This weekend I finished The Gone-Away World, the first novel by British author Nick Harkaway (who happens to be John Le Carré’s son), and I could not recommend it more highly.
In tone, style, and theme, the book is basically a near-future sci-fi analogue to Catch-22, as written by P.G. Wodehouse and Douglas Adams with an occasional polish by a wittier version of Neal Stephenson. With maybe a dash of Kazuo Ishiguro on acid. It is digressive and sprawling in a way that (rarely, in today’s literature, and even more rarely in novels of considerable length) rewards close reading: it’s pretty clear that Harkaway constructs each sentence with care and joy,* stringing words together in ways that make them pop and hum, and the novel’s many tangents are uniformly entertaining as hell.
More than that, though, and unlike Adams and (arguably) Stephenson, the book has a tightness to the core narrative that unfolds in a really satisfying way. The narration of the lead character is terrific, surprising, organic, and internally consistent; the world-building is (with a few broad exceptions) well thought-out and creative; the underlying premise is simple, novel, and honestly presented;** the plot unfolds naturally, with appropriately escalating stakes; and the backstory is both self-contained and important to the progression of the story. For all of its 500+ pages and many random digressions, it’s an economically-told tale, with few wasted narrative threads.
And it’s so much fun to read!
Anyway, has anyone else read this book? If not, and it sounds remotely appealing, you should do so immediately. 
*There are few things I enjoy more than writing that has been crafted not only with regard to general flow and paragraph structure, but with an eye to individual word choice and an ear to the cadence of each clause in each sentence. You lose a lot when you just skim that kind of writing. Which gives me an opportunity, which I’ll gladly take, to plug Fafblog and its glorious, glorious prose. (More choice Fafblog links.)
**With the exception of the bit about how FOX is made, which was glossed over in a handwave-y fashion that made me suspect that it was a hastily thrown together resolution for that particular plot strand.
