Gnomon by Nick Harkaway

Normally I would steer clear of any novel written by the child of a novelist, as the only other example I can think of is the Amises (though does Kingsley even count as a novelist rather than a “humorist” or even just a scenester? – certainly the “novels” of his I’ve read – Colonel Sun and Lucky Jim – didn’t do anything very memorable, and Martin essentially wrote young adult fiction (if you don’t grow a wiser moral consciousness you’re basically still a child)) and they have such bad vibes it kinda poisons all of the As on any alphabetised bookshelf…

It was with reservations, then, that I cracked open this giant 2017 speculative fiction novel from Nick Harkaway, the pseudonymous novelist son of the pseudonymous novelist father John Le Carré. And although it’s a massive book, this won’t be a massive post, as the intricacies of the plot/plots would take more time to summarise in detail than I have, and I’m sure you can find someone else doing that in more, better, detail elsewhere.

I picked this up because I’ve been racing through short texts over the past couple of weeks, as my baby’s sleep has “regressed”* and I now have a bonus awake hour or two most nights around 3am when swaying/rocking/gently bouncing while making small noises is required, and because those actions are all very easy, I must read, as if my conscious mind is unable to yoke onto something, I’m susceptible to Thoughts, which is what scott manley hadley is always trying to avoid, yeah???

So read I must…

I’m also – whenever out of the house and walking or on public transport – almost always carrying an infant strapped to my chest at the moment, which limits the power in my arms to hold up hefty books to read. I keep grabbing the slim paperbacks. And I keep reading them and reading them and reading them.

This, though, was a massive hardback. But read it I did, too. I must be getting stronger.

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Gnomon is one of those novels that lots of writers attempt, but most never quite pull off, in that it’s one of those where there are several threads that seem almost totally separate or linked thematically, or slightly, or tied together in a neat ending etc., but distinct almost the whole time…

I am pleased to report (this is not a report) that Harkaway is able to connect his threads well. 

Those threads:

1. a detective investigating a death-in-custody in a futuristic highly surveilled London where micro-surveillance and potent AIs have eliminated basically all meaningful freedom;

2. a Greek banker bro who has a near death experience (nearly eaten by a shark while [scuba] diving) then gains a near-supernatural ability to read and influence the stock market (set basically now-ish);

3. the alchemist ex-girlfriend of Catholicism’s own Saint Augustine is in Ancient Cathage mourning the death of their shared illicit son, when she is suddenly confronted with the existence of a mythical artefact that she [thought she] had made up in a complex fraud to mess with a rival;

4. a successful mid-20th century Ethiopian visual artist who was imprisoned during the rebellion at the end of Hailie Selassie’s reign then relocated to hip London but gave up painting to run a moderately successful small business, is lured back into art making by his techpreneur granddaughter decades later, to become the visual designer for a complex video game she is developing;

5. in the far distant future, intelligences and consciousnesses are no longer limited to a single body, and one great entity – named Gnomon – is asked to perform a favour for another great entity (one which has absorbed every single lifeform on a planet), with the promise that in exchange Gnomon will be able to additionally untether his consciousness from time, too;

Arguably there are other threads later on, but they tend to ultimately be shorter passages within these five main stories, where a different character takes the structural and narrative focus.

Maybe these five sections sound more similar when written down like this, or maybe they sound more disparate than I felt them to be, but – like all but the absolute worst type of these novels – every time a section ended I was desperate for it to come back, waiting for the story to return to ancient Carthage, or contemporary Athens, or the deep fictional future, or 20th century Addis Adaba, or or or or or (actually I could take or leave the surveillance dystopia London as it didn’t feel as far away from now as maybe it did in 2017, when generative AI was more science fiction than the bleak reality of a tool that many losers (sorry, efficiency-focused business leaders) now use instead of very simple human actions and plan to increasingly rely on as a way to strip expertise, knowledge and humanity from every single industry…

Yes, Harkaway’s future here doesn’t feel too far away. Too close, if anything…

But that’s a pretty paltry criticism for a novel, and this giant book (which I read in hardback, like some kind of feudal lord) is a real treat throughout.

Maybe I missed bits by reading so many sections in the middle of the night while balancing the book on one knee and my baby, Whamathan, on the other, but even if I did miss ideas, I lost none of the overt pleasure that comes from the neat, satisfying – yet still complex, surprising and imaginative – ways in which Harkaway’s threads coalesce at the novel’s end…

Images of sharks recur, ideas of exploration in real and virtual spaces recur, discussions of the importance of artistic expression recur… So, too, do explorations of selfhood and freedom and economics and societal norms and politics and literature itself, of course, and all of this is packaged in an exciting and engaging giant fucking novel.

I loved it. Yes.

I will read more Harkaway. And I’ll read more of his dad, too, probably…

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* If you speak to anyone who has (or manages) children/babies, then the phrase “sleep regression” is one you hear a lot. Allegedly, babies go through a sleep regression phase – depending on who you speak to – basically every week. Essentially, babies are shit at sleeping, and even if they seem like they’ve cracked it, they likely haven’t and they’ve just got lucky many days in a row… I was recently chatting about this with a former colleague who has two children aged five and eight (or thereabouts) who said they still haven’t mastered sleeping. “My house at night,” he said, “Is a circus.” He looked tired.