Book Review: Nick Harkaway - Gnomon

Man, this is a lot of book. It starts off as a straightforward dystopian sci-fi story, with an agent of the standard Sinister Comprehensive Societal Monitoring System attempting to determine why a person of interest died during an investigation, before the characters multiply and the timelines expand and the novel transforms into a cosmic detective story that includes a priapic Greek banker during the 2008 financial crisis, an Ethiopian artist during the Selassie period, and the mistress-turned-alchemist-haruspex of St. Augustine, working in musings on art, religion, high finance, and freedom, before it neatly folds back into itself several hundred pages later. Astute readers will note and enjoy the many literary references; Harkaway is able to allude to and draw upon works like 1984, Cloud Atlas, Foucault's Pendulum, Illuminatus!, Greek mythology, Borges' short stories like "Death and the Compass", and so on without ever being excessively derivative. Indeed, he has so much fun creating this world of nested realities and universe-eating sharks that you never think you're reading something else.

I was a bit unfulfilled when it ended, however. My main complaint is that while the pace is engrossing, and there's always plenty of stuff going on, you the reader aren't asked to do much but sit and watch Harkaway display his erudition, so while he has clearly intended for this to be more than the standard thriller (most thrillers wouldn't throw in high-concept literary thematic allusions like apocatastasis or catabasis), there's not much for you to chew on afterwards and it ends up feeling closer to a "this author spent a lot of time on this" novel like House of Leaves than "this author packed a lot of life lessons in" novel like Cryptonomicon. I did have fun looking up his British references to things like Lubetkin's postwar architecture, Hawksmoor's churches, Jackie Morris' paintings, and so on, and also exploring neat historical connections like that the repeated phrase "Quaerendo invenietis" is Latin for "Seek and ye shall find" from the Sermon On the Mount in Matthew 7:7, which also references Bach's Musical Offering (BWV 1079). Does it mean anything? Maybe not, besides familiar warnings that universal surveillance systems are bad news, but it was still a blast to read.