This is Nick Jinks victim of a childhood and a deadly youth

An exciting novel nest, is fraying the world between gaming and game of massacre.

Who is Simon Ings A desperate moralist A cold néo-marxiste An Angel of death in the image of his anti-hero, Nick Jinks, who arrives the crime and misery A little all this at the time no doubt. The author of "maps of the world" has the look of a visionary, who has lost the concept of colors and sees the world in black and white in black especially. His ambitious novel is a tower of strength on the form, as he "tells" the lives of several characters on several decades and several continents, as the "cut up" pieces of life cut, intersecting with a back and forth in time. A way to build a giant House of cards at the end is the breath of destiny. On the merits, "the maps of the world" plunges us into an unlikely thriller, the Blitz of London, the independence of Mozambique, passing by the Cuban revolution and the birth of Israel. A chaotic journey in time and space, including the Red wire is disillusion. The repressed homosexual mathematician who has kept for him his work foreshadowing the Internet revolution to left became purveyor of clandestine activist, all the heroes of the book are losers. Simon Ings geopolitical finding is cold in the back: map of the world is a vast field of mines, a revolting cemetery trampled under foot by Socialist ex-révolutionnaires, fascist militia, the cynical bugbear, the falsely naive humanitarian it is to them that Saul Cogan, sickened, broken by the aftermath of bloody Portuguese Mozambique colonization, sells human meat.

Infernal mechanics

But, above all, which makes its singularity in the novel, it is the amazing game of chance developed by the writer. Because all his apparently so distant characters are related, involved little or less hellish mechanics which is in place and leads to tragedy: the discovery of 58 clandestine body buried in a range of Porsmouth in 2006. Our "Heroes" are not crossed only once they sometimes find themselves, without knowing it. In this random tribe operates a sorcerer. This is Nick Jinks, victim of a childhood and a deadly youth. Violent, instinctive, bestial, it is at the same time surprisingly human and seems to be manipulated by the devil or a malignant God. Warrior, sailor and low works agent, it is a kind of anti-Marlowe (the metaphysical browser through the work of Conrad). Jinks, change without judgment of name is "our" obscure part, a man who has never had the opportunity to cross the property and lives in the cruel rhythm of the world apart at any moment his eyes.

Simon Ings is not that novelist. It is a science journalist. His prose is: accurate, almost metallic, in the great tradition of the modern British narration. In English, his book is called "the weight of numbers" (the weight of numbers). The world he describes is frightening as an unsolvable equation, whose engine would be random and the ultimate goal to destroy.