Nick Harkway is the youngest son of John le Carré, but unlike, for example, Stephen King's children, who are trying to become competitors to their parent, Harkway, although he followed in his father's footsteps, becoming a writer, decided to work in a completely different style and genre. "The World that Disappeared" is his debut, a huge and in a good way crazy novel that made him popular overnight. Not with us, of course, because the Russian translation was published 8 years after the publication of the book in English. But it's better late than never...
It is impossible to describe "The World that disappeared" in two words. This is definitely a post-apocalypse, because before us is the Earth after a certain number of "disappear bombs" dropped on it, but instead of describing the world and creating an atmosphere of 600 pages, Harkway tells us about what happened in the narrator's life before and what is in it now, who is Gonzo Lubich and how earthlings came to such a life in general.
Roman-education? Please: friendship, family, senior mentor, first love - everything is available. An anti-war novel in the spirit of Vonnegut or Heller? And then: in this case, everything related to militarism is just a circus, and in the literal sense of the word, too. But no superimposed plot scheme or subgenre can fully describe either what is happening in the book or what it is about.
Harkway sought this consciously and achieved it, so now readers are divided into two camps: some are delighted with the madness that is happening on the pages of the novel, others say that this nonsense is nonsense. I couldn't make up my mind a few weeks after reading it: I definitely liked the concept itself, but its implementation turned out to be somehow very uneven and bumpy, verbose and unnecessarily complicated, as if the text of a novice author was taken and published without any editorial edits, whereas he himself hoped that they would be able to "comb" everything that he gave out on the mountain.
The narrator in the text is an unnamed man who, together with his childhood friend Gonzo Lyubich, went to war, and then rode around the planet on a huge pipelayer, trying to support what was left of the Earth's population. The fact is that the war was extremely unusual: the atomic bombs were replaced by the so-called "disappear bombs", which simply erase all existence by destroying the connection between the material and information component, but the matter.
Kungry to greed, left without information, began to pull it from everywhere, for example, from human fears and desires. Brainy scientists, of course, have figured out how to deal with this slowly, but since at one time the countries did not face off with their weapons, Gonzo and Co have plenty of work...
I made up the paragraph above all right, you won't wait for this from Nick Harkway, you'll have to wade through a bunch of entertaining (and not very) episodes, add up 1 + 1, brush off mimes, ninjas, kung fu masters, lovers of tea and cookies in wartime, girls with horse hooves and everything else. In the best traditions of "Massacre Number Five" or "Amendment 22", he guides his heroes through the absurdity of military life.
The absurdity of bureaucracy and the realization that there is not such a thick line between reality and fiction, and therefore one often overlaps with the other, creating a special world. I have a feeling that much of what has become part of the "World that has Disappeared" was invented by the author once upon a time, in the days of fervent youth or even childhood, but since the writer has not lost his enthusiasm yet, he decided "why not? why not use everything I want in an adult text?", we are now witnessing something absurd.
At the same time, under the author's "nonsense" brought to an extreme degree of absurdity, there are quite serious observations and reflections about our world. For example, in one of the episodes, an unnamed narrator literally turns into a Kafkaesque Joseph K. from the "Process" and beats the thresholds of human resources specialists, one of whom eventually shares information that no one takes him to work because a secret dossier is attached to his questionnaire. The narrator wonders what it is about that dossier that everyone refuses him.
"And no one knows, it's secret," sounds to him in response. Quite a slice of the modern system for you and me, when some kind of piece of paper is required for normal life or getting what is required, but no one knows what kind of piece of paper it is in all the details. And how many situations when some information is spread by word of mouth and everyone believes what they have heard, without trying to find the original source and figure out why?
Or an even more terrible situation: the result of the fusion of information and matter can become just people, but they are not people for people, let's say, who naturally appeared, although they are not distinguishable, and therefore turn into enemies that need to be destroyed. This is just a typical propaganda ploy: to turn the named enemy into something as different from you as possible, they say, another race, a nation - they are not like us, they drink the blood of babies and, perhaps, aliens in general, trying to enslave the world. Judging by the world news, this technique is still in use, and you won't even smile at it.
In general, it is difficult for me to describe the ideal reader of Harkway's work, this is the case when in order to understand whether you like the book or not, you need to start reading it and decide already in the process, because neither love for the absurd nor sympathy for post-apocalyptic fiction in this case is not enough, you just need to be on the same wavelength with the author and happily perceive the whole carousel of events that he diligently writes out.
The main thing is to be prepared for the bumpiness of the book, the fact that there may be outright bullshit behind a strong scene. And yes, please note that the work has opened a new series of AST publishing house called "Puzzle Novel" and the name of this series is not at all simple...
351.991 SRY