MARCH 2019 - AudioFile
Narrator Ben Onwukwe’s satiny bass voice is perfect for this dense and erudite sci-fi thriller. In a near-future dystopia, the System watches and records every movement, thought, and memory of every citizen. This policing structure works perfectly until a mysterious artist suspected of a crime dies in custody. When the investigators delve into the woman’s stored memories, they find a half-dozen personalities ranging from an elite Greek financier to an Ethiopian painter and a Carthaginian concubine. Relentless and mesmerizing, Onwukwe excels at giving voice to the many characters and especially shines at delivering the subtle humor, irony, and shifting moods that drive this novel to a mind-bending conclusion. B.P. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
The Barnes & Noble Review
Over the span of only ten years, with just three prior novels to his name, Nick Harkaway has emerged as one of the most daring and distinctive voices in modern speculative fiction. His books clothe the potent familiar tropes of SF in fresh and startling new attire -- earnest without being sappy, engaged without being didactic, and intimate without being self-centered. At once humorous and tragic, his passionate worldview is the essence of an old soul, a blend of seasoned wisdom that has not throttled youthful enthusiasm. His first book, The Gone-Away World (2008), was a surreal, Phildicikian postapocalyptic jaunt. Angelmaker (2012) served up a Pynchonesque postmodern conspiracy tale. And Tigerman (2014) riffed on superheroes, imperialism, and ecology in the manner of a team-up between Joseph Heller and Kurt Busiek.
Gnomon represents something of a departure. While Harkaway's earlier books all blended tragedy with comedy in nearly equal measure, this one exhibits decidedly more gravitas and mournfulness, less game playing and ludic gonzo-ness. And while his first three novels were laid out in a more or less linear fashion, this one features a convoluted, looping, many-layered plot. (Our heroine likens her quest to peeling off layers of onionskin.) And the language in this book is accordingly more magisterial and formal -- even at times, due to the subject matter of existential and ontological weirdness, arcane and recondite. But certainly once the Harkaway fan wraps his or her head around these novelties, the bones of the book, and its author's consistent worldview, will emerge in familiar and highly enjoyable fashion.
The main arc of this multivalent, multiplex saga -- in a way, functioning as a framing tale -- is set in the last quarter of the twenty-first century. ("The engineering genius of 1870 did not anticipate the consequences of two-hundred-odd years of global warming.") Our scene is the UK, a nation now totally run by the System, a network of omnipresent surveillance devices that extends down nearly to the metabolic level of the citizenry. Not only does the System make for a stable, almost crime-free environment, it encourages an egalitarian leveling among the power brokers and the powerless, and helps also to support a distributed wiki-democracy where constant polling ostensibly determines the true will of the people.
But even such a seamless cradle of a polity requires a police force, and our protagonist is an inspector therein who relies on a semi- sentient interface to the System called the Witness. In nigh- constant communication with the Witness, Inspector Mielikki Neith can summon up all the data, archived and real-time, that she needs to solve her cases, and she can commandeer the time and efforts of practically any other citizen. Utterly judicious, upright, loyal, and perspicacious, Neith is the living embodiment of the justice and rightness of the System.
Neith is assigned to parse the death of one Diana Hunter, an elderly author of cult novels who also happens to be an eccentric Luddite. But the authorities had reason to believe that Hunter was actually a dangerous dissident, so they took her in for interrogation. And in this future, interrogation is a cybertech matter. The subject's very thoughts are unraveled and recorded, supposedly without any harm. These thoughts may later be played back, as a kind of virtual reality trip for the authorized perceptor. But in Hunter's case, the interrogation has killed her. Neith must learn why and decide if the System is culpable. So the first thing she does is relive the interrogation session. And during that process she learns that Hunter was not the oddball writer she seemed to be but a highly trained agent for some larger, conspiratorial force. Hunter employed the technique of "narrative blockade" -- an elaborate fiction mounted within one's own consciousness -- to thwart the interrogation process.
Neith discovers three narratives sustained by Hunter's prodigious mental storytelling power. In the first, we inhabit the life of Constantine Kyriakos, who lives more or less in our era. Kyriakos is the essence of a Wall Street Master of the Universe, utterly self- centered and materialistic, a monster of ego and hedonism. The second narrative concerns a female philosopher and scholar named Athenais, who lives during the Classical period and is obsessed with recovering the soul of her dead son through magical means. The third track fashioned by Hunter as a distraction concerns the Bekele clan, transplants from Ethiopia living in a day-after- tomorrow London. Their lives are taken up with art and with the construction of a video game that bears a surprising resemblance to Neith's own System.
Experiencing these three realities very intensely, in bits and pieces that interrupt her own reality, Neith nonetheless continues her physical investigations. She visits Hunter's apartment and there encounters her seeming nemesis, an eerie figure calling himself Regno Lönnrot, who seems to know too many things about the case, including allusions to secretive figures called the Fire Judges. Unable to hold Lönnrot for further questioning, Neith embarks on other angles: talking to several of her expert consultants; interviewing Oliver Smith, the man who interrogated Hunter; and so on. Meanwhile, in her head the three narratives unspool in strange parallel to her case.
Then, midway through the book, Hunter's sequential brain scan recording erupts with a fourth narrative, that of Gnomon, a mind from the far future who calls himself the Desperation Protocol and who seems intent on tampering with the very time stream itself. Is this merely another fiction, or the ultimate reality?
Harkaway increments all these scenarios in meticulous parallel, allowing all five tracks -- and the number five is a dominant motif in the book -- to interpenetrate and comment on each other until they all reach a simultaneous climax. The result forces Neith into a last-ditch position she only reluctantly accepts, ultimately sending her down one last rabbit hole where Lönnrot awaits.
Harkaway has set himself the task of writing five novels in one, since each venue and character demand appropriately different tone, voice, and delivery. He succeeds wonderfully. The Neith portions of the book attain the kind of dystopian or ideologically pure ambiance of estrangement found in Zamyatin or Orwell. Additionally, I was reminded of Rupert Thompson's neglected Divided Kingdom, which, while utterly apart in theme, has some of the same feeling of high-minded precepts carried to extremes. There's also a tinge of Neal Stephenson's hard-nosed, clear-sighted exegesis of culture as in The Diamond Age or Anathem. The Kyriakos segments are probably the most humorous in parts, since our antihero is unrepentantly in love with himself. In the Athenais arc Harkaway delivers the kind of Rosicrucian mysticism found in Crowley's Aegypt cycle, while the Bekele narrative probes issues such as the fate of refugees and the role of art in a consumerist society. Finally, the Gnomon riffs are full of over-the-top pulp SF vigor. All these constituents blend together as aesthetically as those in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, with similar punch.
Abetting the ultimate unity of the individual pieces is a massive set of symbols and recurring character types interwoven throughout. As Harkaway says in his Afterword, Gnomon is "a book which contains layers of puzzles and references the author himself has largely forgotten as he moves on to the next and the next . . . " The sensitive, alert reader will revel in assembling these carefully scattered fragments into a charged mosaic.
But naturally enough, given his past track record of propulsive suspense, Harkaway also delivers taut action scenes and gripping face-to-face interactions. The chase scene where Neith goes after Lönnrot after glimpsing him in public is worthy of being transferred to the big screen by a master director and cinematographer.
Intricate storylines aside, Gnomon offers the reader a great deal simply to ponder: the pluses and minuses of a surveillance society; the Heisenbergian limits of certainty; the possibility that tools may one day operate humanity instead of vice versa; the role of the individual versus the state; oligarchy versus democracy; the usefulness and objectivity of paranoia; and the propriety of "nudging" the populace into desired channels of behavior. All of these themes enjoy a long-running tradition in science fiction, and so the novel conjures up pleasant associations with a host of noble predecessors, from Philip K. Dick to J. G. Ballard, from Isaac Asimov to David Brin, from Robert Heinlein to Jeff Noon, from Umberto Eco to Poul Anderson.
Gnomon proves to be a highly accomplished philosophical adventure, an ethical novel of detection, one woman's confrontation with the abyss, and a mind-blowing speculative marathon across a patchwork landscape that resolves itself finally into the corrugated cortical contours of the Harkaway brain -- an awe-inspiring maze in which it is a great pleasure to get thoroughly lost.
Author of several acclaimed novels and story collections, including Fractal Paisleys, Little Doors, and Neutrino Drag, Paul Di Filippo was nominated for a Sturgeon Award, a Hugo Award, and a World Fantasy Award -- all in a single year. William Gibson has called his work "spooky, haunting, and hilarious." His reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Science Fiction Weekly, Asimov's Magazine, and The San Francisco Chronicle.
Reviewer: Paul Di Filippo
Publishers Weekly
★ 11/27/2017
Harkaway’s inventive, mind-bending, and mesmerizing novel interweaves a detective story set in the future with disparate tales of a Carthaginian alchemist, a Greek investment banker, and an Ethiopian painter. Harkaway imagines London in the not-too-distant future as a city where technology meets all security, medical, transportation, informational, and scheduling needs; facilitates democratic decision-making; and monitors emotional well-being. When 61-year-old refusenik Diana Hunter (she prefers books to electronics) dies in custody, Insp. Mielikki Neith investigates. Using the Witness machine to examine Hunter’s last thoughts, Neith discovers a puzzling mix of narratives: the story of alchemist Athenais Karthagonensis, Saint Augustine’s former lover, kidnapped and taken to the Chamber of Isis; the adventures of Constantine Kyriakos, a financial shark who gains wealth and fame after a near-fatal encounter with an actual shark; and the recollections of Berihun Bekele, a painter from Addis Ababa who comes out of retirement to create artwork for his granddaughter, the designer of a computer game so powerful the British government wants to buy her company. As Neith separates clues from red herrings, Harkaway (Tigerman) reveals a digital dystopia of constant communication, information saturation, and diminishing humanity. Literary spelunkers in particular will enjoy decrypting his social science fiction, rich in literary, historical, and pop culture references and laced with humor and linguistic sleight of hand. (Jan.)
From the Publisher
A Best Science Fiction Book of 2017—The Guardian
"A Pynchonesque mega-novel that periodically calls to mind the films of Inception and The Matrix. . . . What a ride!"
—The Washington Post
“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
“Opening a novel by Nick Harkaway feels like stepping into a theme park for the mind—every page you turn brings new delights for the mind and the senses. Gnomon is brilliant and terrifying, full of pleasures big and small. Basically, everything I want in a book.”
—Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
“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, author of Gun Machine
“This huge sci-fi detective novel of ideas is so eccentric, so audaciously plotted and so completely labyrinthine and bizarre that I had to put it aside more than once to emit Keanu-like ‘Whoahs’ of appreciation. . . It is huge fun. And it will melt your brain. . . Whoah, indeed. I wanted to give it a round of applause.”
—Tim Martin, The Spectator (London)
“Beguiling, multilayered, sprawling novel that blends elements of Philip K. Dick-tinged sci-fi, mystery, politics, and literary fiction in a most satisfying brew. . . Fans of Pynchon and William Gibson alike will devour this smart, expertly written bit of literary subversion.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
Library Journal
09/01/2017
In a world dominated by high-tech government surveillance, state inspector Mielikki Neith is asked to investigate when suspected dissident Diana Hunter dies in custody and discovers that Diana had sought to slow the investigation by unfurling stories about fantastic characters, from an ancient Carthaginian alchemist to a London-based Ethiopian painter designing a boundary-breaking video game. Just the sort of literary-gilded dystopia to expect from the frequently best-booked Harkaway (Tigerman).
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2017-10-31
Beguiling, multilayered, sprawling novel that blends elements of Philip K. Dick-tinged sci-fi, mystery, politics, and literary fiction in a most satisfying brew.In surveying, a gnomon is a set square used to mark right angles on a chart. "By extension," writes the genre-hopping British novelist Harkaway (Tigerman, 2014, etc.), "it means something perpendicular to everything else, such as the upright part of a sundial." It is different from its surroundings, and so is everything that police investigator Mielikki Neith (as in 'neath, where hidden things are to be found) learns about the case just assigned to her: it involves a dissident, now deceased, in a near-future society where citizens patrol each other by means of social media, totalitarianism with a thin veneer of friendly hyperdemocracy, all committee work and political correctness. In this world, Diana Hunter, "a writer of obscurantist magical realist novels" read in fragmentary samizdat editions, harbored antinomian thoughts—and, given the recent news that the brain remains conscious for at least a short time after death, it makes sense that Neith should try to get inside her brain to ferret out subversion. That's not easy, for Hunter has laid land mines throughout in the form of odd diversionary characters: ancient mathematicians, Roman legionaries, and other formidable obstacles who share Hunter's "bad attitude." The possibilities in the story are endless, and Harkaway looks into most of them, it seems, firing off brilliant lines ("The universe has cancer," "Thousands and thousands of years, thousands of bodies, thousands of minds combined into one, and your best answer to pain is still revenge?"). Although he doesn't go out of his way to advertise the fact, Harkaway is the son of John le Carré, and from his father he has inherited a feel for the world-weary tediousness of police work. Yet there's no Smiley in the smiley-face future world where being a fascist busybody is a badge of honor—though enigmas abound, to be sure.Fans of Pynchon and William Gibson alike will devour this smart, expertly written bit of literary subversion.
