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End Of The World Blues by Jon Courtney Grimwood
01/08/2006 . Source: Tomas L. Martin 
pub: Gollancz. 362 page hardback. Price: £12.99 (UK). ISBN: 0-575-07616-X. Buy End Of The World Blues in the USA - or Buy End Of The World Blues in the UK  check out website: www.orionbooks.co.uk
John Courtenay Grimwood is, great name aside, one of the best British writers to come through in recent years, along with Richard Morgan, Alastair Reynolds and China Mieville. His work is characterised by exotic Earth locales speculated on into the future. After the Ottoman style 'Arabesk' books - 'Pashazade', 'Felaheen' and 'Effendi' - which explored a hypothetical North African empire, his new novel moves east, towards Japan.
'End Of The World Blues' is a strange mix of near-future intrigue and occasional far-future weirdness. Kit Nouveau, a man that ran away from his childhood to Japan, where he's having an affair with a ganglord's wife. When someone starts to target him and an ex-girlfriend's criminal mother turns up to ask him for help, things start getting complicated.
That in itself would make most novels but inter-linked with Kit's story is that of Neku, a young girl from the far future, a world with sentient castles, replicating bodies and complex conniving politics between her noble family and the others that rule over a dying Earth.
Neku comes back to our time to find some of her memories, which have been entangled into Kit's life. She helps killing someone attacking him and bemused and confused by her, Kit allows her to follow along with him as he tries to fix the demons of his past.
I enjoyed 'End Of The World Blues', the same as I have enjoyed other Grimwood novels I have read. I came away with the same inescapable conclusion as I have in the past, however. The author is very talented and one of the best British prospects out there but as of yet I have yet to read a novel of his that truly fulfils that potential.
This one is no different. While Kit's story is well told, exciting and interesting, I feel for what is meant to be fifteen years in the future it doesn't make enough creative leaps to feel much different from today's world. Neku, whilst a great character in Kit's storyline, falls flat in most of the future segments and these don't connect very well to the main story.
That's where this book fails to click. The future segments are too vague for much of the early part of the book and take the reader away from the engaging Kit storyline, for no real advantage. The two storylines eventually entwine but it never feels quite realistic or satisfying enough and I kept wondering why Grimwood needed the far future segment at all. Neku could easily have had a background in the modern world and would have been just as interesting.
I feel like I have read a book that was almost a great novel but didn't quite make it. John Courtenay Grimwood is a fantastic writer but until he finds a story that truly fits together without confusing sections detracting from the whole, he'll never quite be the complete package for me.
Tomas L. Martin
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