Thursday, May 31, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Gnomon by Nick Harkaway



Gnomon is......a hell of a book.  It's also one of the most unusual and unique books I've ever read.  The closest comparison I can think of - and I admit to seeing this comparison in another review - is Inception....maybe if it was combined with The Three Body Problem.  And yet those comparisons don't really do Gnomon justice.

Gnomon is a book that features no less than five narratives - all with fantastical or science fiction elements, and it's never quite clear until the end what exactly is really going on.  The main narrative, featuring the character who's going through the other four narratives, is in a near future dystopian London where all of London is watched by a set of cameras and microphones.   Then there are two narratives in what are basically our modern day world, one in Ancient Carthage, and one from a different future.  And yet each of these narratives is developed pretty well, despite having to share the book with the others.

This is not a simple book, if you couldn't figure that out from the prior two paragraphs, and the book enjoys tossing out long diatribes and explanations about the worlds it is describing.  And yet despite all that, the book manages to not only have a gripping and intriguing plot that had me wracking my brains trying to figure it out, it also manages to have a number of fascinating characters who I really liked and wanted to read about, something that usually doesn't happen in books sort of like this (See New York 2140 or Seveneves for example, for other books with long diatribes).  Gnomon is a long mind-twisting puzzle, that somehow manages to have time to develop an interesting cast of "characters" and still works incredibly well.


------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
In a near future, All of London is watched by The System, a series of cameras/microphones that see and record everything.  A pseudo AI (not a true AI, as it doesn't have independent thought, but close) known as The Witness helps inspectors pursue crime when it occurs in the City and policy decisions throughout are governed by on the moment spurts of micro-democracy.  To maintain order, every now and then citizens may be brought in to The Witness for an "interrogation", where the system sees the thoughts of the individual in question to ensure nothing is out of order.  These interrogations are harmless to the "victim," who will then go back to their ordinary life as usual.

But when a woman, named Diana Hunter, dies in such an interrogation, Inspector Mielikki Neith is called in to find out why this has happened for the first time ever.  What she finds is incredibly strange - when Nieth views Hunter's recorded thoughts and memories while Nieth sleeps, Nieth finds not the memories of Hunter, but the memories and thoughts of four other individuals from various points in history:

Constantine Kyriakos, a genius mathmetician and investor who has a strange encounter with a shark;
Athenais, an alchemist from Carthage who finds a strange chamber which should have been fictional and seeks to resurrect her son
Berihun Bekele, a painter who escaped from an Ethiopean Prison and helps his computer genius granddaughter create a dystopian digital world
Gnomon, an collection of minds formed into one from the future who seeks to go back to the past;

As Nieth views the stories of these four, she comes to realize that similarities keep popping up between them, and she desperately will search to find out what exactly Hunter is hiding in these minds.  But other individuals are also interfering in Nieth's own world with the investigation, including a strange man who seems to know far more than he's telling.

What exactly caused Hunter to die?  And how did she fracture her mind like this?  And perhaps most importantly - why did she do so and what was she hiding?  The answer will change....everything.
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Gnomon is a book that will throw you for a loop and keep you guessing, quite quickly.  The book is not short - 688 pages in hardcover - and its first couple of chapters are quite long, but often take place in very different places.  So our first chapter, spends a large period of time introducing the surveillance state version of London and the investigation of Inspector Nieth, and our mysterious interrogation subject, and why she is strange for the time.  And then our next chapter is in modern day Greece with an asshole genius mathematician stock broker who becomes famous at first for surviving an encounter with a shark.  After another jump back to Nieth for the next chapter, we suddenly find ourselves in Roman Empire-era Carthage with a woman alchemist in a magical chamber trying to both solve a mystery and resurrect her dead son.  Later on we join an elderly painter who once escaped from a political prison in Ethiopia and is helping his granddaughter create a computer "game" showing the horrors of a surveillance state.  And later we meet a fourth narrative of AIs - or a mind that's a collective of other human minds - opting to go back in time.  These stories are all very different from one another, although similar ideas start to pop up in each of them, and we spend enough time in each of them - or at least in the first three - to actually learn to be interested in the characters and the stories.

All of those strange narratives are seemingly from the mind of the interrogation subject Diana Hunter, with Nieth viewing them in her sleep.  But there's something clearly weird going on with each of them, which will lead the reader to question everything that's going on.  It's made even more interesting by Nieth's chapters taking place seemingly in 3rd person....except for a short sentence early on which suggests it's being told by a storyteller who is actually a character in the story.  And the narratives themselves are told in 1st person, from the perspective of each major character in that narrative.

I want to make special mention of the three human narrative major characters - Kyriakos, Athenais, and Bekele - who all are particularly fascinating.  Kyriakos reminded me of a character from Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 - his viewpoint character who was a day trader and who initially cared only about making money even if it meant screwing everyone - who I hated for being just too much of an asshole but somehow Harkaway makes him work incredibly well - it helps I suspect that Kyriakos is aware of when he's being an asshole and that unlike Robinson's character, Kyriakos is hilarious (I tweeted this quote out on twitter for an example of his humor).  Bekele is also fascinating - having seen true oppression he escaped in his home country, he at first is too optimistic about racism in London, but comes to take action to try and attack such racism when his granddaughter is confronted with it.  Athenais is probably the weakest of the three, but even her quest for resurrection, through the Greek underworld, is fascinating, and her vulgar tone is not what you'd expect for someone from her era.

The result is a cryptic mind-bending mystery book, that throws you for a loop repeatedly but will keep you interested in each part of the story, no matter where the story is at any given moment.  That's not an easy feat - it's why I tend to hate generation ship books which often fail to do that or why the final Three Body book, Death's End, failed.  But Gnomon is different, and as a result it works really well.  The book probably overreaches a little - it's last few pages try to be a little meta which I don't think works at all, but it drew me in and kept me reading and had me wanting to reread immediately thereafter to try and really see how things look after I knew the answers the book was teasing early on.  Well recommended.
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