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Harkaway provides a complex context for this story, the island of Mancreu, with its environmental damage and international governance arrangements – and it felt to me that there was too much going on – you were being pushed to suspend disbelief in too many directions at once.
Within this is placed Lester Ferris and “the Boy” - characters that are a bit clunky but there is a humanity about then which you can warm to. While around them is a cast of cardboard cut out clichés.
I will try to avoid spoilers, but I found the ending completely unsatisfactory – you get to page 344 out of 372 and the identity of “Bad Jack” is revealed and it makes no sense (even in the midst of the barely plausible wider narrative…).
I think it would have been a better book if it had been stripped back, a lot the goepolitical complexity was just noise, the bonding of Lester and “the Boy” was where the interest was, and in that relationship was the spark that drew the washed up Lester out of himself and allowed him to become his best self – that would have made a sharp novella which sadly got lost in this somewhat flabby novel.
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