Friday, October 4, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Tigerman by Nick Harkaway



Nick Harkaway's "Gnomon" was one of my favorite books of last year, which says something because that book was in a genre (cyberpunk) that I don't really love that much.  Somehow Harkaway took a setup that could easily have felt overwhelming and result in a bunch of half-baked characters in service of an idea-filled plot and made everything - the characters, the ideas, the twists - work near perfectly.  So I naturally made a note to check out the rest of Harkaway's bibliography, especially after others suggested I do the same.

And I'm glad I did, because Tigerman is pretty phenomenal.  The book is a "superhero" origin story that may remind people of Unbreakable, yet is far more interesting - the book also is a major satire (and an oft hilarious one at that) of the global politics of colonialism and and the postcolonial global order.  It also features an incredibly well built cast of characters, as well as a main character who is really damn great as he struggles with his own fears and hopes in a world that seems doomed.

Note:  I read this as an audiobook and I HIGHLY recommend the book in this format, as the reader does an excellent job with all of the voices and accents - even to the point of when a character with one accent is doing an imitation of another character with a different accent.  The reader is tremendous, and really enhances the reading experience, so yeah, worth your time if you're looking for an audiobook for sure.

---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
The island of Mancreu, a former British colony, is doomed.  Chemicals and pollution have resulted in the growth of a strange bacteria under the island, which periodically releases discharges of chemicals into the Island's atmosphere which have strange and dangerous effects on the inhabitants....and the great powers of the world fear the spreading of this bacteria could spread the problem apocalyptically throughout the world.  So they've decided to destroy the Island before that can happen, with the inhabitants eventually facing evacuation if they don't leave in time.  And in the meantime, the powers that be have decided that, with the Island doomed, Mancreu is no longer anyone's property, meaning the island is a lawless atmosphere for anybody - and everybody - to do whatever illicit activities they wish offshore.

Sergeant Lester Ferris is a burnt out British Sergeant, after years of fighting in wars around the globe.  So his assignment to Mancreu as the sole British representative is supposed to be just a place for him to gracefully live out his service, where he can not rock the boat as the days of the Island's existence go by until the end.  But the Sergeant has found an unexpected friend on Mancreu, a Boy of unknown (early teens?) age with seemingly no name and no family that the Sergeant can track down, who loves comic books and seems incredibly smart at dealing with the situation on the island.  The Sergeant even dreams of adopting the Boy, if the Boy doesn't actually have any parents.  But when an act of violence happens right in front of the Sergeant and the Boy, the Sergeant finds himself caught up more and more with the illegal activities of the island he's under orders to ignore.  And to do anything about those activities, and to prove himself to the Boy, the Sergeant will have to become something else.....a hero.....or maybe a superhero, one named "Tigerman".
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Tigerman is the story of a war traumatized middle age man, finally in a position where he should get some peace, who is finally trying to deal with personal desires - for a family mostly, but for himself as well.  Meanwhile, all around him in this, are two worlds: people native to the island whose personal lives are being disrupted because of the outside world driven destruction of their home and people of that outside world there on the Island either to simply "watch" or to take advantage of the opportunities presented by a land where there is no law.  That last group is represented by the Fleet - a group of ships with hidden (though not that hidden) ties to National Governments performing every black market or illicit action you could think of - drug profiteering, organ harvesting, human experimenting, arms trafficking, etc etc.

It's a hell of a setting for a story with strong themes of the evils of colonialism, even in a post-colonial world, as Mancreu supposedly is - the Sergeant is the only British person on the island and instructed to do nothing because Britain has supposedly relinquished its claim to the Island.  After all, the Fleet is supposed to not touch the Island itself with their illegal activities, and their influence is supposed to stay off the coast, unseen.  Yet everyone knows that its influence greatly affects life on the Island, and the fleet's actions do even touch the island directly, as the Sergeant finds out.  The idea that the colonizers can just take away all of their influence from a place is ridiculous, as this book points out.

And ridiculousness is the theme of much of this book.  The Sergeant - as he mostly thinks of himself - finds himself repeatedly in ridiculous sounding conversations with the people in charge and the people not in charge on the Island, which will crack up the reader quite frequently.  Or make the reader depressed at the realistic humor of it all - well, realistic to a certain extent: this is a book titled "Tigerman" after all.

The Sergeant's character is a perfect vessel for demonstrating this ridiculousness - he's supposed to overlook all the evils going on in the Island, but he personally can't do that, and even just trying to act as a one man police force isn't enough to assuage his guilt over what it's doing to people he's called friends there.  After all, the Sergeant has seen refugee camps to know what is going to happen to the people on Mancreu who manage to survive it all but don't leave until the very end, and he knows how lousy that situation is.  Yet he's insecure and uncomfortable with people and not quite sure how to act around others with interests in him, or who he's interested in in general.  As such, he has trouble dealing with a scientist who may be showing romantic interest in him.  And then there's The Boy, who the Sergeant just can't bring himself to ask about the Boy's family, or to ask the Boy directly if the Boy would be interested in being adopted and taken away to the place - despite many others asking the Sergeant why he doesn't just ask the Boy directly.

The other characters in this book are similarly excellent - both to show off the ridiculousness of this world and in their own rights.  First and foremost is The Boy, who is another great example of the paradox of the island.  On one hand, he's still a young boy, somewhere between 10-14 years old, with his own innocence and needs for comfort and family, who loves comic books and wishes for real life superheroes.  On the other, this is a boy who is comfortable dealing with both the island and the evils of the Fleet, who goes back and forth between one and the other seemingly at will, and seems at time to act more like a man of this world than even the Sergeant.  The world won't let The Boy live a normal childhood, even as he pretends outside to have one, and he has been forced to adapt as so.

Then of course there are the other more minor characters in this world.  There's Dirac, the French solider exiled to Mancreu because he took a stand on injustice in another nation when he was merely supposed to be observing.  There's Jed Kershaw, the American had of NatProMan (The international organization of nations supposed to be supervising events on the Island up tits destruction) who has American braggadocio but simply wants to obey orders, unlike the main character.  There's Inoue, the Japanese scientist who keeps trying to explain that blowing up the Island won't actually stop the bacteria, only no one will listen.  I could go on and on, but I'll just stop here: there's a lot here, and they're all done really well. 

I want to make this clear by the way, in all of the themes I describe above, this is also a book about a man who sees all this injustice, and finds himself driven to become a costumed superhero to try and do something about it.  This is still science fiction in its form (the bacteria and the like, as well as what Tigerman becomese), even if it feels very real in our world because of how well Harkaway paints it all.  I don't want to give the impression this is wholly literary fiction, even if it's pretty damn satirical in how it uses its superhero story trappings.  But those themes are so damn well done, that they've wound up taking up most of this review, and I could go on and on about them: this is a book that demands more time than a simple review.

In short, read Tigerman.  It's fantastic.

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