To The Last Page

**First book spoiler warning** This is Nick Harkaway's second book in the Titanium Noir series, so while there are no spoilers here for Sleeper Beach , it does reveal at least one significant event that took place in the first book . ** Cal Sounder, in his capacity as a Private Investigator rather than as part of the important Tonfamecasca family, is called in to look into the death of a woman on Sleeper Beach in the costal town of Shearwater. A formerly thriving town, it's now something of a backwater, but still the centre of operations for the Erskine family who practically own the town. It's not uncommon to find dead bodies on Sleeper Beach. People often come there to lie on one of the many sunbeds laid out and stay there; those suffering from what the local police pathologist calls 'spontaneous dysphoric and psychogenic cognitive atrophy', a fancy way of saying that they feeling discarded by the world and have given up on life. The dead woman Alisa Lloyd doesn...

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 ...

There's a definite Blade Runner vibe to Titanium Noir , but that's probably only to be expected. It's going to be hard to avoid comparison to a work as influential in the science-fiction world as that when a movie or book adopts the style of the noir genre, is futuristic and somewhat nihilistic in outlook. There is still plenty of room for originality here however, particularly for an author like Nick Harkaway, and while there are some obvious and probably unavoidable similarities and correlations with Ridley Scott's influential take on Philip K Dick, Titanium Noir succeeds to some extent in putting its own stamp on the material, or at the very least manages to be a hugely entertaining dark futuristic science-fiction noir thriller. Cal Sounder is not an official on the police force but a 'specialist' they call upon when it comes to dealing with any crime or incident that involves individuals known as Titans. Much like Rick Deckard when it comes to dealing with...

The ambitious concept, the format and the structure don’t immediately strike one as original, but sometimes it’s what you do with an idea that is important and there’s no reason why Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon can’t be better and more purposeful that some of the models it brings to mind. In the case of Gnomon , the obvious comparisons are works by David Mitchell, Christopher Nolan and – almost inevitably these days when you are dealing with high concept science-fiction – Philip K Dick. Gnomon is made up of a number of interconnected stories, exotic in nature, covering cast distances of space and time in the manner of Mitchell’s Ghostwritten or Cloud Atlas – and there’s a little bit of the computer game world and Orpheus mythology of Mitchell’s opera with Michel van der Aa, Sunken Garden . There’s an element of Christopher Nolan’s Inception in that those identities are overlaid, imported into the mind and ‘lived’ in a mental dream-state, adopting a persona from a scanned memory, and the...