Gnomon Is a Mindbending Metafictional Mystery

Gnomon may be Nick Harkaway’s most challenging, interesting book yet (which is saying something). Over his 10-year literary career, the writer has gained a reputation for melding philosophical concepts, surrealistic pulp tropes, and labyrinthine narratives into works that could have come from no one else. Gnomon, is no exception: it’s a noirish detective story, an argument on the nature of reality and the divine, a Borgesian nested narrative, and a twisted, fourth-wall-breaking indictment of the surveillance state, and of complacent thinking as a whole. It’s an unnerving work of philosophical metafiction that seeks to do nothing less than comment on the road modern culture is headed down.
In a dystopian future England where people are oft-subjected to mind-probe interrogation and a complex surveillance system known as Witness presides over all aspects of daily life, an inspector is tasked with an unusual case: Diana Hunter, alleged anti-Witness terrorist, was arrested and died during “questioning,” spitting out a complex series of interconnected narratives in lieu of the usual brain-vomit. While it’s clear Hunter was protecting something, Inspector Neith, the government investigator assigned to the case, must decode Hunter’s narratives to discern what it was.

As Neith tries to unravel Hunter’s stories— which range from a conspiracy thriller about a Greek math savant to a battle of wits between two sociopathic planetary intelligences—memories begin to blend with the dead woman’s, and she finds herself menaced by a shadowy assassin and a mysterious group she calls the “Fire Judges.” It’s clear something is very wrong with WItness, and it falls to Neith to figure out what—and close the loopholes before whatever it is brings down the whole system.
The central mysteries of Diana Hunter—how she managed to fight having her brain “interrogated,” and what eventually caused her death—deal with the absence of something, whether the books Hunter might have written that somehow never show up in any official collections, to what she’s hidden behind her narrative blockade, and Harkaway has great fun playing with the notion of the blind spots we all have, whether we know it or not, teasing us via recurring shark motifs and video game references to the presence of a secret hidden in a supposedly ordered system. It gives the book the effect of a surreal puzzle, with enough pieces on the table to assemble the bigger picture, provided you can make sense of them—honey, the five-fold key, the mysterious Chamber of Isis.

The reader engagement lends the book a rather unsettling tone. At times, it’s clear that the sections taking place in the ostensible “real world” are narrated by an unknown party who speaks directly to the reader, who cheerfully informs us that we are being manipulated via the story of Inspector Neith and Diana Hunter. In a book about perception versus reality, which plays with the concept that a narrative might be able to alter thought patterns, the fact that Harkaway is so transparent about his metafiction, parting the fourth wall like a shark fin parts water, comes off as more sinister rather than ostentatious. The narrator even taunts us at points, asking if the plot is turning out how we wanted, or if, as more of the mystery comes to light, the journey alongside the characters has been worth it.
This is hardly the most straightforward of science fiction novels, and definitely treads on the ground of literary fiction more often than not, , but the philosophical points it raises, the interesting way it presents the omniscient surveillance of its social engagement-driven future, and the arresting nested narrative structure make it one well worth decoding. Parsing its surreal plot turns also invites a rereading or two, and the experience is pleasurable enough that you may do just that. Certainly you won’t stop thinking about it anytime soon.
Gnomon is available January 9.