Gnomon
by Nick Harkaway
2018
Gnomon is a very literary scifi mystery novel set in a dystopian near-future Britain. We follow Inspector Neith as she tries to determine responsibility for a death in custody of an elderly privacy advocate. Was she simply too old, stubborn, and frail? Or were her interrogators at fault for pushing her too hard, beyond what anyone could endure? To find the answer, Neith downloads a recording of victim's thoughts during the session - but instead of just one woman's memories, she finds four other people's stories too. Is it possible they could be true, or are they just a trick the woman used to avoid revealing herself?
The System is a surveillance state that styles itself as a perfect democracy. Everyone is being watched all the time, not only by ubiquitous cameras and their own smart phones, but by their whole internet of things, fridges that know what they eat, washing machines that monitor alcohol intake and run pregnancy tests. But only the machine sees any of this, unless it flags something for human review, which will be conducted by a member of the Witness, like Inspector Neith.
Everything is decided by direct democracy - sometimes by a jury-like subset, and sometimes by a plebiscite of the entire public. The machine decides who will vote, tallies the totals, and enacts the results. The machine, we are told, is perfectly fair and impartial, seeing everything and treating everyone the same, without the possibility of discrimination or corruption. (Though later we are asked to contemplate what it would mean if some people got preferential treatment, or if the electorate for some votes were chosen to ensure the result.)
Sometimes the System marks someone as suspicious and requires them to submit to questioning. If human Witness agents can resolve the suspicions, they will. But if the suspect refuses or seems dishonest, the machine can quite literally read their mind. The death Neith is investigating was someone who died while her thoughts were being recorded; in addition to traditional modes of investigation, Neith plays the transcript, meaning she experiences everything the dead woman thought from the moment they hooked her to the machine until she died. The substories framed by this main plot are narratives the woman was thinking at her interrogators, tales she was telling to avoid revealing herself, and perhaps to communicate another hidden message.
The title of Gnomon refers to a tool for drawing right angles, or a thing that is perpendicular to its surroundings, like the upright hand of a sundial, or it could refer to one who knows. The gnomon will recur in one form or another in each of the substories, and that's really just the start. There are a host of recurring images that repeat across the tales and accumulate new meanings and significances as they reappear, including five-factor authentication and the idea of a truth that can only be understood by superimposing multiple allegorical reflections, which doubles as advice for how to understand this book as a whole. There are frequent incidents of metalepsis, when events in one level of the story seem to affect another, and the kind of 'rhymes' Fritz Lang often used as scene transitions, like when one story ends with a character being kidnapped with a sack over his head, and the next starts with a different character being kidnapped the same way.
The structure of the book is a much-extended version of a traditional detective story, and that familiar formula helps you avoid getting lost along the way, which is important, because the substories are probably collectively longer than the frame story, and certainly they're long enough individually that you could lose track of where you are within the whole. Cloud Atlas famously used recurring themes and images across several stories that spanned over time and place, but in Gnomon, the substories are much more explicitly linked together. Remember that each of these stories supposedly has the same teller - the woman being interrogated by a machine that records her thoughts - even though there are multiple narrators, each so fully realized that they feel like an authentic person in their own right.
There's Constantine, a Greek math genius who became an investment banker. We join him as be has a life-changing encounter with a shark, which sends him on a stock-trading hot-streak, turning his life into a bacchanal while he ascends to multi-billionaire wealth. There's Athenais, an alchemist from Carthage and the former lover of St Augustine, who's asked to investigate an impossible murder and realizes she has a chance to make the mythical Alkahest. There's Berihun, a retired Ethiopian painter living in London who gets inspired to paint again by his genius granddaughter, who's making a video game about mass surveillance. Both Constantine and Athenais are mourning a dead loved one, and are offered a supernatural opportunity to be reunited. Constantine and Berihune's stories take place at the same time, starting before the Brexit vote and continuing a few years after. And then there's Gnomon, an artificial intelligence from the far future who has supposedly traveled back in time and occupied a human body on a mission to kill the other characters.
While Neith starts out convinced that these stories are nothing but a distraction, of course, I as a reader want them to be more than that. Granted, the whole novel is a work of fiction, actually entirely written by Nick Harkaway - but within that larger fiction, the stories are sub-fictions or hypo-fictions, they are presented as bring fictional even within the 'real' world of the larger fiction, and so I found myself questioning how 'true' they were supposed to be. I spent a fair bit of time considering that Gnomon the narrator might genuinely be a consciousness from the future. I do think that one of the narratives originally came someone else who was interrogated by the System, understanding how that story got inside this suspect's head is one of the many, many revelations you learn along the way.
I think of success of Gnomon the novel depends on the substories; if they were just a distraction, if they were merely well-told tales that are fun to read, then the book as a would be less successful than if they are (within the larger fiction of the novel) in some sense 'true'. Within these stories is hidden an account of how the System came to be, the story of someone who was horribly mistreated by it, and an account of why the woman being interrogated came to be arrested. Some of it is lightly fictionalized, some very allegorical, some extremely literal, and all of it told in such a way that the meaning and significance of what you've learned is revealed only after you've learned it, so the truth of each story propagates backward in time, changing the meaning of the stories in your memory as you think back over them. I think Harkaway was very successful here, in a way that's clearer now as I write this than it was when I first closed the book.
Lest you be worried, Harkaway did not cast Inspector Neith as a true believer in the perfection of the System, only to have her finish the case convinced she's right, that distributed democracy can't be manipulated, that total surveillance is good, that privacy and secrecy are inherently unacceptable, and that having certain knowledge of what people have done means the accused deserve no rights. But giving the System a robust intellectual defense and a defender whose own conduct is above reproach makes the later turn against it more satisfying. It takes no special insight to oppose a society that's obviously capricious and unfair. Like any good detective story, Neith's own tale will see her finding flaws with the side she serves and seeking to correct them, a quest that will put her into alliance with the interrogated woman and opposed to the System that interrogated her to death.
