(courtesy NewSouth Books)
There is something magnificently enthralling about bearing witness to a talented author conjuring up an entire near-future world from the ground up in just 110 tautly-written pages.
From nothing, we are led with brutal vivacity and a readily identifiable broken humanity into a dystopian world where civilisation survives but in a way that only benefits the elite, where government lurks with authoritarian intent, drunk on the powers of surveillance and manipulation that technology offers it, diplomacy is less finessed power than coercively exercised control, and people who don’t find themselves on the heady uppermost rungs of society are condemned to scrabbling for survival in ways that leave their innate humanness lying bloodied on the street.
It’s an arresting place in which to be plunged but as Ghost of the Neon God unfurls in spectacularly epic but emotionally intimate fashion, T. R. Napper builds it piece by stunningly immersive piece, introducing us with little fanfare but maximum impact to Jackson Nugyen, a survivor of the gritty, dog-eat-dog streets of future Melbourne, Australia where the only reasonable response to a desperate plea for help is to steal that person’s shoes.
Which is precisely what Jackson does, before he and his partner in necessary crime, Col, retire to the squatting existence in an unfinished section of the city which has fallen victim to what sounds a pervasively creeping economic slowturn that is less than occasional cycle than grindingly, corrosive default.
Someone said f**k.
Yao Li turned again, and Jackson Nguyen was looking at him, eyes wide, a revolver in his hand.
But what starts as just another act of petty theft by someone who long ago lost the agency to employ any kind of moral choice, soon spirals into a thrilling race for survival as Jackson discovers that the woman, a Chinese dissident running from thugs and desperate for help, has gifted him with a technology so world-changing and deadly that his very life will be on the line.
It’s a terrifying ordeal but as Jackson is pursued across the dying remains of a once-great city and into the sprawling emptiness of the Australian Outback, Ghost of the Neon God, rapidly becoming a consuming story of one man discovering he still has the power, however challenged and blunted, to tell his own story and that maybe in doing everything he can to ensure his own survival, he may just unwittingly be striking a blow for the wider downtrodden sections of humanity and their unspoken need for rebellion against a feudalistic system dressed in glaringly cyberpunk attire.
Ghost of the Neon God has it all – a chase scene across the Nullarbor, crooked cops who take advantage of a system where brute power trumps everything else, scenes of wild and bloody battle, and some unexpected redemption as Jackson discovers, to his great surprise, that he still has a beating heart after all, and that maybe, world-ending though this all feels, that he may be able to fashion an ending that works to his advantage, after all.
(courtesy official T. R. Napper Facebook page)
Or that isn’t as slow-drip destructive as his previous course in life seemed to be.
Brimming with blockbuster brio and writing so cinematically big and fatalistically alive, Ghost of the Neon God packs a huge amount of visceral humanity, world-building and emotional intimacy into its 110 pages, offering up a story that goes expansively huge with import and action but which knows that at the heart of any raging story of survival, there are people trying their best to get through it all.
It’s this beating heart of raw humanity that powers and sustains Ghost of the Neon God, which, quite astonishingly fashions some moments of truly affecting humanity and emotional intimacy in a relentless narrative that depicts the world as broken beyond all redemption (or is it? Or at least parts of it, or people in it?), its inhabitants as hardscrabble denizens with few choices, and a cat-and-mouse game where the latter strikes back but with an inevitable sense that the former will always prevail.
What’s so empowering about this richly-told and character-alive story is that Jackson finds a lost sense of agency that grows and becomes more defined even as some truly terrible agents of an outside power do their best to take it from him, ripping it out of his hands with no care for who he is, their only driver to get the technology he now stewards and use it for their own devious ends.
With that kind of intent and murderous push coming hard against you, how can you possibly make any headway or find your once-lost self?
‘Nah. Some shame you don’t want to revisit. I deleted it that night. Didn’t want to think on it again. Those f**king boots. Cost me everything.
It’s not easy but Jackson somehow finds a way in an unholy but necessary alliance that he knows is the only way he will find some measure of peace in this life, one now warped and twisted by battles far greater than his own and which care little for the concerns of the little people as long as their sprawlingly dark and controlling need for power and control are met.
It’s relentless, it’s full-on, it doesn’t stop for even a second and leaves you breathless in its wake, but Ghost of the Neon God also takes you on a revelatory deep dive into what rebellion looks like, and how, even with its back most definitively up against the wall, the human spirit can remain undiminished and unbowed.
It’s wild how endlessly intense it all is, and how much Jackson has to fight to come through at the other end, assuming that’s even possible, but somehow even in the midst of battle for survival that doesn’t look like it will end well at all, Ghost of the Neon God still manages to feel personally triumphant, possible and hopeful, underscoring why, even when the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against the oppressed, that they fight back, that they take a stand for what is right, and even if costs them everything, or comes close to doing so, that they don’t give up and keep what is left of their free humanity alive because, otherwise, what is the damn hell point of living?