Gnomon (novel)

Gnomon

UK edition cover
Author	Nick Harkaway
Language	English
Genre	Science fiction
Published	2017
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print
Pages	704
ISBN	978-1-473-53954-9

Gnomon is a science fiction novel by Nick Harkaway. The book deals with a state that exerts ubiquitous surveillance on its population. A detective investigates a murder through unconventional methods that leads to questions about her society's very nature.

Plot summary

In a near future United Kingdom, now governed by a continuous direct democracy called the System, all of Britain is under constant surveillance by the nigh-omniscient AI called "The Witness." The Witness AI is purported to be completely impartial, doing nothing "unless public safety requires it. [...] It cannot be hacked, cracked, disabled or distorted. It sees, it understands, and very occasionally it acts, but otherwise it is resolutely invisible." Mielikki Neith is an Inspector of the Witness Programme—the "prosecutorial ombudsmen to the surveillance state, reviewing and considering any case that passes a given threshold of intervention."

Neith is tasked with investigating the death of 61 year old luddite and "writer of obscurantist magical realist novels" Diana Hunter. Hunter has died mysteriously while in Witness custody following her interrogation, a process where Hunter's memories were forcibly extracted. Neith quickly finds that Hunter's memories are a seemingly impossible maze of other lives/narratives. In one narrative/memory thread, Neith sees the life of Greek investment banker Constantine Kyriakos in the early 21st century where he has a fateful encounter with a great white shark. In another, Neith sees the 5th century alchemist lover of Augustine of Hippo, Athenais Karthagonensis, as she endeavors to uncover the secrets of a chamber that could lead to the fabled Alcahest following the death of her son. In yet another, Neith sees Ethiopian painter Berihun Bekele, who lives in London in the early 21st century and assists his granddaughter Annie with the development of a video game, Witnessed, that bears striking resemblance to Neith's actual world.

Reception

In The Independent, Darragh McManus gave a negative review, calling the book a "baffling utopian epic ladled with elegant nonsense." While praising Harkaway for "writing women extremely well" ("Hunter, Neith and Athenais are the book's most vivid creations and strongest elements"), and saying "there are a lot of things to enjoy in Gnomon," she nevertheless felt it was "hugely confusing."

It's not the length, though the novel is much too long. It's not that Harkaway has a tendency to overwrite: both in labouring a point or observation before labouring it some more, and using arcane (and possibly non-existent) words where a normal, widely-known one was available. [...] My main problem is that Gnomon doesn't make a lick of sense. Or maybe it does, in the author's mind, but I'm afraid I was baffled, to the point of paralysed stupidity. I genuinely couldn't tell you, by the end, who did what and when, whether anything reported here actually occurred, whether any or all of these characters even exist.

In The Guardian, Steven Poole also gave the book a relatively negative review. "Gnomon [...] reads like the first draft of what might have been a tighter 400-page book rather than a rambling 700-pager. Progress is routinely halted by sketchy Wikipedia-style exposition-dumps about tidal flow or behavioural economics, or a character asking herself a whole page or two of questions about what just happened, or vague disquisitions on the meaning of identity. Things are repeatedly explained, unnecessarily." Still, Poole also said, "Such defects wouldn’t be so annoying were it not obvious that Nick Harkaway can sometimes be a very good writer indeed. Readers who are prepared to mentally edit the book as they go along, as the author and editor have not, will encounter a host of highly enjoyable fragments and suggestive ideas."

For NPR, Jason Sheehan gave a mixed review, saying, "it's a big book, a digressive book, and it contains so much that it sometimes feels (like Diana Hunter's house is supposed to feel) like a museum of curiosities trapped between two covers and shaken vigorously. You can't help but be hooked by a detail here, a tic of recursive language there, until suddenly, you know things about Isis, ocean water or the Thames that you never thought would be interesting until Harkaway dangled them in front of you."

For Tor.com, Niall Alexander gave a very positive review. "its vast canvas takes in tales of inexplicable ancient history, our appallingly prescient present and, fittingly, the far flung future, all of which orbit Gnomon’s central Orwellian thread like spy satellites on an imminent collision course." Alexander called the twisting narrative "a puzzle that proves a pleasure to pursue," complaining only that "when answers are handed to us on pretty little platters, it cheapens an experience so rich as to be remarkable in every remaining respect." Alexander concluded,

In its cautionary characters and in its careful construction, in its incredible creativity and in its conversely very credible commentary, Harkaway’s latest is likely his greatest. As in The Gone-Away World and Angelmaker before it, the macro is simply magnificent—Gnomon bursts at the seams with appealing ideas, powerfully put, and perhaps more relevant than ever—but bolstered as it is by the micro that made Tigerman so moving at the same time as being buttressed by the author’s inquiries into the meaning of life in the digital era in The Blind Giant, this isn’t just a big, brash book about technology or horology, it’s a breathtakingly bold, barely-tamed beast of a read about being human in an increasingly alien age.

External links

• Gnomon on Goodreads
• Gnomon UK edition from Penguin
• Gnomon US edition from Penguin Random House