book review
(I really had to tell other gaians about it, seriously)
It's "THE GONE-AWAY WORLD" by Nick Harkaway
summary:
"Equal parts raucous adventure, comic odyssey and romantic epic, the gone-away world is a story of, among other things, love and loss, of ninjas, pirates, politics, of curious heroism in strang and dangerous places and of a friendship stretched beyond its limits."
(needless to say, I bought it after reading the ninja and pirate part)
now some extracts :
"of course, you're always going to get some accidents, because human beings screw up; they get horny and think of their sweethearts and lean on the Big Red Button and someone loses a finger" p.17
"He is an old man. He has eaten a lot of cake and drunk some tea, and he's been playing with a Tupperware box for half an hour." p.108
"We have a gun moutain. We don't really mind having your spare guns. We just wish you'd put them right on the pile. They come into our country in little dribs and drabs. They go to Erwin Kumar and he loses them or sells them and they show up all over the place. Only a week ago, I found a whole crate of them in my kitchen, under the broccoli. And of course, very occasionally someone gets shot with them, which is very upsetting" p.116
"If it puts you in a chicken-wire box and treats you like a sub-human, and it wears a sexy uniform and claims all this is for the greater good, it's a Nazi" p.120
"That was crap. it was total crap. Are you some kind of huge-testicled ballet dancer under that uniform? Are you a f*cking chorus girl in a red beret? If I strip you off, sergeant Hordle, and don't snigger, because I can and we both know it, if I strip you down to your skivvies with my own two hands, which I wouldn't, because I don't know where you've been, but I have thoughts, will I find that you are wearing stockings and a bloddy tutu? And lest you think, Sergeant, that I am impugning your sexuality, let me remind you that Billy Radigand from C company was in here half an hour ago and nearly took my bloody head off and he is a poof, not to say a homosexual, not to say he sups on sausage rather than fish, but he is hard as nails! And you are softer than a baby's arse! Now f*ck off and practise!" p.165
"It was a zombie letter. In the middle of the night it will rise from the grave and eat the other letters, starting with the headings. Then it will crawl out into the camp and begin its rampage, and some of the scraps it leaves behind will also re-animate. The undead paper plague will spread until nothing can stop it... bwha-hahaha!" p. 176
"For reasons I have never understood, the Swiss still think the Russians are going to sweep down on the European fold annd devour their babies" p.222
"Whatever it is, Kemner wants to put us in it, one by one, and will enjoy putting us in, and she is a crazy lady with a collection of human heads on her office furniture." p. 262
"After a moment, the orange person traces with one cloved hand on the ceiling. Semicircle. Zigzag. He speaks in hieroglyphs. I understand nothing. Semicircle. Zigazag. A plan to attack? A clock. A pretty flower? He is Zorro. Yes. That's it! Zorro has come. The fox, with his mighty sword and whip, to smite the evildoers... Z for Zorro. I think about it. Ah. Semicircle. Zigzag. Not Z. U, N. He is a soldier. He was a prisoner. He will fight, because she keeps his friends in a drinks fridge." p. 268
"We say "Hooray" to them, and they say "Hugwugwughug" to us, and we try to copy them and get it wrong, and everyone finds this enormously amusing, until one of the sheep wanders over to the left of where we're all leaping around and laughing and explodes with considerable emphasis, and we realise that we are doing our hugwughugging on the edge of a mine field." p. 275
"It is the first laughter I have heard since the end of the world. (Nervous laughter and evil laughter do not count)" p. 283
"He would scream, but this expression has been taken from him, so he just stares at me in horror, and I tell him I know, I know, it hurts and you are dying. I know. I am here. He stares at me, and I cannot tell if he is thankful or if he simply cannot believe I am so damn trivial as to imagine that makes any better." p. 286
"We watch him wander off, and we are ashamed a bit that we don't offer help. On the other hand, we haven't shot him either, which was a possibility, given that he was a completely impossible, alien object in the middle of a dangerous place at a dangerous time." p.289
"Its full name was Piper Nine Zero Bravo One One Uniform, which means, if you assume that each section of that designation could be either a number from zero to nine or a letter of the alphabet (as represented by the Alpha Bravo Charlie code beloved of gun nuts everywhere) that it was potentially one of 78,364,164,096 units. [...] So Piper 90 has a totally dumb name, and it looks like the love child of a bulldozer and a shopping mall after someone poured several thousand tonnes of yoghurt over it and left it out in the garden for a month.." p.304-305
"Perhaps Professor Derek - accursed be his name and his seed in eternity, and may giant badgers pursue him for ever through the Bewildering Hell of Fire Ants, Soap Opera and Urethral Infections - is still alive and trying to clean his mess." p. 305
"Pascal Timbery made a noise as if he was trying to speak, maybe to say something like "I'm really sorry I ate your dog" which might or might not have been a good thing to say, and surely it wouldn't have been the most tactful sentiment at that time" p. 314
"Sam, if we are ambushed in the next twenty minutes by anthropophagous plants or by giant fish-rabbits looking for their horrid young, I am going to let them have you. In fact, I will serve you to them on a plate made of banana leaves. I will put a white napkin over my arm and I will carry you into their dinning room with an apple in your mouth, and I will offer to carve you. I will recommend a full-bodied red wine, because I suspect your meat will be gamey or even smoked, and I will bow until my nose touches the vile, gobbet-covered carpet of their lair and wish them bon appetit, and then I will walk out and consider myself richer and the world a better, less arsehole-ridden place." p. 334-335
"The noise he is producing with each impact is a sort of bone-deep BUH! rather than the soft pmf! which people use for emphasis, or the toctoctoc! you sometimes hear when a Teutonic public speaker wants to call the room for order" p. 342
"They all live exclusively on a diet of small children with a dash of puppy juice (if they do, maybe we can find a baby substitute; as to puppies, I like them, but if the price of avoiding genocide is a hundred or so puppies a year going into a kind of monster version of Tabasco, I'm good with that)" p. 346
"Gonzo : [...] Hello little lady! Ain't you a fine figure of a woman? (because for Gonzo, anything which may explode at any moment is clearly a girl)
Gonzo's massive testicular superiority thus established, he caressed the nearest bomb in a moderately obsene way" p. 359
"We didn't have time to stop and pick up the wounded, but thank God, Moustache wasn't the kind of guy who left any" p. 373
" He slaps like a girl. Hah! I have been shot. Mere slapping cannot harm me! I feel no pain. I tell him so. He has big round eyes like a cow. Perhaps he is a cow. Most likely, a friendly cow has come to sit with me while I die. " p. 388
"I am dead, but by some error - of a type with which I'm extremely familiar - I am in the wrong afterlife, and while it is reasonable picturesque and full of (pretty but ill-educated and also curiously French) nymphs, I should really be getting along" p. 391
"if there's a part of me which does not hurt, it's being very quiet about it" p. 393
"They smile widely so that we can see they don't file their teeth to cannibal points, and they all find excuses for taking off their shoes (small stones, itches, hangnails, broken soles and such) so that we will know they have toes instead of talons" p. 401
"Bumhole. You hare giving me a pain. I will not say where. The location of the pain you are giving me is so vile and intimate it would turn your man-parts to water even to contemplate it. I am not in the least bit joking." p. 416
"You are ********. You are desirous of getting ********. ******** is considerably more difficult than ********." p. 418
"In any given situation there are myriad forms of attack. (actually, there aren't. A myriad is ten thousand in the Greek arithmetical system, which was based on their alphabet and made Archimede's life impossibly difficult. If he'd had decimals, he might have done remarkable things, and we'd be all driving flying cars and heating our bathwater with home fusion, or perhaps speaking Latin and living in the ashes of the Graeco-Roman nuclear winter ; in any case, there are usually several ways of dealing with any given situation)" p. 492
"It's uneven, because all I'm trying to do is to stay alive and maybe get back to the party, where he may not feel able to pursue his present line of argument, and all he's trying to do is to open my skull like a grizzly with a honeycomb." p. 501
"If Pestle's using the Iron Skin, I should have my own special magic power. Where are my laser eye beams?" p. 502
"In movies, people have fight on these things [window cleaner's hoist]. You just wouldn't. You'd sit ther politely, talk about your favourite place to eat in the city below, maybe exchange names. You'd wait until you got to the top or the bottom and get off, then either fight in the knowledge that you had the ground under you and you'd die of violence rather than gravity, or reckon to resolve your differences over a coffee and a sandwich in the fortieth-floor bar." p. 521
"My ribs complain. Of course they do. Ribs are whiners. I tell them so." p. 526
"Squids have better eyes than we do; there is no blind spot. I wonder briefly whether that means they have no need for image retention and therefore would be immune to television. Thousands of squid families, sitting at home at night wathcing a single bright spark sing across a black screen, wondering what all the fuss is about." p. 530
"If we are lucky, they believe I am dead. They won't find my body, but there are many reasons why that might be so. Perhaps jackals have devoured me, or starving children of the street. Perhaps I rolled or crawled, broken, to the road, and was flattened by a succession of buses. Maybe - and I am particularly proud of this one - my body has been washed into a storm drain and is slowly leaching into the city's water." p. 545
"Deserts are like a nearly bald man having a haircut. The difference is absolutely crucial from within, but to the rest of us it's still a dusty scrubland with little in the way of plant life." p. 546
"The last- ditch plan is to pretend that we're escorting a prisoner, then cause mayhem. Elisabeth Soames pointed out that this didn't work well in Star Wars and can reasonably be expected to fail in the real world, which is somewhat more demanding in the field of cunning plans, and Samuel P. tried very hard to pretend he hadn't been thinking of Star Wars when he proposed it." p. 556
"I wish I had had the chance to take Elisabeth to dinner and eat bruschetta. Please, dear Lord. Tomatoes and basil, and plenty of green olive oil. A prayer for the antipasti." p. 560
"I slide past his guard and slap him. It doesn't hurt him, but it's extremely embarrassing. I have just girly-slapped him in front of his ninja kiddies. I have no respect. So nyah." p. 575
"Ghost Palm of the Voiceless Dragon Style, ********.
[punch line goes here]
The ninja kiddies freeze. Each and every one of them has that Tuperware feeling." p. 577
I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK TO EVERYONE.
Navi_the_fairy Community Member 
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