Gnomon

Very complicated, dense, and challenging. If that's what you're looking for in a science fiction book, you'll enjoy this a bunch. There are stories within stories, characters within characters, plots within plots, and so on.

It reminded me of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson in theme and concept, only they never really made me work so hard for it.

The big picture is the dangers of giving up freedom and privacy for safety and security. In Gnomon, a Big Brother-type security system provides protection, appearing more benevolent than good old Big Brother. I view this as trading adulthood for permanent childhood.

There were bits I liked; the individual character stories were compelling. Seeing how they tied together was clever and made me feel smart, which is always fun.

Harkaway loves to use a lot of detail. I enjoyed this in his previous books as it added a lot of color and humor, as well as an emotional payoff as backstory and character developed. Here, it weighed down an already heavy book. Gnomon was more of an intellectual exercise, and even at that, not the most dynamic one.

At first, I was so excited and delighted with this book, that I nominated it for an award. But something happened as I read, it began to feel like wading through mud, and I abandoned it halfway. But, me being me (and don't lecture me booktubers, I am what I am) I picked it up again, albeit years later, in my primal drive to finish every book. This is not so much a long book (although it is that, in excess of 600 pages) as it is dense with compacted ideas. It doesn't help that Harkaway doesn't feel any obligation at times to make it clear which character is doing what or who they are, and, sometimes, he doesn't feel an obligation for pronouns to have antecedents. The prose is like poetry at times, and chock full of allusions and references, from abstruse details of Greek mythology to Yogi Bear cartoons from my childhood. The font alternation is annoying and unnecessary (although it is a clue in lieu of others, as to what's going on). But that's all stuff that could either be overlooked or appreciated for something or other - the most difficult thing here is that it's impossible to care about any of the characters here, or to be even interested in what's happening to them. It's a wild crazy trip, but, alas, a trip where you say to yourself, are we there yet, Nick? Briefly, in a near-ish future London, a women turns herself in to the offices of a surveillance state run by the usual all-knowing computer AI. The Inspector, who passes for our main character, uses the cutting edge technology which merges her mind with that of the women suspect, now dead, mysteriously, at the hands of previous inspectors. Therein, we get a view not of that woman's memories but of a wild ride through numerous different stories in the distant past and remotely far future where godlike hive minds joust with each other. The fun in this book is the Martian Chronicles-like series of independent stories, connected with symbolism and coincidences which gets the Sherlock Holmes in you going. But somewhere along the way, to me it seems, Harkaway lost interest in the connections. I did finish the book, but at times I felt like I was dragging my eyes from word to word. I don't know what to say: I should have loved this book, and sort of do some aspects of it, but I'm left with a throughly ambiguous feeling (which will seem appropriate, if you read this book yourself). Perhaps I should re-read it, but I don't have it in me. The best character by far was the shark. Despite Kyriakos's last words that he didn't miss the shark, I did, I sure did miss the shark.

I was taken in by all the positive blurbs on this one. And I've read this author before (Angelmaker) and enjoyed the book. But I maybe should have paid attention to what 2-star reviewers were saying about this book. Ten-dollar vocabulary words don't faze me, but the long stream-of-consciousness type chapters where you don't really know how they tie in to the story are a slog. Apparently that type of thing is a big part of the book. This is a science fiction near future kind of thing with an emphasis on a surveillance state and a way to get into peoples heads (almost quite literally). But oof! What a slog. I gave up on page 166 (of 660).

What a strange loop!

Overindulgent, this book was a little too enamored of its own cleverness and structure. It had interesting and in some cases important things to say that are buried in elaboration.

I like the author but this is a book where he likes himself too and too much.

I Feel Stupid This book definately belongs on the same shelf as Vellum, Splinter and Fairyland for me. The shelf should be titled ‘Books I Just Don't Get'. I don't think of myself as being particularly dumb but this one went WAY over my head!. I can follow the very basic plot of the book but the meat of the story was just strange. Never mind. I would like to try another of the author's books but that probably won't be anytime soon.
 
A week later...
Right, so, I've revised my rating for the book because I have had time to think about it and understand what it was that bothered me. I understood the plot and the coming-together at the end, in other words, the basic storyline, which was really good. What I didn't get was the significance of the individuals' stories inside of Diana Hunter's head. I understood the overall significance of the individual characters themselves as part of the whole but their stories threw me. Maybe, I will reread it one day, now that I know what to expect and it will make more sense to me.

4/5 Probably. This was a long read and at times very hard work. I struggled between periods of boredom and excitement trying to get to grips with the multiple layers, of often, very dense prose. I'm still not sure if the portrayed reality of the story is what I think.
A second read? Maybe, but not yet.

Some of the most interesting science fiction books these days are those that deal directly with the messed up interaction of our information age, late stage capitalism and democracy. And this book fits nicely in that niche; not only is it about the surveillance state, as the blurb suggests, but it deals a lot with democracy and its problems too. (As such it makes a very interesting companion book to Malka Older's Centenal Cycle and there are certainly parallels between The System and Information)

One of the book's motifs is the combination of steganography and obfuscation to bury useful information in a flood of data. The book somewhat does the same thing. At least two of the story layers don't really add a lot to the core plot. Not to say that they aren't interesting in their own right, but they do lead to a massive 700 page brick of a novel.

But it's a clever book and when everything clicks together at the end, it's very satisfying.

There's an awful lot to chew on here, so much so that it feels almost wrong to write a review after one reading. It demands a reread, but I think I could read this a hundred times and still not find every allusion, every sly reference, or unpick every layer. It's a big, brave book, wrapped in a future dystopia but echoing back through time, with plenty to say about our current society and the directions it could be headed in. It won't be for everyone, but if it clicks with you, it'll really click. Good work, Mr Harkaway!