Catabasis for the masses [p. 603]
An extraordinarily dense and layered narrative, which I had to restart twice before I was sure I understood what was going on. (And now I am not so sure that I did understand.) The setting is a near-future Britain, surveilled by the Witness (an all-seeing, all-knowing combination of AI and CCTV) and governed by the System (direct democracy, where everybody gets to vote on selected matters). Mielikki Neith is a Witness inspector, and something of a celebrity: she's engaged to investigate the death of Diana Hunter, a woman who was living off-grid and possibly spreading sedition. Mielikki is given access to the recordings of the surgical/chemical interrogation: not mere audio-video, but a way of examining Hunter's lived experience during the process. Except that, instead of Hunter, there appear to be other people in her memories: a Roman alchemist (former lover of St Augustine), a Greek banker (haunted by a shark, or possibly a god), and an Ethiopian artist, Berihun Bekele, who's producing the artwork for a game that features an all-seeing, malevolent Witness... And there's something else in there too: not strictly a person, but an entity in the distant future, which seems to be a sociopath.
Spoiler, slightly: it is not all a game.
There are so many layers of narrative here: the splendidly divergent voices of Athenais ('Show me but once how to bend the laws of fate, and I will tie them in such knots as shall make your head spin'), Kyriakos ('reality is something I’m losing touch with, and have been since a god-shark invaded my head and crashed the stock market') and Bekele ('Between six and seven in the evening on a Thursday, I felt the last of [my art] turn to dust inside me'); Mielikki's insistence on discovering the truth behind Diana Hunter's 'Scheherazade gambit', a nice term for the creation of false narratives to confound the interrogator; the 'appalling certainty' of the entity that calls itself Gnomon. (Surely mere coincidence that that's the name of the case as assigned to Mielikki Neith?) Each story, each narrative, is coherent, complete and cogent: each is, in its way, a lie.
Harkaway throws in a plethora of digressions. I've learned about alchemical concepts, about catabasis (journeys to the underworld), about the racist chemistry of celluloid film, about the etymology of words for blackness. I have learned, and tested the knowledge, that it is very difficult to vomit while humming a tune. And I have forgotten much already... Perhaps the overall novel could have been tighter, less discursive, less uneven: perhaps it might have been shorter, less convoluted, less twisty. It's certainly not an easy book to read in fits and starts. But Gnomon repays close attention with an exuberance that made up for my frequent moments of confusion. The characters are vivid, the plot paradoxical and the prose a delight. And now (having put off reading this for years after acquiring it) I may just have to purchase Harkaway's new novel, Titanium Noir, and dive in.
Fulfils the ‘A Character Who Is A Refugee’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge. Bekele escaped imprisonment in Ethiopia before immigrating to London.
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