Review: Gnomon
Gnomon mashes up several genres – police procedural, technothriller, heist movie, historical fantasy, and a few others that are harder to name – into a sparkling oroboros of an SF masterwork. That is a genre that often shines a light onto today’s society by turning a knob past 11. Here, Nick Harkaway twists the knob of privacy and surveillance past the peg and we’re off to the races.
He does a nice job building a world that’s believable enough to spark ideas and arguments without distracting overly much from those ideas. And the ideas and allusions start coming fast. The magic is that those genres and allusions spotlight the ideas in addition to obfuscating them. Ideological sounds ring out and randomly reverberate more deeply as Gnomon progresses.
Gnomon is rich with ideas inside and calls outside its universe; those ideas reverberate, rattle, and ultimately pervade the genres and entangled narratives that form it. Those narratives outline the ideas of self, democracy and representation, persuasion and coercion, and privacy. The multi-genre, multi-narrative style shows how these ideas dance with and tussle against one another. By wrapping them in various forms of story and literature, Harkaway makes them elemental.
Now allusion and reverberation is all well and good, but if the story doesn’t engage people, it’s pointless. Gnomon is pointed. Each arc is propulsive on its own terms and spiced with the questions and tension of figuring out how it all connects to the others.
Hardaway’s Gnomon was one of the best things I’ve read in a long time both for thinking and for fun.
A must.