Lester Ferris is a lonely and dutiful former soldier sent to the small volcanic island of Mancreu somewhere in the Arabian Sea to act as the British consul. Scarred by his tour in Afghanistan, he has been sent somewhere a little calmer, where his role will mostly consist of being friendly towards the locals, policing the area for petty crimes and turning a blind eye towards the ominous fleet of ships hanging around the harbour. For Mancreu is not an ordinary island. Left in a lawless limbo, its days are numbered thanks to years of chemical dumping and seismic activity have resulted in dangerous gases being released over the island. These ‘discharge clouds’ have caused horrific birth defects and strange illnesses, and so it has been decided that the island should be evacuated and then decontaminated with fire and destruction. In his time idling on the island, Lester has struck up a tentative friendship with a comic-book obsessed young boy. Unsure if he has any immediate family, Lester has tentatively begun to investigate his past, hoping to adopt him and offer him a life outside of the island.
The end of Mancreu is brought forward when a shoot-up in a coffee bar by a gang of armed guards leaves the owner dead, and it’s only through the quick thinking of Lester (and a custard tin) that he and the boy (whom he only knows as Robin) manage to make it out alive. Unable to do anything in an official capacity, Lester is persuaded by the boy to assume the guise of a superhero/demon in order to get some revenge on the perpetrators and thus, Tigerman is born. Blessed by an albino with supposed magical powers and loaded up with nonlethal weaponry borrowed from the embassy, Tigerman’s first mission reveals a secret drug lab and inadvertently turns him into a celebrity when the CCTV footage is leaked onto the internet. The last half of the novel is a James Bond-esque series of escalating events that are truly exciting, as Harkaway manages to evoke the fluid visual action of the darker side of DC comics, but just as gripping is his search for the boy’s identity and adulation.
Lester is a brilliant character, all pent-up-emotions and stoicism, while his teenage sidekick is an internet-slang spouting prodigy well versed in comic lore and the intricacies of technology. Their relationship is endearing and believable, and even as things get darker, Lester rises to the occasion. Although seemingly hapless, he’s actually very proficient, clear thinking, and sitting on a hidden reservoir of power. These and other superhero motifs pepper the text, and part of the fun is spotting the references Harkaway has laid out. His love for the medium shines through, and I particularly enjoyed spotting Grant Morrison’s works pop up. The latter half is wonderfully pulpy, and as the island starts to fall apart and the mastermind Bad Jack starts to reveal himself, Tigerman becomes more and more necessary to the wellbeing of the people Lester loves.
Harkaway is a brilliant writer, adept at turning a phrase and evoking a mood. It’s a slower, darker and more measured novel than the elaborate and breakneck Angelmaker, and that enables us to truly get to know and feel for this mismatched duo. It’s not just a loving deconstruction of superhero tropes or a tale about father-son relationships, but a story about the vacuum left after colonialism and the acts ordinary people can perform in extraordinary circumstances. It’s a novel about finding purpose in the world, and Lester’s transition from damaged sergeant to hero is wonderful and the ending will break your heart in the best kind of way.