Sleeper Beach is the follow up to Nick Harkway’s science fiction noir with a social conscience book Titanium Noir. In the word of Titanium Noir, the wealthy have essentially become another species due to a drug called T7. This drug allows them to live longer but also increases their size making them literal Titans. Each dose of T7 makes the user young again and larger. For those who have not read Titanium Noir, there will necessarily be a couple of spoilers in this review. Lovers of good detective/science fiction mash ups should start there.
Hard bitten, cynical detective Cal Sounder is now a Titan. Having saved the life of his lover Athena he has been saved in turn and is no longer a “baseline human”, but Cal still hangs onto to his profession as private investigator. When Sleeper Beach opens, Cal has come to the rundown industrial seaside town of Shearwater to investigate a murder. Cal has been hired by one of the oldest, wealthiest Titans, Martha Erskine, whose family essentially owns Shearwater and the factory on its outskirts. Being Cal, it is not long before he has turned over some rocks, pissed a bunch of people off and found that there is, of course, much more to this murder than first appeared. This includes multiple connections to an infamous massacre from twenty years earlier and a possible workers’ revolution.
Cal Sounder is a down-the-line classic noir detective. Interestingly, being a new Titan gives him some additional armour (he can take a bit more punishment) but also some blind spots. But he is still a dirty fighter, snarky, cynical and poetically observant such as:
It’s early morning, cool air lapping at the land, the sun low in the east. If I look up and down the strand, I can see the twilight still hanging around like last night’s partygoers, too full to call it a night.
Or this about the faded glory of Shearwater:
If this place was still what it was there’d be a steeper class of idlers, cozeners and thieves, wearing their best clothes and talking in loud voices about the party at Erskine Hill – the wine, the dancing, the scandal… Instead… there’s just down-and-outs and fishermen, not always easy to pick apart because to be honest there’s a sliding scale now… Most of the fishermen have no boat to go to, because even the fish don’t come here anymore.
Sounder also has a bit of a (slightly tarnished) heart of gold so is constantly chafing against the privileges that being a Titan has given him over others and trying to do the right thing.
Harkaway uses the noir detective tropes and a classic hard-boiled narrator to explore and expose his world and in doing so, our own. Because Sleeper Beach is (like much of the noir tradition) an intensely political novel – using the metaphor of the Titans to dig into issues around the wealth and power disparities that drive the Western world. But more than that, even the title alludes to a beach in what used to be a holiday destination where people who have given up hope come to essentially fade away.
While he has the framework and ideas of Titanium Noir to build on Harkaway still has to occasionally fall back on slabs of exposition to underpin his scenario. As a result, Sleeper Beach feels a bit longer than it needs to be, and not quite as tight as a noir novel should be. But overall, in Sleeper Beach Harkaway once again effectively captures the cadences and beats of noir detective fiction and delivers a unique dark and politically aware vision.
Sleeper Beach by Nick Harkaway
No Comments
Comments are closed.