Starred review from May 19, 2014
All his tours of duty can’t prepare British army Sgt. Lester Ferris, a veteran of the War in Afghanistan, for life on an island facing certain ecological destruction, in Harkaway’s poignant morality tale, equally fueled by emotion and adrenaline. Though the fictional island of Mancreu, located somewhere in the Arabian sea, is no longer officially under the thumb of the British government—the Brits ceded control to an international peacekeeping force—Ferris is appointed brevet-consul, a largely ceremonial post that’s supposedly a last stop for him before he can leave army life behind for good. Mancreu is anything but an island paradise. Long exposed to harsh mining involving the island’s volcano, it’s a ticking time bomb, with the residents waiting for the next in a string of toxic events, known as “Clouds.” The sergeant’s only real friend, and surrogate son, is a comic-book-loving, Internet-slang-spouting teenage boy he calls Robin (think Batman), who helps him navigate Mancreu’s social and political intricacies. With a mishmash of countries all fighting for a piece of the island, either under the auspices of national pride or scientific experimentation, it’s no surprise that Mancreu has a thriving black market, operating out of a flotilla of ships moored just outside the harbor. The murder of one of Ferris’s acquaintances sets off a chain of increasingly violent events that coincide with an incoming Cloud, all of which threaten to destroy not only the bodies but the minds of Mancreu’s inhabitants. Harkaway (Angelmaker) adroitly explores the lengths one man will go to save what he’s come to love, even in the face of almost-certain failure.
Starred review from July 1, 2014
Imagine Superman in Grand Fenwick and you'll have some idea of Harkaway's (Angelmaker, 2012, etc.) brilliantly imagined latest romp."It's amazing being a superhero," says Lester Ferris as the action winds down at the end of Harkaway's latest. "It's totally mad." Ferris, aka the Sergeant, hasn't been on Mancreu for long, but he's lived 10 lifetimes there. Posted to a supposedly quiet patch of earth after long, soul-shattering duty in Afghanistan ("the Americans called it a Total Goatfuck") and Iraq, he's found himself on a spit of land out in the Arabian Sea that, thanks to climate change, is in danger of receding under the waves-but until that time is a convenient entrepot for drug dealers, arms smugglers, pirates, spies, defectors, flimflam artists, multinational corporatists and all the usual suspects, not least of them numerous powers NATO and otherwise: "[V]arious interests," writes Harkaway, "were making use of the lawless nature of the Mancreu waters for things they might not otherwise be able to do." Mancreu's hub is a cafe owned by a fine fellow named Shola, who's mowed down by gunmen for no apparent reason. The Sergeant, aided-or perhaps not-by shadowy figures flying the stars and stripes and the tricolor, is at a loss until, visited of a night by a tiger, he takes on the superhero guise of the title, suggested to him by a comic-book-loving, lonely teenager helpfully named Robin. The ensuing showdown is full of in-jokes, knowing nods to the headlines and miscreant Belgians, which will please fans of Monty Python if not necessarily the good burghers of Antwerp. The cast of characters is straight out of a Milton Caniff cartoon, with names like Bad Jack, White Raoul and the Witch, but the burdens poor Mancreu has to bear, from land rape and gang war to toxic dumping and international intrigue, are thoroughly modern millstones.A hoot and a half, and then some: hands down, the best island farce since Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle half a century ago.
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Starred review from July 1, 2014
Harkaway is at it again, celebrating pop culture, mixing genres like a mad scientist, and producing a book that is both profoundly moving and deliriously entertaining. This time his canvas is not nearly as broad as it was in Angelmaker (2012), with the action limited to one moment in time and one confined place. But what a place! Mancreu is a tiny Asian island on the brink of extinction. Polluted beyond salvation, with noxious gases belching from its core, Mancreu is scheduled to be evacuated, then obliterated. Meanwhile, lawlessness reigns, with a motley crew of British, French, American, and Japanese officials looking on aimlessly as the island is overcome with the deep, dark brown taste of gloom. The British representative, Lester Ferris, a former soldier put out to pasture in Mancreu, is told only not to make waves. That's fine with Lester until he befriends a mysterious island boy, a lover of comics and a whiz on the Internet. When Lester's and the boy's friend, a caf' owner, is murdered in front of their eyes, the boy wants revenge and expects Lester to step up. If Harkaway's debut, The Gone-Away World (2008), was his take on postapocalyptic fiction, and Angelmaker a kind of Dickens-meets-steampunk epic, then this novel is an ode to superhero comics. To please the boy, whom he calls Robin, Lester dons a self-styled superhero costume, complete with some twenty-first-century weaponry, and sets off as Tigerman to right a wrong world, hoping to show Robin that sometimes someone does fix it. Mancreu can't be fixed, of course, and it is at this point that Harkaway throws a spanner in the comic-book works, adding depth and complexity to the mix, more Haruki Murakami than Stan Lee. While Tigerman romps, Harkaway slips in a moving (surrogate) father-son drama, but nothing is quite what it seems. Yet another bravura performance from a writer whose imagination knows no bounds.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)