The Gone Away World

This is a book with an apocalypse as well as a post-apocalypse and having important characters who include ninjas, mimes(!), a team of (de facto) oil-well fire fighters, in short, a book written on a broad and wild canvas. Which is to say, the sort of book Nick Harkaway would write. I thought I would love it but alas this book needed an editor: while Mr Harkaway’s prose is consistently sharp, clever, unexpected, the plot plods through a back-story that just needed to be redacted/tightened somehow. This is the same problem I have had with some Stephen King books, for example “It” and for egregious example, “The Stand”. Anyway, it became A Mission to complete the book and I managed to miss some details that I assume would make the conclusion coherent to me. All I can really say is that the good guy got the girl and the bad guy got dead, yay!! So, all and all not my fave book, but hey, I am comparing Harkaway to S. King…