The two meet when Lady Neku, disguised as a cos-play girl, rescues Nouveau from a strange mugger. Nouveau has more than enough trouble on his hands even before the attempted mugging. He's a former sniper in the Iraq War who has apparently deserted from the British army. He has a kinky and shaky marriage to a famous artist named Yoshi and is sleeping with the wife of a wealthy gang lord named Mr. Onji.

On top of all of this, Nouveau's bar burns down under suspicious circumstances, killing Yoshi, and he winds up in the hospital being told by Mr. Onji to basically get out of town. And, on top of that, the mother of an old flame of Nouveau's visits him to tell him that the woman, Mary, has supposed committed suicide. Driven by this news, Nouveau returns to London to investigate the circumstances, shadowed by Lady Neku, whose connection to Nouveau becomes clear only much later.

As Nouveau investigates Mary's death, he becomes ever more caught up in strange intrigues, while Lady Neku's mission provides an even greater sense of urgency. Is it the end of the world? Will Nouveau be able to reinvent himself? Will Lady Neku get what she wants?

The mind-blowing meets the mundane

I longed to love End of the World Blues—it has so many amazing elements—but wound up just liking it. There is definitely much to enjoy here, including the pseudo-noir stylings and a fascinating view of Japanese culture. Secondary characters like the irrepressible No Neck, Nouveau's sidekick, ratchet up the energy level considerably. Lady Neku's far-future desolate world has creepy echoes of the utter silence of the far future in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. More importantly, Nouveau, as Grimwood depicts him, is a complex, haunted man with a varied and enigmatic past.

The problems I had with the novel have more to do with the deployment of these elements than with the elements themselves. Although the far-future world Lady Neku inhabits fascinated me, nothing really happens there, and the strangeness seems oddly muted, oddly static. Every time Grimwood cut away from Nouveau to show us Lady Neku's world, I longed to return to the present-day narrative, despite the lovely eye candy and amazing inventiveness on display. At the same time, Nouveau on paper is more compelling than "in the flesh" of the story. His lack of emotional reaction to Yoshi's death and the flat effect of his personality throughout the novel undercut the wonderfully exotic qualities of his backstory. In addition, flashbacks (clumsily labeled as such) combine with the static future sections to slow the momentum of the narrative. It isn't until halfway through the novel that the story begins to display true movement. Before that, End of the World Blues seems to be in the process of continually beginning.

Jon Courtenay Grimwood is an incredibly intelligent and interesting writer. Nothing in End of the World Blues works against that assessment, but ultimately he seems to be treading water here, even as I have to give him high marks for trying something different. Making mind-blowing concepts seem ordinary can be an extraordinary achievement, but when it removes the sense of wonder, and when disparate elements don't quite seem to come together, the result is a novel more easily admired than loved.