Titanium Noir
by Nick Harkaway
2023
Titanium Noir is probably Nick Harkaway's most accessible book to date. At under 250 pages, it's less than half as long his others; compared to the rest of his output, it's practically a novella. It still has Harkaway's usual blend of genres, this time mixing dystopian scifi with a noir detective mystery.
The future tech that drives this one is the T7 injection, a miracle drug that biologically de-ages a person's cells to pre-pubescent, then rapidly reruns a decade of puberty in a month. The result is that any injuries are healed (even lost limbs and cancer,) the patient is perhaps 20% taller and heavier, with denser bones and another 60-80 years of natural life to look forward to. They have become a titan. After one dose, someone who started very short or thin might pass as a very tall unaltered human - though few would want to.
Titans are the elite. The first dose is unthinkably expensive, but the reward, beyond near immortality, is the kind celebrity and license to misbehave that today we associate with rock stars, football players, royalty. The future world is one or two hundred years past our own, yet in many ways scarcely changed from our own. Our society's uppermost class has been supplanted by the titans, the oldest of whom would be alive today. The city where the book takes place has a sparkling neighborhood of skyscrapers that accommodate the titans' homes and offices that must've taken decades to build. But aside from things like that, it feels more like the world of 2050 than 2250, because the titans can be conservative to a degree our own elites, many of whom are old, but not like 'born before the Civil War' old, cannot possibly match.
It's maybe not a mysterious why Harkaway was thinking about near-magical medical technology. In the acknowledgments at the end, Harkaway thanks a hospital employee who was very understanding on a particular date in December 2020. Harkaway's father was John le Carre, who died then, of complications from a fall, only a few days apart from my own father, of covid. Out of a terrible couple years, that December still managed to be one of a handful of notably awful months. A lot of people lost someone then.
The future tech that drives this one is the T7 injection, a miracle drug that biologically de-ages a person's cells to pre-pubescent, then rapidly reruns a decade of puberty in a month. The result is that any injuries are healed (even lost limbs and cancer,) the patient is perhaps 20% taller and heavier, with denser bones and another 60-80 years of natural life to look forward to. They have become a titan. After one dose, someone who started very short or thin might pass as a very tall unaltered human - though few would want to.
Titans are the elite. The first dose is unthinkably expensive, but the reward, beyond near immortality, is the kind celebrity and license to misbehave that today we associate with rock stars, football players, royalty. The future world is one or two hundred years past our own, yet in many ways scarcely changed from our own. Our society's uppermost class has been supplanted by the titans, the oldest of whom would be alive today. The city where the book takes place has a sparkling neighborhood of skyscrapers that accommodate the titans' homes and offices that must've taken decades to build. But aside from things like that, it feels more like the world of 2050 than 2250, because the titans can be conservative to a degree our own elites, many of whom are old, but not like 'born before the Civil War' old, cannot possibly match.
It's maybe not a mysterious why Harkaway was thinking about near-magical medical technology. In the acknowledgments at the end, Harkaway thanks a hospital employee who was very understanding on a particular date in December 2020. Harkaway's father was John le Carre, who died then, of complications from a fall, only a few days apart from my own father, of covid. Out of a terrible couple years, that December still managed to be one of a handful of notably awful months. A lot of people lost someone then.
I don't know, but I do wonder if that's part of why this book lacks some of Harkaway's usual manic exuberance. I missed his signature style of abundance and excess, of digressions and diversions and flashbacks and philosophy. Compared to his other offerings, this one seems trim and streamlined. There are minor characters who I thought we'd see more of, who could've gotten whole unnecessary chapters just because he liked them, who show up just once, or get mentioned again only in passing. We don't learn the history of the city, or find out much about our narrator's life before this particular case.
And a couple plot threads seem ill-proportioned to the shorter length. There's a red herring clue about the Marx Brothers that carries on far too long and has almost no payoff; encounters with a titan crime boss and repeated listenings to multiple versions of the same rumor likewise feel too big for the book they're in. In a 500-pager they'd fit in fine alongside the other extravagances. Here they're like a man too big for his suit coat, tearing stitches from all the seams. Maybe that structure is intended to remind us of how the titans take up too much room compared to the normal humans around them? Or maybe Harkaway was sad and his heart wasn't quite in it.
The protagonist this time around, Cal Sounder, is the sort of fellow who maybe Humphrey Bogart would've played in the film version if the timing had worked out right. He's a consulting detective, but I think he's also Harkaway's thought experiment about what good police would look like. Cal is kind, deeply empathetic, smart, and he fights dirty enough to win even when he's physically outmatched. Cal cares about humanity, and he tries to help the little people when he can. I liked his cadence, especially his way of recounting what a witness said in response, without needing to state his own questions.
Cal is kind of a fixer in titan-related cases. Sometimes, I think, he helps clean up their mess and protects them from bad press. This time, he's investigating a dead, possibly murdered titan, and he's there to protect the cops from retaliation if someone upstairs doesn't like the answers they come up with. Cal's ex-girlfriend is now a titan, and the daughter of the man who invented the injections. She was dosed after she was badly injured, which makes Cal kind of a friend of the family. I badly wanted to know more about her, and about their life together before her injury.
Like Memento, the solution here hinges on something forgotten due to the terrible pain and trauma of growing a foot and aging a decade in a month. I was very glad that Harkaway didn't make Cal a secret titan who'd forgotten the truth about himself! But I think the point of the book is the tour through the dystopia that is very rich people having too much power, moreso than it is the solution to the mystery itself.
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