Ever since I listened to an episode about mystery novels on The Incomparable podcast last fall, the library holds that I’d placed have been intermittently coming through and inserting themselves onto my TBR queue. Since I’d waited eight months for Titanium Noir (2023) by Nick Harkaway, recommended by Jason Snell, I delayed my self-assigned reading (Hugo finalists and upcoming novels) a little longer to start this one. I’m glad I did (even if I feel a little guilty). I enjoy the noir subgenre, and this is a good noir plot; the science fictional elements here are also interesting, but what really raises this book to a remarkable level for me are the very human and sympathetic reasons for the way people act here, even the ones becoming transhuman or arguably posthuman.
This is a near-future novel, and the only significant futuristic change is that a process has been invented to upgrade people to Titans: longer-lived, healthier, stronger, and larger. The first genetic-modification treatment usually makes someone tall like a basketball player, still within typical human size, but each booster increases size and weight, so that Titans who’ve had multiple treatments are truly gigantic. These treatments are very expensive, so naturally they’re reserved for the ultra-rich and a few of their favorites (relatives, lovers, and maybe, if you’re VERY useful, other associates).
In the judgment of Cal Sounder, the narrator/detective, the elite who’ve had the treatment live in “a fairy-tale world where no one thinks about money and there’s only a couple of thousand real people on earth. The rest of us are flickery fairy lights: cheap, disposable, and fragile.” Indeed, later on, a Titan says to him, “… who the fuck are you? You’re no one. Some ant with ideas of humanity.”
Of course, many people would argue that most one-percenters of today already think of everyone else as ants. Recall F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1926 “The Rich Boy” short story, in which he says, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them.”
It seems as though a process like Titanism could very well have been the centuries-ago origin of the Ogres in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s titular 2022 SF novella, who are the nearly undisputed masters of a feudal humanity.
Later in the book, Sounder says, “Titans are having some kind of internal discussion and real people are getting hurt.” He gets called out on his prejudice (having implied that Titans aren’t real people anymore), but replies that most people who get the treatment “get it because they’ve spent a mortal lifetime being an asshole … You’re about the second Titan I’ve ever met that behaved like a person and I figure that’s because you know what it is to have a bad day.”
The person he’s addressing is a powerful crime boss who wants the detective to obtain something for him during the course of his current investigation. Their wary relationship reminds me a little of the early truce between Rex Stout’s detective Nero Wolfe and his nemesis, the ganglord Arnold Zeck.
The other Titan whom Sounder respects as a person is Athena, his former girlfriend. They were lovers back when she was still a normal human, but then she was in a terrible accident, so he called her fabulously wealthy and powerful father, the developer of the Titan process. It was too difficult to stay together after she was changed, but they still care for each other and stay in contact.
Speaking of that current investigation, it’s a murder case. The police called in Sounder because the shooting victim was a Titan, and he has connections and knowledge that can help. Unlike most Titans, this one was poor and obscure. Finding out who he was and why he became a target requires Sounder to reluctantly deepen his connections with other Titans and to ask questions that are uncomfortable for himself as well as others. The investigation also imperils other people (besides the killer) as old secrets and new vulnerabilities are revealed.
I love the noir tone of the book. Despite the occasional alliance, Sounder is getting pressure from several sides, and he is nearly killed a few times. But he’s persistent: “I get to my feet slowly, as if I’m worse off than I am. It’s not hard, because I’m worse off than I want to believe.”
Sounder is reasonably intelligent, but it’s a complicated case where multiple people are hiding things to protect not only themselves but others. In a couple of cases, men think they are protecting women (or their mental images of those women) who turn out to very much have their own agency and agendas. I was amazed by Harkaway’s revelations about some of those characters and their actions.
In the end, a sort of rough justice prevails, although it doesn’t look as though anyone will ever go to trial. I’m curious how the resolution will affect Sounder’s life going forward, and there is a sequel that is currently unpublished in the U.S.; however, this novel stands alone perfectly fine on its own. I enjoyed it very much.
Content warnings: Murders, beatings, threats, domestic abuse, disabilities, mental illness, memory issues.
Disclaimers: None. I love my library!
