Nick Harkaway: Titanium Noir (2023, Little, Brown Book Group Limited)
English language
Published May 18, 2023 by Little, Brown Book Group Limited.
Pretty nice detective novel with some cool sci-fi elements about long life. Some interesting brutal fight scenes as well, including one where the main guy shoves his fist in his opponents mouth, cutting off his air supply.
An engaging noir tale set in a world where a Titan treatment makes a person larger and practically immortal. Cal operates as a detective working with police to solve cases involving Titans.
Fun noir detective story. Interesting setting and nice characters. Had some of the tropes about noir stuff that I find grate after a while – everyone is cynical and wise, the reader implicitly naive and ignorant, as though it's our fault. Also set in a nearish future but left out mobile and surveillance tech just because it was convenient to do so/didn't fit the tropes. Felt like a wee bit of a cop out, would have liked to see some acknowledgement of it in some way. But a very enjoyable read.
Harkaway is usually pacy, but this one felt particularly brisk and to the point (certainly shorter than his usual).
In the future, the very wealthy are functionally immortal, and also literally just bigger than normal folk. That is the very silly, very on-the-nose premise of this otherwise enjoyable and down-to-earth thriller. Despite its near-future setting, the prose feels authentically "noir". The main character is likeable and the plot has the right amount of twists and turns: you can follow along, but you can't quite predict it.
None of Harkaway's books are quite like one another, and they're all worth your time.
Like the pulp that inspires it, Titanium Noir is a short piece that rolls along a brisk pace. The protagonist, Cal Sounder, is a bridge between two worlds. He lives and works as a detective, doing private work and consulting for the police of Chersenesos, but has ties to the level of society occupied by those so obscenely wealthy their very being is a mixture of unsettling and glamorous both for the other characters and for us readers. When crimes involve one of these hyper-rich, Sounder is brought in to smooth things over. The book starts with Sounder arriving on scene for a crime much too complex and messy for the easier fixes he's used to.
Sounder navigates a crime, a world, and a story in which power is manifested very directly as something brutal …
None of Harkaway's books are quite like one another, and they're all worth your time.
Like the pulp that inspires it, Titanium Noir is a short piece that rolls along a brisk pace. The protagonist, Cal Sounder, is a bridge between two worlds. He lives and works as a detective, doing private work and consulting for the police of Chersenesos, but has ties to the level of society occupied by those so obscenely wealthy their very being is a mixture of unsettling and glamorous both for the other characters and for us readers. When crimes involve one of these hyper-rich, Sounder is brought in to smooth things over. The book starts with Sounder arriving on scene for a crime much too complex and messy for the easier fixes he's used to.
Sounder navigates a crime, a world, and a story in which power is manifested very directly as something brutal and inhuman, something which transforms the people who have it. As the detective slowly, painstakingly pieces things together we meet his mettle and resolve in a world where no one is innocent, everyone is beholden, and everyone is more wise to the seediness of the world than you are.
It's a vaguely alter-world, somewhere between the concrete of classic city noir, a very human present, and a vague, possible future. The quasi-mythical Chersenesos is more medically advanced than us, but at the same time no one ever mentions carrying or using a mobile phone.
As metaphors for brutality of wealth and power it is not subtle, but this is not a genre of subtlety, and like many brutal things it is quite effective. And in the end, I think, also satisfying.
Bit of a departure from his earlier novels but a tightly plotted and flawlessly executed cyberpunk noir story without a wasted page.
