Woken Furies

Title: Woken Furies
Author: Richard Morgan
Publisher: Gollancz

Maybe there's something both sad and inevitable in the way the idealism of youth gives way to the practicality and compromise of middle age, and so on down that slippery moral slope to the conservatism of our golden years. When the hippy generation rose to power we got not peace and love but two Gulf wars and a housing bubble. 

Woken Furies, the third in Richard Morgan's cyberpunk series featuring taciturn badass anti-hero Takeshi Kovacs, is Kovacs in middle age, the burning fervor of Altered Carbon tempered through the fires of Broken Angels, now reduced to nostalgic bitterness and disillusionment.

It's a far more meandering book than the first two in the series, a blurry, unfocused plot in dire need of bifocals, as former government super-soldier Kovacs returns to his birthplace of Harlan's World on the path of revenge, then becomes a fugitive among robot-hunting mercenaries, then rounds up a group of ageing revolutionaries in order to stage a rescue, then has to do it all over again. Spoilers!

The writing in the sense of painting-pretty-pictures-with-words is still top class though, and Kovacs' return to the Japanese-influenced Harlan's World allows Morgan to slip in some dry jokes among the place names: Tekitomura ("Random town"), Tadaimako ("Welcome back") Harbour, Muko ("Over there") Prospect.

It's the tone and theme, however, that have come the furthest since Altered Carbon.

While Kovacs remains his monosyllabic, irresistible-to-women self (tangent: did Morgan have it in his contract that Kovacs would have full-on triple-X sex with two separate women in each novel? Because it works out exactly--two technicolor sex scenes with two individuals. Every. Damn. Book.) but instead of the eat-the-rich anger of Altered Carbon, he's now cynical about political causes, noting that revolutionaries care as little about the individual as the repressive governments they plan to overthrow.

During his time among the mercenaries, Kovacs meets Oshima, a woman who may have downloaded into her own brain a copy of the consciousness of Quellcrist Falconer, a near-legendary rebel leader and kind of moral lodestone for Kovacs throughout the series. Only now, faced with the possibility of meeting his idol, Kovacs is disinterested, wanting only to restore Oshima's personality and individuality. The other ex-revolutionaries, on the other hand, have very different priorities.

It's not just politics that's grown up, though. Kovacs' return to his homeworld brings him into contact with many of his old associates from his youth, and from his time as an "Envoy" (a sort of intergalactic space commando), and he learns the hard way that the way he remembers things are not the way others do, that our happy peaks are sometimes our friends' lowest troughs, that our friends grow apart from us and we discover there really wasn't that much keeping us together in the first place, save for the convenience of proximity and time.

He even--bigger spoilers--comes face to face with a younger version of himself, and hates what he sees.

To the extent that living on this funny old world of ours has imparted me with any wisdom whatsoever, these realizations ring true, though I'm not sure what anyone could do with this knowledge--if you're young, you probably don't believe it, and if you're not (like me) well, then it's already too late, innit?

Those themes can be a little hard to see as you're wading through yet another rat-at-at action sequence or a squishy sex scene, but once you put the book down for a bit and let it sit, these things come into focus and leave you with an appropriately somber, reflective mood for the end of the trilogy.