A miracle drug with a dark side

Roddy Tebbit is a quiet, tidy professor researching lake algae. His calendar is largely empty and his apartment has no family photographs. A colleague remembers him as “shy to the point of being rude.” Why somebody would put a bullet in his skull is unclear, yet this is how the cynical gumshoe Cal Sounder discovers him at the beginning of Nick Harkaway’s slick novel Titanium Noir. We soon find out that the dead man’s unremarkableness was deceptive. On the mortuary slab he easily clears seven feet end to end, and though he has the face of a man in his mid-forties, his driving license puts him at the start of his tenth decade.

In Harkaway’s latest alt-future, the creation of a dramatic rejuvenation treatment, “Titanium 7,” has given rise to a comprehensively elevated social elite: Titans. The process is only available to the “speciation rich”, and of the 2,000-odd around, all are in debt to the drug’s sole distributor, Stefan Tonfamecasca, who seems the natural target of Sounder’s investigations.

Though looming over most people, Tebbit was only a “first-doser.” Stefan, meanwhile, is four treatments deep, and the largest human alive. “He moves,” Sounder says, “like something geological more than human.” Despite the obvious mythological associations intended by Harkaway, Stefan’s mountain-like stature and hedonistic excesses more closely recall Rabelais’s Gargantua.

The case takes the reader on a wild tour of Othrys, a lake city of unspecified location but with distinctly American overtones. The narrative is thoroughly noir-ish, so we visit dive bars as well as palatial mansions, along with a farm where the pigs serve as effective disposal units. It’s all very entertaining and often convincing, though there are moments when things tip over into parody. People make declarations such as “there’s no good guys and bad guys,” while a woman’s eyes contain something “like gunpowder and white alcohol.” And there’s an incidental character named Marlowe.

There was much to enjoy in Harkaway’s previous novel Gnomon, though at more than 700 pages and with a ferociously complicated set of fractured narratives one felt hesitant about foisting it on friends. That’s is not the case with the slimmer, less flashy Titanium Noir. The eclectic cast includes Stefan’s towering daughter Athena, who is also Sounder’s ex-girlfriend, a criminal Titan of skewed proportions named Doublewide, and a drunk, blind codebreaker. All are gifted with snappy dialogue, and the mystery resolves with a sharp twist.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.