Review Gnomon-clature
Hi,
The first book I read in 2018 might very well be the best book I'll read in 2018.
That book is Gnomon by Nick Harkaway. I'm a bit of a fan of Mr. Harkaway ever since reading his first, amazing, book The Gone Away World, though I always considered his first book to be his best. Well, that's no longer true.
Gnomon takes place in a near-future Britain where the government has been replaced by The System -- a massive neural network hooked up to a massive surveillance system. Everything you do is watched, recorded, and analyzed by the System. When decisions need to be made, the System selects an ad-hoc jury of citizens (sometimes with specialist members to answer questions) and they vote on the outcome. When someone seems to be tending toward criminal behavior, or is suspected of having done so, they are interrogated -- their minds simply scanned and processed to determine guilt or innocence. While all of this may seem a little creepy, to the citizens of Britain, the System is marvelous -- a perfectly transparent system that's always there keeping them safe and happy.
Meilikki Neith is a Witness Inspector, a police detective the System uses to do the legwork it can't and to investigate any odd crimes that require more than review of the CCTV footage. She's called in to investigate the death of Diana Hunter -- a pleasantly crotchety old woman who willingly underwent interrogation and died on the table -- the first time that's ever happened. When she goes to inspect Diana's house (with built in Faraday Cage to prevent System snooping), she's attacked by a strange person who was never seen entering or leaving the house -- which also shouldn't happen.
Neith tracks down suspects and questions them, but she also has access to Diana's mind, when Neith sleeps, she reviews/relives the interrogation as Diana. Neith quickly discovers that Diana's memories aren't a simple auto-biography but contain the detailed histories of several other people: a Greek financial whiz, an alchemist from antiquity, and an Ethiopian artist who regains his talent working on a project with his grand-daughter. There's also a transhuman creature called Gnomon who should just be a memory but seems quite present in the real world as well.
Neith has a lot of questions and as she sifts through Diana's memories she arrives at the answer in the strangest way.
I don't want to get too much into this -- in part because the books is just loaded with delightful bits of prose and dialogue. It's a book that encourages you to refer to a dictionary or wikipedia as it covers a range of interesting topics from technology to alchemy. Obviously, it has a lot to say about the modern surveillance state, and touches on Britain's current nationalism fever, but it ranges far afield and all quite pleasantly too.
LIke most of Harkaway's novels, he leaves out a bunch of intriguing bits and pieces and then brings them all together in a fiery display of literary pyrotechnics. The last quarter of the novel was a delight to read.
What more can I say? Go out and give this book a spin, I think you'll really like it.
later
Tom