TITANIUM NOIR

An SF–tinged romp that blends elements of the noir thriller and the picaresque novel.

Son of the late John le Carré, Harkaway comes by his moody thriller credentials honestly. Yet here he echoes not his father so much as the Thomas Pynchon of Inherent Vice. His book stars schmo of a detective Cal Sounder, who’s pulled into a tangled tale of corporate intrigue and ethnic cuisine (“the Goan-Hungarian place is called Bela’s but the chef’s name is Atilla....His wife, Mâri, runs the business and she’s the brains”). The men blunder through, for the most part, while the women do the thinking. One topic at the top of everyone’s list is why a “nerd,” as Sounder describes him, should be lying dead on his apartment floor, his outfit a pastiche of high-flood pants, a clip-on tie, and orthotic shoes that “complete the anti-chic vibe.” Oh, and the dead nerd with the bullet in his brain is 7 feet, 8 inches tall and 91 years old: a superman, in other words, known in Harkaway’s metropolis of the near future as a Titan. And how does one get to be so old and gigantic? Therein lies a tale of genetic manipulation—familiar to fans of movies such as RoboCop and Elysium—the mastermind of which is, naturally, a Very Bad Man—or half-man, half-whatever—named Stefan Tonfamecasca. The mad science required to produce a Titan might be intellectually interesting, but it has produced a few monsters to make Sounder’s life miserable. And, Tonfamecasca being the creator of a new life form, who knows how many to produce before “ruining that post-scarcity thing for the few”? There are the inevitable crooked cops and femmes fatales (some of them quite oversized) along with some fun culinary side notes (“Barbecue...is the only food apart from lobster where a grown man is permitted to wear a bib without criticism”) to pepper Harkaway’s tale.

An entertaining shaggy dog of a futuristic whodunit.