Review: Nick Harkaway — Gnomon

For about two and a half years now, I’ve been regularly attending a book club. It’s small, with a core membership of about eight, and we meet once every six weeks or so. The idea is to select and read books: each meeting a member proposes three sci-fi or fantasy books, and we all vote on which one to read. Those of us with time or long commutes tend to finish more easily, even making it onto the “secondary” books that didn’t make the final vote.

When Gnomon was picked, none of us realised what we were in for. The preference is usually for shorter and easier, since we all lead busy lives. The tome that dropped on the mat, or downloaded onto a Kindle, is over 700 pages long. Harkaway is not a man to stint himself, but his books generally reward the effort it takes to read them.

In this case, it’s not just the effort required for a long novel, since that doesn’t bother me so much. Gnomon is complex, an often difficult read that requires time and attention, repaying careful readers with a dense plot that doesn’t even start to reveal itself until about halfway through. At first, the reader must endure a jarring experience as multiple font styles are used to delineate between several distinct narrators. There is the detective Neith, assigned to investigate the death during interrogation of one Diana Hunter, which lulls the reader into a false sense of security. Then…