This is one of those novels whose plot could be radically truncated with a single direct conversation or indeed by its protagonist applying his brilliant deductive skills to something that’s concerned him for ages.Īs smartly conceived and gorgeously written as “Tigerman” is, its failures are frustrating. The boy, though, may not actually lack a parent, and almost everything about him is mysterious until it’s all spelled out at once. The true victory that Tigerman is pursuing, then, has to be another superhero trope: the lonely Batman becoming a father to an orphaned Robin. The local motto seems to be “kswah swah”: “what happens, happens” (i.e.
When its inhabitants move away, it’s a capitalized “Leaving,” in which they ceremonially burn everything they can’t take with them. Soon, Harkaway keeps reminding us, Mancreu will be reduced to ash, making heroism there meaningless.
He’s generally referred to only as “the boy,” although he pointedly calls himself “Robin” once. In the course of his duties he has befriended and feels vaguely paternal impulses toward a local boy of about 12 years obsessed with comic books. Mancreu’s harbor hosts a “Black Fleet” of ships that are up to no good, and the semi-official duty of Tigerman’s buttoned-up, burned-out Bruce Wayne type, a British military man named Lester Ferris, is to look the other way.įerris is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, now serving as the Brevet-Consul to Mancreu his job is to be visibly British and not make waves of any kind. That gasp is the “Discharge Clouds” of dangerous gases erupting from beneath the former British territory of Mancreu, a lawless little island in the Arabian Sea that’s scheduled for imminent destruction.
Nick Harkaway’s fiction grapples with the curious power of genre fiction’s cheap, potent end, from the post-apocalyptic kung fu of “The Gone-Away World” to the clockwork bees and London gangsters of “Angelmaker.” His third novel, “Tigerman,” sets the familiar elements of gaudy old superhero comic books - utility belts, kid sidekicks, secret identities - against the background of the British empire’s dying gasp.
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