Item: Gnomon
Rating: 3.00
Author: quirkycat

by 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

‘The best thing he’s ever written … It is an astonishing piece of construction, complex and witty … It is a magnificent achievement … He’s never written a bad book, but this is the one that’ll see him mentioned in the same breath as William Gibson and David Mitchell … This book seriously just destroyed me with joy.’ Warren Ellis

‘Nick Harkaway: bonkers, brilliant and hilarious … Effervescent, clever and entirely fantastic.’ Sunday Times

‘[Harkaway] is the missing, but somehow logical, link between David Mitchell and Terry Pratchett.’ Independent

Near-future Britain is not just a nation under surveillance but one built on it: a radical experiment in personal transparency and ambient direct democracy. Every action is seen, every word is recorded.

Diana Hunter is a refusenik, a has-been cult novelist who lives in a house with its own Faraday cage: no electronic signals can enter or leave. She runs a lending library and conducts business by barter. She is off the grid in a society where the grid is everything. Denounced, arrested and interrogated by a machine that reads your life history from your brain, she dies in custody.

Mielikki Neith is the investigator charged with discovering how this tragedy occurred. Neith is Hunter’s opposite. She is a woman in her prime, a stalwart advocate of the System. It is the most democratic of governments, and Neith will protect it with her life.

When Neith opens the record of the interrogation, she finds not Hunter’s mind but four others, none of which can possibly be there: the banker Constantine Kyriakos, pursued by a ghostly shark that eats corporations; the alchemist Athenais Karthagonensis, jilted lover of St Augustine of Hippo and mother to his dead son, kidnapped and required to perform a miracle; Berihun Bekele, artist and grandfather, who must escape an arson fire by walking through walls – if only he can remember how; and Gnomon, a sociopathic human intelligence from a distant future, falling backwards in time to conduct four assassinations.

Aided – or perhaps opposed – by the pale and paradoxical Regno Lönnrot, Neith must work her way through the puzzles of her case and find the meaning of these impossible lives. Hunter has left her a message, but is it one she should heed, or a lie to lead her into catastrophe? And as the stories combine and the secrets and encryptions of Gnomon are revealed, the question becomes the most fundamental of all: who will live, and who will die?

I received a copy of Gnomon from Penguin First to Read in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Gnomon is many things; a fun word to say, a piece of a sundial, part of a parallelogram, the latest book by Nick Harkaway. Obviously in this instance I’m referring to the last option listed, but I still find it intriguing that the author chose a word that has so many different meanings. This is a beast of a book, weighing in at seven hundred and four pages, so it’s no surprise that Harkaway took his time with building up the story.

Reading the description of Gnomon, I got the impression I was in for a fast paced mystery filled with ethical and philosophical debates. Admittedly I still got plenty of the latter (quite a bit of that, actually), but I still found this novel to be rather slow and laborious to read. While I’m not intimidated by the size of this novel, I do wish it had been slimmed down a bit.
I do absolutely love all the debates this novel brings up. For example, the ethicality of the society that Mielikki Neith lives in; one where everybody is monitored (possibly all of the time) and occasionally forced to undergo a mental screening (where their thoughts and memories are literally analyzed and recorded by a machine). That sounds incredibly intrusive, yes? Well let’s not forget the fact that while they’re getting screened the powers that be (still a bit unclear on how government works in this novel) tweak your brain, check for physical anomalies and fix any problems. This sounds nice, in theory, but then again I’m sure the plan for Miranda sounded nice too (Hint: Serenity reference there). This raises the point: just because we can doesn’t mean we should. I believe this is a point Harkaway was trying to make, and I respect that.
While I enjoyed the mental puzzle this novel presented, I did find myself losing focus fairly frequently. I’d go a chapter or two, and then realize I had to reread the last couple of paragraphs, because my mind had slipped away. I’m not normally one that does that, so I found it upsetting that it kept happening again and again. Perhaps it was the mood I was in at the time, or something else, I can’t say for certain. I do feel that had Gnomon been slightly more concise this might not have happened.
It’s probably worth noting that I haven’t read any of Nick Harkaway’s other novels, though I’ve heard that The Gone-Away World is fantastic. Perhaps this isn’t the best introductory novel for him? I do know that with some authors the first novel you read can make a difference in whether or not you enjoy their work.

For more reviews, check out Quirky Cat's Fat Stacks

Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

Reviewed by Quirky Cat on Dec 23, 2017

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