The premise of this book sounded fascinating & I really wanted to read it. I did struggle for about a quarter of it, but life's too short. I found I was constantly having to look up words I didn't know & that interrupted the flow ( that wasn't flowing very fast) I'm sure this is really well written. I wish I could have got into it but I'm going to have to admit defeat. Thanks to Netgalley & the publisher for letting me try!

I am an avid reader of fantasy and science fiction but I couldn't get into this book. There seemed to be far too much description and not a lot going on. Plus the words used are quite educated words and not something that would normally be said in every day life
I am sorry to say I have up after 30 pages

Gnomon is an all-absorbing challenge of a read, with arguably the least-reliable narrator I've come across in forever. A near-future British utopian democracy (or is it) assigns an investigator following the death of an author in custody. This is a Britain shaped by technology - everyone is under constant observation, and everyone is directly engaged in government and justice; but is the system as flawless as it seems or the perfect vehicle for social manipulation (and for disappearing naysayers)? It doesn't take long to notice the echoes between the narratives, but when you realise you're not sure whether any of the characters exist - which is awkward, because each one is fascinating in their own right - it doesn't detract from the tension or the urgency to discover what is going on. This isn't a book to read lightly: come fully engaged for matters of social justice and for a plot that takes its time to explore its convolutions - you'll need your brain to keep up!

A difficult book to get into so didn't do it for me

Master storyteller, Nick Harkaway, has created a science fiction thriller, where citizens live their lives under total surveillance and worlds interweave across time and space.

Diana Hunter appears to have opted out of the system. She lives off the grid and runs her lending library on a barter system, where her daily life appears to be pretty mundane. Well, that is, until she’s arrested and dies while under intense interrogation.

Mielikki Neith is the Inspector on Hunter’s tragic case. Neith is a loyal supporter of the surveillance system and Hunter’s opposite, in many ways. The interrogation records prove complicated when Neith discovers not only Diana Hunter’s memories but also those of other minds intertwined with hers. One of these is Gnomon’s memory. Neith becomes engrossed in the case and is determined to solve it, even if it means putting herself in grave danger. But is it actually possible?

Regno Lonnrot aids Neith in the case, as she struggles to find meaning in it all. But who is Regno really and can Neith be sure that he is on her side? Neith delves deeper and deeper and discovers that Hunter has left her a message. Should she listen to it? Is it a lie and where will it lead? Gnomon’s secrets and encryptions are revealed gradually and life and death merge into one another, creating a rich tapestry of intrigue.

Harkaway is a master wordsmith and his use of language is breath-taking. Distinctive voices come to life as the characters emerge. The densely layered plot often forced me to stop and mull over events before I was ready to dive in again.

Gnomon is certainly not a light read. It is an epic one! If you love nail-biting, thriller/ science fantasy, then this is the book you absolutely have to own.

Gigi

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.

It took me ages to get into this, I don't think its my type of story, although it is very well wrtiten and original.

I'm sorry to say that this book was so full of big words, tangental lectures, and rambles without purpose that I lost all sense of any plot or character. Not recommended.

This review will not be posted by me to Amazon etc as I can’t continue reading it beyond 25%. I am a well educated, well read person who actually studied English Literature and Classics (in translation) and I really struggled with the references and vocabulary. The initial part of the book intrigued me and I metaphorically rubbed my hands together thinking I was going to reading a cross between George Orwell’s 1984 and Umberto Eco. I found the jumping around of seemingly unconnected characters and time lines most disturbing and this eventually made me give up on the book. I know other more intelligent minds will give this book more stars but I can’t.

This is a long book and often hard work. I was tempted to give up on it several times as I don't have the intellect or the knowledge to fully appreciate the many allusions and concepts, but I'm glad I kept going. Nick Harkaway is a great writer and I thoroughly enjoyed the bits I could get my head around. I'm looking forward to reading his earlier books which, I understand, are a bit easier on the brain!

I will not be finishing this book. While I find the premise super interesting and was excited to read this, I struggled from the first page. I have problems with the way the sentences are constructed and with the words chosen; so much that I had to reread too many sentences to even have some sense of what was happening. I found the book inaccessible and frustrating to read. Ultimately, I think I was just not a good fit for this particular book and just cannot convince myself to go on; especially given how long the book is.

Dystopian Science Fiction with a Confounding Edge

Gnomon is both high- and low-concept science fiction at their absolute best. At 700 pages, with a long, long cast of strong – and strange – characters, and a winding, snake-like plot that doubles back upon itself and sniffs along the way the rarefied air of philosophy, religion, and some funky not-too-distant future science, Gnomon is an oft-confusing, confounding work of near – and maybe total – genius.

It opens as technology-based dystopian fiction, in a near-future world where crime and disaffection have been brought under control by use of the Witness, a computer programme with added technological extras that make the actions of the population transparent and knowable, and thus predictable. Neith, one of the main narrators, is a police Inspector tasked with investigating the circumstances around the death of refusenik Diana Hunter, who lived a quiet life outside the system, as much as she was able, and who taught local children low-level rebellion and anarchy in a gentle and unalarming way. But as Inspector Neith is about to find out, there is much more to what she sees as an almost utopian society, and a great deal more to Diana Hunter, than meets the eye.

In this monster-sized novel, Harkaway ranges freely through deep science and spiritualism, the absurd and the ridiculous, the philosophy of life and death, and takes the reader on some long, wild rides through the outer edges of fantasy.

There were times when I wondered whether and how he could pull it all back together, but – with quite some skill – he manages to provide touchstones of reality in Neith, and at times Hunter, no matter how far he strays into the realms of weirdness.

It’s a beautiful book and well-deserving of a must-read recommendation. But it’s also a confusing one, with several narrators, and sudden unannounced switches in perspective and point-of-view, which makes it an incredibly demanding read – at many points I thought I was just getting the hang of it and was settling down for a nice comfortable, long home straight, and then the whole world would shift again, and I would find myself as bewildered as ever – a delicious feeling, as Harkaway has great authority in his writing, so that the confusion, and wretched feeling of being far out to sea, becomes a readerly rollercoaster of thrills and knife-edge tension that gripped me from first page to last.

Harkaway has pulled off an incredible feat of literary engineering, drawing together impossibly diverse threads of knowledge and narratives to an ultimate point that left me stunned and feeling somehow enlightened. Gnomon is the first book in a very long time of which I can say: this book changed my outlook on life.

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher

Every novel by Nick Harkaway is different, and Gnomon (review copy from William Heinemann) is probably his most ambitious book yet. This is a complex, multi-layered book that braids together a series of narratives to tell a story about society and our trust in its underlying structures. Mielikki Neith is the key to piecing all this together.

Neith is the foremost Investigator for The System, the all-seeing and all-knowing system that governs society. Part panopticon, part the ultimate in participatory direct democracy, it promises government by the people and in their best interests. It's the natural evolution of our current world, where we set out the details of our private lives in social media, and monitor our health and bodies with devices like Fitbits. People today are choosing to self-monitor and share that data with large corporations, without ever questioning whether the offered benefits are worth the potential erosion of privacy. Harkaway's System is a society founded on the idea that if one has nothing to hide then one has nothing to fear. And this is a system that works, for the most part.

Neith is tasked with investigating Diana Hunter. Hunter is one of the few who has lived a life seeking to opt out of the all-pervasive surveillance of the System. She has lived quietly on the margins of society, until one day her behaviour is flagged as worthy of concern. She is brought in for questioning, which in the case of the Sytem means a full brain scan under laboratory conditions. But Diana Hunter dies under interrogation. Her brain print is given to Neith as part of the investigation, to find out what she was up to and why she died.

The scan reveals a series of hyper-real narratives that Hunter has used to block the interrogation by masking her own thoughts and memories. Constantine Kyriakos, the wunderkind banker who escapes a shark attack. Berihun Bekele, a once-feted pop artist who survived Haile Selassie's fall in Ethiopia and is retained by his grand-daughter to design a computer game which bears a startling resemblance to elements of the System. Athenaïs Karthagonensis, a medieval scholar and wise woman mourning her dead son. Although each story is distinct, they are linked both thematically and in points of detail. These are arechetypal stories of gods and monsters, drawing on the oldest myths and stories from human civilisation.

Catabasis and apocatastasis are the two recurring themes in Gnomon, featuring in all of the narratives Harkaway sets before us. They are the primal roots of so many of our stories. Catabasis: the journey into darkness on a quest for an object, a loved one, or meaning. Apocatastasis: the ending of a cycle that acts as a reconstitution of the world, often enabling its rebirth in a new direction.

This is not a perfect book. It's choppy in parts, and slow to get going. Like one of Bekele's painting series you need to stand back and view the whole by layering its component parts. Harkaway is clearly conscious of the complex task he is putting before the reader, and at times is, if anything, a little too eager to lead the reader by the hand, laying out the trail of breadcrumbs to help understand what he is trying to say. And there could have been a much easier story to tell. Harkaway could have used his setting for a lazy polemic about the surveillance society. But Gnomon reaches for much deeper truths about ourselves, about society, and about the impact of technology upon us all.

Goodreads rating: 5*

I loved the idea of this book, I just couldnt get into it, or finish it.
The writing style for me made it difficult to get into, and just as I was getting to know a character we switched to a completely new one, in a new scenario feeling like I was starting the book again.

Well, I tried..... after reviewing 43 books via NetGalley this is only the second novel where I have been unable to summon the stamina and/or interest to reach the end. The overwhelming feeling is one of frustration as Nick Harkaway has real skill, for sure, and his writing is highly literate and fluent. But, for me, the wandering narrative just failed to capture my interest. Perhaps a more ruthless editing would have helped to produce a novel with wider appeal. Minor irritations arose from Mr Harkaway’s rather tedious insistence on introducing words that I suspect would not feature in most readers’ vocabularies - I have no doubt he is well-read; he didn’t need to demonstrate his wide-ranging vocabulary quite so often.

Gnomon is set, it seems, in an alternate reality where Britain operates under a benign but all-encompassing system of surveillance. Instead of politicians, fallible and corruptible human beings, the country is controlled by the System, watched (at all times and in every way) by the Witness and, if things do go wrong, there are Inspectors (like Mielikki Neith, one of the book’s central characters) to work out what happened. When Diana Hunter dies while being interrogated (by having her brain thoroughly and electronically read) Neith has to, effectively, inhabit her thoughts to find out what happened. But instead of one woman’s thoughts, feelings and life she finds at least four other stories unfolding in there – and what stories they are! A greek banker, doing well enough but nothing spectacular, encounters a shark while swimming, escapes and becomes some kind of financial guru. Saint Augustine’s discarded lover becomes some kind of miracle-worker, utilising the power of a temple of Isis which somehow exists even though it should only be a figment of her imagination. The owner of a security firm returns to his former life as a famous artist when his grand-daughter needs him to visualise the computer game she is developing (where Britain is governed by an all-seeing surveillance system…). A mad, godlike figure plans to build a new reality by swallowing the current one – just like it happened before. And through it all is the image of the shark – terrifying and destructive and sometimes more than just an image.

The first time Harkaway thoroughly confused (but also delighted) me was when I read his first novel, The Gone-Away World, about nine years ago. I’ve reread it a couple of times since, I still love it (especially Ronnie Cheung – I bloomin’ love Ronnie Cheung), but I find new angles each time. Harkaway is the son of John Le Carré and, although he writes in a completely different genre, he seems to share his father’s love of a convoluted (but totally joined-up) plot. I’m fairly certain I’m going to have to read Gnomon a few times before I even begin to realise what was going on. If you like a book which is very big, very dense and very clever then this could be for you – the fact it is also very funny is a bonus – just don’t blame me if you have major problems trying to describe what just happened to you when you’ve finished.

My review needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. I struggled with it. For me, challenging is an understatement. After three weeks I'm only 25% of the way through. Frustrating as I list Nick Harkaway as a favourite author.

To me, it feels too idealistic. I'm sure the memory downloads are instrumental to the plot, but they are too far out there. All daydreams and crazy thoughts. I want more of the action and plot progression that you see with the detective.

Saying that, I'm going to push ahead. I'd like to say that it was wonderful in the end. It would be terrible to not have Nick on the list of favourite authors.

A beautifully written, complex and fascinating story that had me entranced throughout.
Made me want to look up others by the same author.

I normally read quite quickly – I’ve read 157 books so far this year. But this one took me nearly two weeks to complete. Partly it’s the fact that it is something of a doorstopper at over 700 pages, but the main reason was that early on I took the decision that I wouldn’t speed-read through this one. The prose is too rich, too dense – there are too many allusions and clues scattered throughout and as you may have gathered from the blurb, the structure isn’t all that straightforward, either.

It might have been tempting to have accelerated through it if I hadn’t been enjoying the experience so much. Harkaway is a remarkable writer and this is him at the peak of his capabilities. For all the depth and complexity, I found the book highly readable and engrossing. It would have been a real shame to have thrown away the experience by trying to skim through it. The writing is immersive and each character has their own flavour so that after a while, it only took a couple of lines to realise whose head I was in. Essentially, it is a thriller. But the puzzle is far more of the slow-burn variety, which doesn’t stop there being some jaw-dropping twists near the end.

For all their quirkiness, I was fond of all the characters, though my favourites remained dogged, persistent Inspector Mielikki Neith whose investigation of the untimely death of Diana Hunter in custody triggers the whole chain of events – and fierce, beautiful Athenais, once-mistress to Saint Augustine, before he decided to become so saintly. The characterisation is masterly and as I’m a sucker for character-led stories, it was their vividness and sheer oddness that sucked me in and kept me reading.

I also feel a similar anger that sparks through the book – the apathy of too many of us, the blind belief that if we put in place a whole raft of cameras and electronic surveillance, it will somehow be alright, no matter who ends up at the helm and in charge. This is a remarkable, brave book, deliberately constructed and written on an epic scale. Does it work? Oh yes. I loved it, but my firm advice would be – don’t rush it. If you try reading this one in a hurry, you’ll end up throwing it out of the window – and given its size, it may cause serious injury if it hits someone…

While I obtained the arc of Gnomon from the publisher via NetGalley, this has in no way influenced my unbiased review.
10/10