Review - Sleeper Beach by Nick Harkaway (Cal Sounder, 2)

Sleeper Beach

Nick Harkaway
Corsair, 10 April 2025 
Available as: HB, 312pp,  audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781472158895

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Sleeper Beach to consider for review.

Sleeper Beach is the second book featuring Cal Sounder, PI in a near-future, fractured reality. In the first story, Titanium Noir, we saw (spoilers!) Cal fatally injured and treated with the drug T7, which prolongs life and increases body mass, strength and endurance. 

Five years on, Cal is still learning to live with his new body and with the profound change to his status in his own - and wider society's - perception. Cal is now a "Titan", one of of a tiny number of reengineered supermen (and women) who seem set to inherit the earth, poisoned and heated as it is. Titans can live for hundreds of years, with many acquiring great wealth over their prolonged lifetimes. They have a different view of the world, losing track of relationships and of the lives of the ephemeral "baselines", many of whom are resentful, forced to the sidelines of life in what is a nakedly capitalist, dog-eat-dog world.

Despite his new status, Cal continues to do what good he can, rather than allowing himself to be enfolded by the cushion of money and privilege that might be afforded by his girlfriend's, Athena's, membership of the powerful Tonfamecasca corporate family. This is how he comes to be investigating the suspicious death of a young woman in the seaside town of Shearwater. Harkaway lovingly portrays the atmosphere of the peeling resort/ fishing town, a place dominated by the Esrkine family who've been having trouble with their workers. It's a complex plot featuring potential revolutionaries, trades unions and family tensions all of whom have only one thing in common - a preference for Cal to mind his own business. Lurking in the background is the mysterious organisation the 1848, a revolutionary sect that may or may not exist and may or may not be set to avenge the massacre that happened some decades earlier in a place called Tilehurst.

That name is one of the few familiar anchors for me to the present - I regularly travel through Tilehusrt on the train, although it's not the small city portrayed here - the action in the book taking place in a strange, almost dreamlike place that's hard to connect, either spatially or temporally, to now. From the hard boiled tone of the narration one might think the story was based in the US, but other place names, and the geography, seem frustratingly off for that. Maybe there's more going on here than one might think - perhaps Cal, who is our narrator, is already succumbing to the Titan outlook, telescoping time and the b brief lives of baseline humans. Perhaps history is being rewritten, and the centuries the Titans have allegedly been around for are a myth, or something worse? It's all tantalising.

Harkaway is certainly having fun with all this, and, I felt, perhaps poking fun at another current project, the continuation of the George Smiley books. There's perhaps a thin line between Cal's profession and that of the spy, the Communist organisation in the shadows suggests, of course, a subtle enemy and I definitely spotted allusions ion the language - as for example when there is a need for a "legend for a girl". 

But the fun doesn't take over. Cal is not in fact a spy, he is a hardboiled detective - a man who may walk down the mean streets but is not himself mean, hard though it may be to grasp his humanity changed as he is - and in Sleeper Beach he does just want he ought to, carrying out the instructions of his mysterious client, who may or may not be fatale, she is definitely femme but not a stereotype dangerous blonde, to discover who is the murderer. There may or may not be a Titan angle here - it's so easy for them to become killers, so easy to escape justice. There may or may not be a political angle. Cal makes alliances and enemies, explores the roots of the town and spends a great deal of time on that beach where the hopeless come to let their lives drain away.

It's a glorious book, a knotty detective mystery wrapped round a peeling dystopia. I can't think of anything quite like this series. It's got noir, obviously. It's got echoes of M John Harrison's Viriconium. It's got a scorching moral centre as Cal processes the nature of the creature he's become and debates its right to exist. So maybe add Frankenstein to that mix? And I could go on. It's weird, it's sad, it's fun and it's all its own thing.

Strongly recommended.

For more information about Sleeper Beach, see the publisher's website here.