Tigerman - Nick Harkaway

The variety of his work that I have read so far should have been a clue, but it took a long time nonetheless to get a handle on where Nick Harkaway was coming from - or the direction he was taking - with Tigerman. It seemed partly an exotic adventure, partly a fun exploration of writing employing modern youth terminology and pop culture references, but a political element couldn't be discounted either considering the status of the main character as a representative or semi-Consul for a former British Territory. The island of Mancreu may be fictional and its location vague - it appears to be a former British Territory in the Arabian Sea ocean, V-shaped somewhat like the Chagos Islands. although for some reason I pictured Sri Lanka as I was reading it - but while that plays a part, it turns out not to be the main purpose of the book either. If you want to pin it down, you would perhaps have to think bigger and more universal.

Which is difficult, because the novel invites us to into a small enclosed world, an island, a former British colony whose location was once and may well still be of strategic importance, but is now in a legal limbo since it could blow up any day due to volcanic activity and is gradually losing everything as people consequently up and leave. Such is its lack of any real significance that the British have only left one military official in charge, a sergeant who once served in Afghanistan, Lester Ferris. There isn't much that happens that he needs to manage - a missing dog, a stolen fishing haul - but a violent incident at the bar where he spends time in the company of an unusual 12-year old boy whose origin, identity and family background are a mystery suggests that there may be other foreign interests and commercial enterprises with an interest in the future of Mancreu.

There are a number of other threatening incidents involving gangs of thugs, but there are indeed suggestions that they are acting on behalf of a larger unknown enterprise whose intentions are difficult to determine considering the imminent threat of the island disappearing beneath the waves. Much as the diplomatic authorities would like him to remain uninvolved for fear of sparking an international incident Lester isn't about to let things lie after some of the locals - including the boy - have had their lives threatened, and one of them killed. Together with the boy, an avid comic reader, they set about planning to enforce their own kind of justice, forming a plan for a superhero/demon called Tigerman to set the cat among the pigeons - a big cat actually, and these are no mere pigeons.

Aside from the superhero element, there is a little bit of a sense of Graham Greene or even John le Carré (Harkaway’s father) to Tigerman but it's definitely more humorous in its seriousness, and it takes in a wider perspective on the way the world operates on a global stage in the modern age. It seems to reflect not just the world around us today but a more modern outlook on the changes that are occurring. The boy is key to this, giving a sense of a younger generation that is not defined by place of birth, but has a wider multicultural influence and references to draw upon, has other allegiances and their own sense of justice. It's a no less complicated world to navigate however and there are a wide range of factors that all have to be brought together for Lester to solve the mystery of what has happened and where the island is going. 

Harkaway is just the author to make something of this, his writing clever and filled with references that are not show-offy but reflect the complex nature of the world we are living in, the impact of climate change, the shift in balance of power and influence between the political and the commercial, the pervasiveness of pop culture and the rapidity of change that the world is undergoing with instant access to information. It's a world that needs superheroes, but of course superheroes aren't real, and as Tigerman finds out, there's a good reason for that. Maybe however, a little more humanity is all that is needed and Lester Ferris tries to bring that to a world that inevitably still continues to disappoint.

Reading notes. Tigerman by Nick Harkaway was first published in 2014 by William Heinemann. I read the hardcover first edition. Previous reading and looking over reviews suggested to me that Nick Harkaway was an author worth exploring further, and this certainly adds to a diverse but impressive body of work that I look forward to exploring further.