobah who shaves his head, a traumatized male nurse named Egon Schlender, and lots of others straight out of V's Whole Sick Crew—treat this new world like a good fart joke, until the lights go out, as a result of a savage fire that has ignited on the Pipe, endangering reality itself. A Jorgmund apparatchik soon shows up to hire the Haulage and Hazmat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company of Exmoor County (i.e., the Whole Sick Crew) to buckle up and do some fire-fighting. Ah Jeez I guess we better, moans the Crew, and they pile stertorously into some nice new trucks, and light out for the fire. We are almost at the end of the first chapter. And we have been roundly conned.

The second chapter plunges us back into childhood experiences shared by Gonzo and Milktoast, and we will not get back to the fire on the Pipe for another 300 pages. But that's not the main con. In the course of that 300 pages we learn that Gonzo and his gang are not a Whole Sick Crew at all but a very highly trained unit of special operatives, tough, savvy, learned, combat-ready, entirely professional. They have worked together for years. They save each other's lives lots. They are not ronin on a bender. They are samurai. They are serious (as serious as Milktoast when he has to speak). We have been flim-flammed.

The world we are cast back into is an alternate universe very little different from our own. There are some geographical slurries, and some political variations, and only those countries that are never visited seem to be given names we recognize. Like the Nameless Bar and the narrator himself, the country Gonzo and Milktoast grow up in inseparably is never actually called England, though its place-names are tauntingly familiar: the ignis fatuous slipperiness of the book only increases the more you attempt to fix upon anything important within. Whatever. Milktoast almost lives with Gonzo's parents (we never meet anyone who might be his own Mom and Dad), and we follow their maturing into a more and more explicitly garish and deranged world.

It is a world that an interior kind of guy like Milktoast has to shout very loud to address. There is teenage love. He becomes adept at martial arts under the tutelage of a wise giggling guru-type oldster from the Far East. At Jarndyce University (a name whose referents seem unfunny to me) he drifts into undue intimacy with some student radicals (one of whom is sexually aroused by slogans) and on his arrest is treated with some brutality. Magically, then, after a discorporate gap in the tale, he finds himself as a soldier of some sort seconded to a government research facility, where he listens in on a lecture by Professor Derek, who has invented a Go Away Bomb, which (after a hundred pages or so) we learn is far more dangerous than the Professor had thought. His original notion is to create a weapon which leaches information out of matter, leaving nothing:

Information is what gives shape and stability to the universe. Remove it, and you get a perfect circle of absence, a space where there's nothing, because the matter (and energy) there doesn't know how to behave any more and ... simply ceases to exist.

He is dead wrong.

The Crew we met initially has gradually been accreting around Gonzo and Milktoast, and the action focuses on the small state of Addeh Katir somewhere adrift of the Himalayas, where a irremediably complex civil/international conflict, along familiar lines, has been souring steadily. Suddenly the world is showing pockmarks (as though some godsized Chigurh has been aiming his vacuum-creating cattle killer at whole neighbourhoods, creating No Countries for Old Men in spasms worldwide). It is of course the Go Away Bomb, and it has gone wrong.

It seems that [Professor Derek] was wrong. Matter [and energy] stripped of information becomes Stuff, known to me recently as Disney Dust or shadow. It hangs around, desperate for new information. It becomes hungry.

Listening for the sound of the book

And we begin to sense an isomorphy between the ravenous noise of the telling of The Gone-Away World and the story within it. It turns out that the utterands of Stuff—the sweet deadly grotesque self-donating creatures who fill the Unreal World—are central to the tale it tells, and in terms of that tale they prophesy an exit from the shrill poison gas of FOX: because the reality FOX maintains is insensate: there is no give to it, no Mutabilitie. Out beyond the straitjacket artifact of FOX are creatures great and small, and they are us:

What has happened here, what is going on all around us [in the Unreal World], is that the human piece of the noosphere—our thoughts, and hopes, and fears—all these things are being reified. The human conceptual mishmash is becoming physical, replacing what is Gone Away with dreams and nightmares.

So it is perhaps no wonder that The Gone-Away World so cacophonously embraces the tangles and tears and exorbitant maneuvers of Stuff becoming; like the story it tells, the book is itself a body English of reifying. The sound of the book is the sound of Stuff saying itself aloud in a world at risk of remaining FOX.

We are not really meant to guess this exactly for many pages, and it may be that some readers will retire deafened before Harkaway's overpumped but incrementally more and more compelling tale begins to turn its face—its registrar—to the light. Certainly there are longueurs; the sessions of text devoted to childhood could be shrink-dried to general advantage, and some of the Kill Bill action surrealisms pale beside the Tarantino original. But the hundred pages or so of war at the center of the text are indispensible, not only because they are very, very well done, but because they allow the narrator's voice some natural space where if it breaks it is because it is crying.

And so finally we return to the Nameless Bar, and the fire on Jorgmund's Pipe, and the tale explodes, controllably. Revelations and turns and Guess-Who Shokkus chase one another through the increasingly end-oriented pages. Faster and faster, we learn what we need to learn. It may be that we were not fully prepared for Harkaway so suddenly to intensify the visibility of story, that we were not expecting The Gone-Away World to tie all its loose ends together and ride into a new world with all the good guys, pumping Stuff. It may be that we really thought the book might be about entropy.

But The Gone-Away World is not a noise. It is a telling.