The Gone-Away World

For much of Harkaway’s debut novel—a digressive, panoptic, sci-fi, kung-fu epic—the obvious touchstone isn’t so much Vonnegut as Heller. An unnamed narrator, who trained as one of the last surviving members of the House of the Voiceless Dragon martial-arts school, enters an elite special-operations wing of the British military. There, he notes: “Some days I get sent on idiot missions to keep me sane.”

Things get insane when the government unleashes its new Go Away Bomb, a weapon of mass disintegration that simply makes its target—cities, mountains, people—disappear. The fallout is like nothing anyone has seen: Strange particles float through the air and turn survivors’ dreams—though mostly nightmares—into reality. With nothing else to do, the narrator and his old army buddies team up as a sort of anti–live nightmare troubleshooting squad.

There are more subplots and digressions here than we could ever attempt to collect, including a colonial revolt, a case of mistaken identity, a Shakespearean/ninja revenge plot, a corporate intrigue and, yes, a love story.

The son of famed thriller novelist John le Carré—best known for his lean, Cold War–era work—Harkaway is so verbose one can guess that Dad doesn’t get a word in edgewise around the holidays. What’s amazing is that Harkaway ably leads the reader back on course without so much as a single bread crumb, partially because he invests equal time in each of his sprawling story lines. Few books have shown us such a good time all year, and we were legitimately hit hard by the ending, like a throwing star to the heart.