A dazzling, puzzling, techno-philosophical SF mystery-thriller: Nick Harkaway’s ‘Gnomon’

If anything were needed to demonstrate the great plasticity of the mystery as a form, Gnomon would do it. In a future England where privacy has been all but abolished for the sake of greater social order, a woman dissident with the myth-inflected name Diana Hunter dies while resisting an interrogation. A woman police inspector, Mielikki Neith, is assigned to find out why she died and what if anything she was trying to hide. So begins a whopper of a tale by Nick Harkaway, published in Britain last fall and in America early this year, in which the contents of Hunter’s mind can be probed retrospectively, further mysteries unfold like origami flowers, and the controlled, rational, material world clashes with realms of magic and disorderly human desires as objective third-person narration butts up against first-person accounts.

What Hunter opposed — in a nod to anyone who has ever raged against “the system” — is called exactly that: the System. It’s an entire form of governance based on direct democracy, in which citizens themselves make a wide range of decisions, from municipal planning to judicial matters. One of the System’s components is an elaborate monitoring apparatus called the Witness, which watches, listens, understands, guides, and shares information — if you wonder who that man walking his dog is, you can find out — but which takes no direct action on its own initiative except when there’s an immediate threat to public safety. Crime still exists, but apparently it seldom succeeds. And the police, when they’re forced to ferret out secrets from someone, can rely on a mental probe — tiny wires into the brain and all that — that can directly detect and record a subject’s consciousness as they’re questioned.

This questioning process rarely fails, yet it’s known to have failed once in the past — it damaged the subject’s mind, which had to be rebuilt — and, even leaving aside the fact that Hunter died, it seems to be failing this time too: as Neith replays the interrogation from the beginning, she finds an increasingly elaborate and confusing set of evasions. Hunter seems to have conceived and memorized long, sprawling stories, which she doggedly recounts in order to keep the interrogators from probing her more private thoughts. At the same time, there’s an evasion in Harkaway’s text, which he conceals skillfully: it’s not apparent why Hunter was being questioned to begin with, apart from the mention of an unspecified tip, but the proliferation of other issues may keep you from noticing for a while.

Neith’s pursuit of answers takes two paths (another of the many dualisms in the book), the interior and the exterior, which are represented by sans-serif and serif typefaces. She continues to replay the interrogation, which unspools in sans-serif, and she goes out into the city of London, following leads, interviewing people who might shed some light on what happened. The interrogation is a strange and fantastical thing, not a mere audio-and-video document, of the sort that shows up in present-day police dramas, but a recording of what Hunter was thinking from moment to moment, which Neith can experience directly, and which — since she’s done this before — she encounters with only a momentary sense of dislocation: Neith “jolts as the dead woman’s mind settles over her own.” What’s more, the entire record can be packaged up and transferred into Neith’s mind, and she does this for convenience, so she can replay it as she chooses, without any need for equipment.

There’s a jolt for us as well, as we suddenly find ourselves confronted with other voices and other minds, every one of which seems at first to be unrelated to anything else in the novel. As Neith learns from her interviews, the tactic has been tried before; it’s known as a narrative blockade and alternatively labeled a Scheherazade Gambit. Like the tales of that other Scheherezade, these are a disparate assortment, but they’re told in first person and, like the rest of the book, in present tense: a macho Greek banker named Kyriakos from roughly the present day (that is, our present day) has mystical encounters with a shark and grows wealthy while causing a financial crisis; a woman alchemist named Athenais in Carthage during Augustine’s time investigates an unexpected death in a supernatural Chamber of Isis while pining for her now-dead son; an Ethiopian artist named Bekele in London, who figures slightly into Kyriakos’s tale, recounts his seemingly miraculous escape from prison during Haile Selassie’s reign and assists his granddaughter in devising a game world with surveillance resembling what we’ve seen in Neith’s world; and a being from the future who calls himself (itself?) Gnomon, and who is a composite of posthuman selves from a planet of outcasts, sets out on a mission of revenge. Correspondences and echoes and direct connections between these tales eventually appear; there are elements of the transcendent, the supernatural, or the metaphysical in all of them, and large passions play out, all of which contrast sharply with the calm, methodical pursuits of Neith. A philosophical conundrum turns up, the one about the barber who shaves all men who don’t shave themselves (Hunter deigns to speak in her own voice now and then, and this comes from her); Harkaway doesn’t say so, but the barber puzzle pertains to the issue of sets that contain other sets, which is like stories that contain other stories. The pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander is mentioned a few times; again, Harkaway doesn’t say so, but Anaximander is said to have invented the gnomon on a sundial, and the word “gnomon” turns up in various ways — among other things, it’s the code name assigned to Neith’s case file. The suggestion in Bach’s Musical Offering of a hidden meaning, marked by the section title “Quaerendo invenietis,” is discussed, and other allusions to Bach appear. Patterns involving the numbers 4 and 5 recur, as do the concepts of catabasis, which is a retreat, and apocatastasis — a restoration, exemplified by Orpheus’s almost-successful effort to return Eurydice to the living world. The novel is sprinkled with gnomic utterances such as “Magic is the invocation of names”and recurring phrases such as “Fire Judges” (boundaries, especially broken ones, are a theme, and historically, as Harkaway points out, the Fire Judges were a group appointed to adjudicate boundaries after the Great Fire of London).

One of Harkaway’s previous novels was described by the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as “exuberantly overelaborated,” and that’s true of Gnomon as well — some of what’s here tries my patience, though those with a devotion to fantasy or to puzzle pieces may like it all just fine — but there’s also the same underlying seriousness that the SFE recognized. There’s a tension between the fact of these embedded tales being contained, finite, constructed things and the sense they create of living or once alive beings. The tales were supposedly devised by Hunter, yet the speakers appear to live in her mind, and they were created by Harkaway but strike us to varying degrees as vivid and real, Bekele especially. They play out as something of a fugue in prose, making the novel a set of voices in counterpoint, though the thematic links are somewhat elusive. And they, like the rest of this long, sprawling novel, speak to the power of stories to alter minds and shape the world.

Harkaway has devoted a great deal of ingenuity to the encapsulated narratives in this novel, to the way they interlace with the main spine of his tale, and to the dizzying complications that eventually require you to ask how many levels of reality this novel contains. The narration features a first-person pronoun on the second page of the book that places in doubt the seeming objectivity of Inspector Neith’s investigation story. That may slip your mind, but a couple of hundred pages in, you may start to wonder what you’ve gotten yourself into. Maybe it’s a tale told by a madman, as in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, though a seemingly lucid one. Or maybe it’s a dream, as in the movie Inception, or it’s a simulation, as in the somewhat obscure film The Thirteenth Floor, or it’s a cross between Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel Escher Bach and something by Borges. Speaking of Borges, a character here shares a name with one of his, and there are other similarities as well.

Despite the elaborate puzzles, though, which ought to get a Reddit forum buzzing as Westworld does (but so far it hasn’t), it’s worth remembering that Scheherazade’s tales, endlessly diverting though they were, served larger purposes: to counter an abuse of power, to save her own life, and to end a process that had cost other lives. Harkaway is more serious, or at least equally serious, about the System and Hunter’s opposition to it. Many American readers are likely to instinctively recoil from the idea of the Witness, and yet it doesn’t really seem like a bad thing, in the narrow perspective from which we view it, which is Neith’s perspective. The Witness functions as something between a nanny state and an extremely knowledgeable and attentive personal assistant, pointing out that you need to catch up on sleep, reminding you of an appointment, fetching any information you want, about anyone that interests you, from its enormous store. Nor is it obvious that anything is wrong with the System as a whole, which after all seems to have eliminated legislators, lobbyists, and the entire business of electoral politics by placing decisions in the hands of the people and providing the appropriate information.

But Hunter does object to all this. Though she speaks early on, in the interrogation record, of favoring mystery and forgetfulness and maladjustment — which appear to have been nearly abolished in her world — we want to know more. We want to know why, some 400 pages later, she calls the System “a new variation on absolutism.” (For anyone who wonders how much of this is possible today, a recent Atlantic article provides an answer as far as surveillance and tracking are concerned.) Harkaway has bent over backwards to avoid prejudging the case against the System; his tales are sprinkled with reminders of the messy, disorderly world outside our door today, such as the 2007–8 financial crisis, and Wikileaks, and the rise of populist nationalism, and Britain’s vote to exit the EU, all of which, we’re allowed to suppose, would be mitigated or prevented by the System. Suffice it to say that Hunter has her reasons for opposing it.

Does Harkaway take his intricate designs too far? Possibly. More than any other novel I can think of, Gnomon is clear, direct, and straightforward in its overall implications while at the same time indirect, elusive, evasive, and puzzling in much of its narrative substance. Its concluding developments are likely to occasion a good deal of head-scratching. Mysteries frequently lead you to suspect that nothing is as it seems and no one is who you think they are, but surely it’s uncommon for a mystery to go so far in unbalancing your understanding while retaining your trust and rewarding it, as this one mostly does. As I already mentioned, one finds here enjoyable resemblances to many other works: there are echoes of Eco; one section may give you a sense of Vertigo; an old, shadowy organization and a seeming conspiracy may call to mind Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49; the novel honors its epigraph, drawn from Ryszard Kapuściński, not only in illuminating Selassie’s Ethiopia (which is part of the artist Bekele’s story) but also in using imaginative literary means to analyze, not actual recent history, but potential future history. All these themes and motifs and allusions add richness and resonance to the novel. But when it comes to figuring out exactly what has happened, Gnomon reminds me of the loopy time-travel movie Primer; as critic Richard Brody said of that film, the plot here takes you into “metaphysical wilds,” and grasping the details may require a diagram like the ones that film’s more determined viewers have constructed.

I’m not sure Harkaway even intends for us to be able to fit every piece of the jigsaw together. In the book’s final chapter, we’re told in effect that books can’t be pinned down and summed up any more than people can. As this voice (which I won’t identify) puts it, “What is the difference between a person and a book? We can know the truth of neither. Both are encoded things seeking to make themselves clear. Both must be read and quickened within us.” Nonetheless, we can’t talk about either without resorting to labels and thumbnail sketches and the like. At least one more thing can be said for Gnomon. We’re now so awash in superheroes who are saving the city, the nation, or the world that the concept has become unremarkable. But Inspector Neith has no superpowers; she’s extraordinary but decidedly human. Her superiority comes largely from her probity, which is one of the first words used to describe her, and which the entirety of the story bears out. Neith is a genuine hero, a figure of recognized importance within the world of her story, enmeshed in an action that involves godlike forces, that ranges across space and time, and that concerns the fate of a people. (It’s ironic that, in its aspect as a cautionary tale, this novel is intended to forestall the rise of a new, technology-enabled police state, and yet its hero is a policewoman.) I hesitate to use the word that among literary scholars refers to major work from Homer and Milton to Melville and Joyce, and that’s tossed off in common parlance for anything that’s momentarily impressive, but for once a touch of the literary sense may apply: Gnomon is something of an epic tale.

Originally published at ifitbenotnow.wordpress.com on March 19, 2018.