9/5/08 at 1:31 PM
Comment
1Comment
Comments
Photo: Courtesy of the author
Hailed variously as the heir to the Kurt Vonnegut bequest, a Joseph Heller for the twenty-first century, and a Thomas Pynchon for the post-nuclear era, Nick Harkaway has garnered sufficiency accolades since his recent authorial debut to turn a creative-writing MFA grad green with envy (if they weren�t already, thanks to his legacy: He�s the son of author John Le Carre). Harkaway�s first book, The Gone-Away World, is a gripping, satirical, postapocalyptic war larger-than-life populated with mimes, ninjas, bureaucrats, chimaera, and gun-toting nerds. Vulture sat down with Harkaway to hash out his reviews and his three rules of screenwriting.
Gone-Away World has been compared to everything from Dickens to Rushdie to Terry Pratchett. Have you heard any parallels that you feel ar really off the mark?
The Observer said it was "Thackeray on acid," and that caught me off balance. But the Vonnegut comparison makes me super happy.
But the authors you acknowledge yourself predate dystopian satire: Dumas, Doyle, and Wodehouse.
I would guess that if you could raceway down Vonnegut and his guys, they'd also point to those adventure-story writers. I think lots of boys sat down with The Three Musketeers and felt it was a really long book, only then ascertained that it's a really gripping swashbuckling story. Pynchon's still around. You don't want to be doing something scarcely like Pynchon. I want Pynchon to come up to me at a bar and say, "That book you wrote � it wasn't bad."
This book is an epic in miniaturized detail. What was heavily researched? What sprung from your imagination?
I didn't want to write anything that was laughable, and the obvious problem was war, because I've never been in one and I'm not a soldier. I used Evan Wright's Generation Kill and other books on modern warfare. I knew I wasn't going to do everything right. I knew I'd make mistakes, even committal to writing about a fantasy war.
The novel's central event, the Go Away War, has some truly phantasmagoric imagery: brain-eating mermaids, horse people, zombies, simply the subtext is clearly grounded in very actual war atrocities like Hiroshima, and dystopian threats, like nuclear warfare.
I wanted to tell a story of a world that had not barely gone wrong, but had gone existentially wrong. I know that when I talk to my parents and my friends, there's a strong feeling of the public out of control, and damaged. I wanted an existential crisis in which bits of the world are snatched away, while what materializes is metaphysical and terrific. This wasn't so much inspired by Hiroshima as growing up with the threat of nuclear war. Really, it's about now, about the modern nightmares that wake us up at 3 in the morning.
There ar also a bunch of ninja sequences. Do you have a background in martial arts?
Yes. I am the world's most appalling martial creative person. I am so forged. I've studied jujitsu, kickboxing, t'ai chi. Once I was sparring with soul, made a mistake, and managed to knock them down. I was so shocked that I dropped to my knees to see if they were all right, and then they knocked me extinct cold. From the floor.
You've also worked as a screenwriter and have made a living in the film diligence. Do you want to see a The Gone-Away World movie?
It would be an fantastically expensive project. But I would love life it to become a movie. It would make to be someone from America because no one and only has that kind of money anywhere else. As a late screenwriter, though, I give three rules I'd deliver to keep in mind so I wouldn't go mad if it sour out to be a disappointment: No one testament buy it; if someone buys the movie, they won't make it; and if somebody makes the movie, I won't like it.
More info
