TIGERMAN, by Nick Harkaway
In the twelve years since Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man hit theaters, superhero movies have become far and away the dominant genre in Hollywood. After more than a decade of back-to-back centimillion dollar blockbusters, the superhero meta-narrative that pits ordinary people with extraordinary abilities against a cast of shady, unambiguous bad guys has grown deep roots in our collective unconscious. Those roots have spread, nurturing flowerings of superhero stories in media outside the walled gardens of the comic books that birthed them and the Hollywood studios that supersized them. Television is now awash in such stories, and a number of prominent names in genre fiction have released superhero-inspired work. It was only a matter of time before literary fiction had a go at it.
Tigerman, Nick Harkaway’s third novel, is an unabashed attempt at a superhero novel for the literary fiction set. Our hero is Lester Ferris, an unassuming British sergeant posted to the island of Mancreu, a former British colonial holding in the Arabian Sea, who seemingly wants little more in life than to be a father and a family man. This vague desire finds a foothold in his friendship with a local boy, whose name we never learn, and who seemingly lacks a family of his own. For Ferris, the representative of a former colonial overlord and man of intense social inhibition, this would be a complicated enough situation under ordinary circumstances. But the state of affairs on Mancreu is anything but ordinary.
Decades prior, a chemical company emptied mysterious waste into caverns deep beneath the island. A subsequent earthquake brought magma bubbling up into the caves, creating a kind of crucible for the toxic effluent stowed there, as a result of which new, ungodly chemical substances came into being. When a critical mass gathers below ground, it explodes to the surface in a massive discharge cloud.
As of the time of this story, there have been three discharge clouds, each with different, progressively more fantastical consequences. The first one deforested and scorched large parts of the island, and the second one killed all rodents (but only rodents). The effects of the third discharge cloud were very strange indeed:
It caused the fish to change sex and provoked a wave of lust and license across Mancreu. It was remembered for months as a very good party, but the children born of passionate couplings in the Cloud could not speak. A German specialist, flown in to study the matter, pronounced that the entire section of the brain dealing with language--Broca’s Area, he said--was missing. (p. 26)
No one knows what a fourth discharge cloud will do, but no one is sticking around to find out: the British have ceded sovereignty to a amalgam of foreign governments with the menacing moniker of “NatProMan,” which stands for NATO and Allied Protection Force on Mancreu. NatProMan is charged with evacuating and “sterilising” Mancreu, which basically means burning the whole island in an attempt to cauterize the gurgling chasms beneath.
And as bad as that is, it gets worse: in the hands of the international community, Mancreu’s harbor, called the “Cupped Hands” for the way the island’s land masses intersect, has become a veritable rat warren for mobile black sites: ships flying flags of convenience puppet-mastered by the intelligence agencies of the largest governments and their multi-national corporate clients. The Fleet, as this collection of secret ships is called, specialize in an exhaustive suite of dark activities that includes “prisons for deniable detainees and hospitals for unethical procedures; data havens, grey banks, untaxed subsidiaries; floating harems and forced labor factories, auction houses for contraband goods; torture facilities for hire.” (p. 42)
While residents of the western world have the luxury of being able to ignore the covert brutality committed in the name of their security and economic well-being, residents of Mancreu have a constant reminder of it staring in at them from their own front yard. Except that, in a feat of defensive doublethink, they are taught to not see it:
The Fleet could have painted itself pink or burned to the waterline, and no one would have remarked upon it. People saw the harbor and the horizon and nothing in between. Even the fishermen who went out and zipped in between the big vessels, selling fresh fish and crab, and the traders on junkboats who bought and sold DVDs and Coca-Cola and fresh meat and anything else they could lay hands on---even they had a strange amnesia about which ships they visited. it wasn’t feigned. It was a habit so totally ingrained as to have become part of reality. The enormous ships were a fact of life, and it was a fact that you couldn’t see them. (p. 41)
Between mysterious chemical plumes, a restive, soon-to-be dislocated populace, and the occulted malfeasance of the Fleet, Mancreu is ripe for chaos.
And chaos descends early in the novel. A mass shooting prompts Lester to utilize his hard-earned military training to save the life of his friend, a local boy referred to throughout the novel only as "the boy." The boy, a hardcore comics junkie, prompts Ferris to combat Mancreu's burgeoning lawlessness dressed as a tiger. In a moment of prospective paternal indulgence, Ferris does.
Ferris is the embodiment of the reluctant hero. And despite having a distinct talent for violence, he emphasizes the symbolic nature of the superhero.
The first thing he understood in that hour was that it was never about hitting people. It was always about proving a point. Hitting people was just a background, the way a uniform was. The message varied like the soldier. For Superman, that point was about justice and ideals. He really was a perfect American dream. For Batman, it was something else altogether. It was a statement that no matter who you were, how tough you were or how wicked, there were some things you simply could not do. He was not primarily about punishment or even prevention. He was a living cipher, a message that the set of actions which were available to human beings did not include certain crimes, and that line was absolute, made absolute not by him but by what he represented, the human capacity to say “no.” (p. 134)
Ferris's heroism also contains a distinct antidestructive strain, one that feels pretty right coming from a veteran of the Bush/Blair Afghan invasion and subsequent fiasco. At one point, when a rocket attack has destroyed a prison, Ferris's seethes at the perpetrator, but his moralizing is
Fuck him for being so rude, so stupid, so powerful and yet so utterly powerless. He could blow up a building. Big deal. Could he put it back together again? No, and that was exactly how the whole thing worked. The chemical men had broken the island and now the United Nations would burn it. No one in the wider world seemed to do anything constructive, no one built or mended. It was lawyers, guns and tax avoidance out there. Real work, reconstruction, was down to ordinary people, and no one ever spent as much money and time on that as they did on ripping things down in the first place, because it was hard. (p. 255)
Harkaway's enlightened take on the superhero character, however, doesn't prevent the novel from veering towards some of the more racist conventions of the superhero narrative. The architecture of the story, wherein the representative of a former colonial overlord of a small tropical island fights the native criminals his nation's government had a hand in fostering, all but preordains a diminutive portrayal of native agency. Among other things, this dynamic makes the way the native Mancreuans eventually embrace Tigerman come across as unintentionally disturbing. For instance, when Tigerman successfully stops a riot, he is embraced by the people thus:
And then, here, at last, he let it go, because for all that he had done in his quest, this moment in the square was more important, not to him but to them. Tigerman. Tigerman. Tigerman. He was not Fleet. He was not Britain or America or France or anywhere except Mancreu, Mancreu looking out for its own. Tigerman, Tigerman, Tigerman, and the noise was louder than anything he had ever heard. Tigerman, for Mancreu, because they needed him so very very much. (p. 275)
There is a distinct element of volunteerism here.
Controlling for this feature of the story, however, Tigerman is an immensely satisfying novel that is one of the best marriages of high stakes action and literary high concept I've come across in some time.
