Nick Harkaway

A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Gnomon is an extraordinary novel, and one I can’t stop thinking about some weeks after I read it. It is deeply troubling, magnificently strange, and an exhilarating read.' Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven 'Nick Harkaway’s most ambitious novel yet. [A] story of near-future mass surveillance, artificial intelligence and human identity ... An amazing and quite unforgettable piece of fiction.' Guardian 'Harkaway dazzles.' Daily Mail 'Wonderfully good.' Sunday Times Near-future Britain is a state in which citizens are constantly observed and democracy has reached a pinnacle of 'transparency.' Every action is seen, every word is recorded and the System has access to thoughts and memories. When suspected dissident Diana Hunter dies in custody, it marks the first time a citizen has been killed during an interrogation. Mielikki Neith, a trusted state inspector, is assigned to find out what went wrong. Immersing herself in neural recordings of the interrogation, what she finds isn't Hunter but rather a panorama of characters within Hunter's psyche. Embedded in the memories of these impossible lives lies a code which Neith must decipher to find out what Hunter is hiding. The staggering consequences of what she finds will reverberate throughout the world.

Gnomon

Gavin

Aims for Eco and Calvino, hits Nolan and Stross. Unsugared mind candy. About twice as long as it should be. 

How do you have a horror film when the characters have mobiles? How do you have a whodunnit when the entire world is on camera? What if you automated totalitarianism, and it somehow actually made almost everyone safe and happy? Gnomon is a well-executed mistake.

I loved the initial Kyriakos (the Greek debt crisis of 2009 dramatised; the right kind of conspiracy thinking) and Athanasai segments; initially it felt like Cloud Atlas but irreverent and stronger at sentence level. The depiction of the Athenian mob is extremely acute. But the second half ruins it. (view spoiler)[The Erebus section attempts the awesome energy of DOOM but is somehow just dull (hide spoiler)].

In spending so much time in the head of an intentionally obscure novelist / conspirator, Harkaway has the perfect excuse to go full hog on the idiocy and hallucinations of semiotics, the maniac idea that puns and etymologies reveal Reality. The constant repetition of a few abstruse ideas is meant to be a profound weave but it's just boring. Catabasis torn gnomon gnomon gnomon. But a lot of the SHEER DETAIL is actually cool, not just the usual tired mythic icons: a measured account of how collateralised debt obligations are unfairly demonised, a Space Truckers reference, details of St Augustine's youth. It would be fine if the central symmetries were less contrived. (All of these four people... have at some point been in a small room!!) So I can't avoid mentioning Dan Brown can I, even if Harkaway's prose is suspended entirely above that. 

(view spoiler)[Another main weakness is the facelessness of the metaphysical villains, Harkway's paranoia, which is a common paranoia. Fascists take Britain, Greece, Ethiopia. Fascists are lurking behind everything. They subvert the police and MI5 somehow. (hide spoiler)]

It's very romantic, underneath the verbal pyrotechnics. We know that the panopticon state is wrong before anything goes actually wrong because it is sterile. The jumbled literary rebellion of Hunter (Diana! geddit) is portrayed as enough to shake the totalitarian. Neith is sterile too: even her scepticism and openmindedness are tame and ultimately help close her off.

One brilliant thing is how banal the mindrape technicians are. Like Brazil except without Gilliam's gurning and cartoonish sensibilities.

The pareidolia proliferation pogo can be great - Labatut or Delillo, Ghost in the Shell.

Bryan Alexander

composition is collision, synthetic as much as original. Authors are accretors. (292)
Gnomon is Nick Harkaway's richest and most ambitious novel so far.

I've read all of Harkaway's novels (plus one that might be his, under a pseudonym) and count myself a fan. I love his odd worldbuilding, weird plots, and the combination of manic humor with stark tragedy, where pulp and geekery are taken seriously.

Gnomon does all of this, but ramped up. Here Harkaway seems to be wandering deeply into Borgesian territory, with a story concerning devious books, sideways conspiracies, and dreams within dreams. But he's also marching right onto David Mitchell's patch, since most of Gnomon is a nesting series of tales told by different narrators. The novel is also a riff on digitally structured surveillance state. Crashing back and forth across those architectonics are a police investigation, an alien invader, a kickass nuclear submarine, and games with codes and ciphers.

Naturally things get meta. Characters discuss codes, and the text contains many. Indeed, it leads with a cipher. And there are winks to the reader, like this: Most successful book: The Mad Cartographer’s Garden, in which the reader is invited to untangle not only the puzzle that confronts the protagonists but also a separate one allegedly hidden in the text like a sort of enormous crossword clue... (6)FA LA JI RO JI JA is repeated often enough to make me want to start cracking. 

There are other pleasures to Gnomon, like Harkaway's sly wit.There are many advantages to the end of privacy, and one of them is the obsolescence of social awkwardness. The Inspector finds this outcome both efficient and laudable. (28)
Finance by itself is ruthless, and that ruthlessness is its salvation. The real disasters are only possible when you bring politics into it, because politics is about pretending to care.(65) 
Well. You don’t murder a universe without some degree of discomfort.(541) Characters are a treat to dive into, from the braggadocio-drenched, shark-haunted Greek banker to the sinister alien intelligences. There's also Harkaway's deep geekery, which lets him toss off references to "extremely rare and undervalued duodecimal quipus" and "locatively discursive spimes." 

It's easy to get lost in the novel's referential depths. On 216 we get one single mention of a character called Slade; I'd bet this is a quiet nod to David Mitchell's nifty Slade House. Later (322) the future narrator mentions the Last Redoubt; doubtless this bows to William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land (1912). A brief mention of "the Van Riper Principle" (356) surely points to the great US Marine, Paul Van Riper and his stunning 2002 wargame triumph. And a secret lair hidden "beneath the bust of Shakespeare" (604) - tell me that's not from the Adam West Batman tv series!

I relished swimming through those reference- and shark-infested depths. The climax went on a bit too long, perhaps. Otherwise, I welcome everyone to have a shot at dive in and FA LA JI RO JI JA.

Matteo Grilli

Hannah Swithinbank

In a near-future Britain, a distributed surveillance-democracy called The System knows everything you, and can even spy on your mind. It's a Panopticon country. But when state investigators then look into the head of a refusenik novelist named Diana Hunter, what they find there is not her life story but that of four other people, spread across thousands of years, all vibrantly real and each utterly impossible - and before they can unravel that puzzle, Diana Hunter, shockingly, dies as a result of the investigation, an unheard of result in a perfect system which protects everyone from harm. That's where Inspector Mielikki Neith comes in, a staunch believer in The System who is assigned to investigate the Hunter case. The only problem is that the teasing mysteries in the dead woman's mind may change all that. And these are extraordinary memories, ranging from the life of a banker named Constantine Kyriakos, who finds himself pursued by a shark that may in fact be a god; and an Ethiopian retired pop artist, Berihun Bekele, who picks up his brushes to create a virtual world called The System at the behest of his games' designer grand-daughter; and Athena�s Karthagonensis, the jilted lover of one of the Church's most beloved saints, who seeks to resurrect her dead son with the help of a non-existent miracle; and then finally GNOMON, the acerbic post-human who is plotting to assassinate the next iteration of the Universe . . . The question is whether there is a truth hidden in the noise of all those lives, as Mielikki begins to suspect? Or is all that unfolding experience and drama simply a cover for some kind of attack upon the fabric of the most democratic nation state ever constructed? And the questions just keep coming. Who was Diana Hunter, and why are her books impossible to obtain? And above all, was Diana Hunter innocent all along - worse, could she have been correct to attempt to withstand a perfect, democratic system?

Clara

Robert Hinchcliffe

"In the world of Gnomon, citizens are ceaselessly observed and democracy has reached a pinnacle of 'transparency.' When suspected dissident Diana Hunter dies in government custody during a routine interrogation, Mielikki Neith, a trusted state inspector, is assigned to the case. Immersing herself in neural recordings of the interrogation, she finds a panorama of characters and events that Hunter gave life to in order to forestall the investigation"--

Gnomon

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