I predict a riot

Published on Friday 6 June 2008 18:13

Stuart Kelly finds pleasure in the pandemonium of a stunning debut set in a dystopian future; a historical fiction involving papal treachery; the second volume of the Glass Books Trilogy; and an outrageous coming of age story

DIFFERENT kinds of books offer distinct kinds of pleasure. There's the honed precision of a poetic novella, the tumbler-lock satisfaction of a well-crafted plot and the breath-catching epiphanies of psychologically intense explorations. And then there are the rambunctious, riotous, over-the-top books, as conspicuous and chaotic as a hyper-ventilating chimpanzee in a cathedral. These four novels are by turns thrilling, silly, gripping, crazy, daring and outrageous. I loved every minute of them.

Nick Harkaway's stunning debut, The Gone-Away World, is set in a dystopian future where humanity huddles in the shadow of the Jorgmund Pipe. The rag-tag bunch of heroes are sent to put out a fire on the Pipe, a mission both dangerous and imperative, since the Pipe, like a vast futuristic Glade room-freshener, releases the only substance that keeps the psychic stinks and foul odours of this post-apocalyptic world at bay.

On the way there, the unnamed narrator reminisces about his upbringing, college days, military service, the Go Away Bombs that created their surreal present, and above all his friend Gonzo, to whom he's always felt closer than a brother. Somehow their story brings in ninjas, first loves, pirate-kings, mime-artists, human monsters and, well, monster monsters. Each sentence throws in as much: at college, our anonymous tale-teller looks at his professor's head and wonders "whether the pale, scabrous material which is fluttering from it… is in fact a contagious disease, a harmless consequence of advanced age or the residue of something he accidentally dipped himself in at lunch". The revelation of Gonzo's relationship to his nameless best friend (and the ways in which Harkaway keeps on teasing around us not knowing his name is one of the novel's joys) is both unexpected and obvious. The Gone-Away World is brakes-off fiction.

Imprimatur is historical rather than science-fiction, and has caused a fracas over the authors' heavily annotated revelation that Pope Innocent XI colluded with the Protestant William of Orange. As a historian of the period confided in me, he'd be more surprised if the Papacy hadn't had schemes and intrigues with William, given they had them with everyone else. Set in 1683, the delicious premise is a murder taking place in an inn already quarantined for suspected plague. Papal politics in the 17th century might be a dry subject, but the authors inject every scene with life, colour, lies and wit. Soon enough there are corpses, catacombs and trap-doors a-plenty; plots and counter-plots. The mysterious (and real) castrato Abbot Atto Melani, a spy for Louis XIV, emerges as a detective with a vested interest, and co-opts the hilariously incompetent apprentice cook in un-puzzling the business.

Imprimatur, despite the Da Vinci Code-style "truly shocking true revelations" is at its strongest when it revels in its Three Musketeers mode; all glorious swagger and sly winks. It ought to be compared instead to the coy and canny political panoramas of fellow conspiratorial Italians, the Wu Ming Foundation.

The Dark Volume is the second part of GW Dahlquist's Glass Books Trilogy. The first book, which you don't have to read, but really should, established the heroes – the daring virgin Miss Temple, the assassin Cardinal Chang and the compromised Dr Svenson – and the nefarious technology of blue glass, which can capture memories, store them, and play them into other minds. It also killed off all the villains – dun dun da! – or did it? The heroes are cast ashore and apart; someone – but who? – is killing the local villagers. They leave trails of blue clay as if – but how? – some of the wicked Cabal has survived.

Dahlquist's greatness in this book is, in having invented a fictitious technology, to fully explore what possibilities and applications it might have: and it's fearful. Miss Temple, having once looked into a glass book containing baroque orgies, is now tormented by erotic complicities and desires. Other characters are wasting away, as if addicted, and one book in particular might contain the entire explanation of the glass books' power. The wait for the final volume will be insufferable, except for the future pleasure of boasting to your friends that you read it before it was a movie.

Steve Toltz's A Fraction Of The Whole is the most conventionally literary of the bunch, but in a tremendously unconventional way. It's the bildungsroman or coming of age story of Jasper Dean, for whom explaining his life means explaining his father, Martin's – "the whole of Australia despises my father perhaps more than any other man, just as they adore his brother". Martin is an abominably wonderful creation: misanthropic, cynical, a "Shakespeare who didn't have a gift for words" who calls his son "my failed abortion" and worries if Jasper is his "premature reincarnation". Haunted by Uncle Terry, who was a one-man, Ned-Kelly-style vigilante mission against cheating sports stars, Martin and Jasper are involved in various escapades in their attempt to be genuine. Toltz's pyrotechnic prose means being stuck with these messianic losers is bizarrely joyous, and even sentimental – who can resist sentences like "For months I'd been harbouring vile ideas about people (I dreamed of filling their mouths with haggis), and now I knew actual violence was the next logical step". A Fraction Of The Whole has the kind of opening sentence I would defy any reader to stop at; and it's a rarely affirming first novel that makes you think a sequel wouldn't be a bad idea.

There's a tradition in the novel that runs through Rabelais, Sterne, Dickens and Flann O'Brien – no-holds-barred, out-and-out pandemonium books, grotesque but recognisable, light but profound. These novels carry on that tradition admirably.

The Gone-Away World, Nick Harkaway, Heinemann, 17.99; Imprimatur, Rita Monaldi & Francesco Sorti, Polygon, 16.99; The Dark Volume, GW Dahlquist, Viking 18.99; A Fraction Of The Whole, Steve Toltz, Hamish Hamilton, 17.99