re:mote voices

Title: Woken Furies
Author: Richard Morgan
Publisher: Orion Books

Woken Furies is the fourth novel by Richard Morgan, the third to feature the character Takeshi Kovacs. Returning to the character he introduced in Altered Carbon and Broken Angels after the break represented by Market Forces.

With Takeshi Kovacs, Morgan provides a somewhat unique character - one with an extended life and who has a different body every time we meet him. All thanks to the background technology of this sequence of novels. This is part of what enables Morgan to keep changing what he is doing with each novel, avoiding the many traps that one can encounter when dealing with a recurring character.

Woken Furies takes place some time after Broken Angels and sees Takeshi Kovacs make a return to his planet. Bringing together some of the references from the previous two books. Harlan's World is run by the rich and traditionally everyone else has struggled to make a living. With a couple of failed revolutions led by Quellcrist Falconer (who has been quoted in each Kovacs novel) things have improved, but not enough. We are dropped into this background, with initially little explanation of what is going on.

We follow a transformed Kovacs, a man who has always had violent tendencies as he goes on a killing rampage. Unfortunately while the dead priests only concerns the church, the dead yakuza has made him enemies, and he quickly finds himself with a price on his head. So he joins up with a group of mercenaries and heads off into the no-mans land left by the last failed revolution. Distracting from the way things were going, by fighting intelligent military hardware to reclaim the land.

Which is all good and fine, until two things happen to change things. The group comes across something in the Bad Lands and someone as dangerous as Kovacs is tracking him down. Thus from the headlong charge of the narrative we follow Kovacs into the brink of a new revolution. Along the way we get a mix of Harlan's World's history, what role revolution and the Quellists have had in that history, how that shaped Takeshi Kovacs, drove him to become an Envoy and what events in recent history triggered his current killing spree. Through this we have Morgan's key ingredients elite Envoy training, sleeving technology that lets people change bodies, the alien technology that keeps nudging human culture onwards, and the power plays and violence that go with them.

However to a degree this is a different from Morgan's other work. In Woken Furies his "hero" seems to be particularly dislikeable. Here we have a man who is barely holding it together, with Kovacs being a man driven by rage, detached from any hope that he might have had in the past. He talks to himself and lashes out at anyone who might be a friend. On the whole he seems to be beyond redemption. Which is a difficult quality to sell the reader, and is no doubt part of the reason why the progression and plotting feel different. We are so reliant on Kovacs as narrator that we don't really know where the story is going because he doesn't. In Altered Carbon we had Kovacs as private detective trying to solve a murder, then in Broken Angels a mercenary looking for treasure in a war zone. With Woken Furies the plot is there, but it is considerably less clear cut, which isn't especially beneficial. The novel is hectic and disorientating, so that in the end I am left with mixed feelings.

Particularly in Broken Angels, Morgan built certain scenarios about the nature of his universe and the role of the long dead aliens and their technology in that. Woken Furies perhaps serves to make the over all text a little denser, but it only provides the slightest of advances in the big picture. To a degree I feel like this was a tangential novel, which wasn't as good as it could have been. Inevitably I expect there will be at least another novel with Takeshi Kovacs, questions still hang unanswered. One wonders how Morgan is going to handle the character after this novel, though with the way this sequence works he probably only needs to jump ahead another 50 years, provide a new body and a new scenario and go with it.