Nick Harkaway sighs and scratches his stubble as he waits for the washing machine to finish, a round of wool on standby. Fatally, he’s squatting impatiently next to the machine while it’s juddering its utmost, and the shape of his cognition, still stretching into the late morning and clouded with pre-Brexit anxieties, cannot make room for the heavy plastic container standing precariously atop the machine and over the skull housing the cognition’s very hardware. Soon, the three-odd liters of heavy encased liquid will be dislodged from his future, rocked off its precipice of robust EU-stamped engineering to precipitously drop towards their rendezvous with his unsuspecting moneymaker.
Harkaway’s head should get a bump but because the container enters his world at a right angle and–crucially–because the first thing he sees is the words UNIVERSAL DETERGENT momentarily misread by his seared brain, it instead gets a vision of a time sorcery scroll folded as fifth-dimensional origami into what purports to be a mere novel.
I am Gnomon, a character in Nick Harkaway’s acclaimed 2017 novel. I am one of four narrators in charge of encapsulated stories the book alternates through before they eventually converge; stories, I might add, so loaded with themes and exposition and encyclopedic asides they could have easily detached from the mothership and lived as sovereign novels.
The book needed you to power through and keep track of common threads in the narrators’ journeys so when it eventually pulls them all in one go you see a knot like a beautiful butterfly. You’ve forgotten most of it now, because you read in commutes and because your puny brains were soon exhausted by the smorgasbord: of the cul-de-sacs of data-driven direct democracy (skewed utopian, yet undeniably Orwellian), of dream-quests in syncretic late Roman alchemy (damn cool era), of modern Ethiopian history and febrile analyses of Greek mythology. But surely you’ve retained a faint recollection of how the word ‘conjunction’ kept popping up after a point?
You’vet let all the juicy IRL bits go too, like the one where mice were made to associate caring with pain in an experiment involving a food dispenser with razor edges, or the one about the microscopic shapes of tears obeying to the mood of the cry. But I’m sure you remember me, because the story I narrate is the weirdest and coolest in the whole book. Motley crew selves distributed across bodies in a deep future of sentient ecosystems, and me the time-travelling assassin. I am Gnomon and I am the best character.
Or am I? Because you know that, by the end, this turns out to be not entirely accurate. By the end I have revealed myself to be the narrator of the master story as well, the story, that is, we initially perceive as frame narrative, or outer, mostly told in third person. Not only is this entryway story given in its own font (vintage Janson in the Knopff hardcover), but–get this–all the other stuff are meant to be someone’s recorded inner monologue, spinning off into all the first-person narratives it encapsulates, including mine. It goes: I can see my mind on the screen. And she literally can, as can you, on screen or paper. (Cue thinking sounds: don’t you always?) By the end, I have broken through my book within a book that both you and the hero are reading to hijack her narrative, the story we initially perceive as frame. In fact, due to in medias res (or me existing along the entire time continuum, same difference) I have already done this in the beginning.
In the coda I’m even addressing you, reader, for all the good it did us. You’re still staring at me bovine. I should have said, right from the start: I am Gnomon, Nick Harkaway’s acclaimed 2017 novel. Full stop.
Huh, you thought, there was that weird chapter where Gnomon (a word whose several meanings are discussed and alluded to across all narratives) is revealed to be a deep future entity travelling across time to encounter all narrators, with intent both ill and mysterious. These encounters should take place in spaces perceived as fictional from the real world footing of the outer story, only Gnomon turns out to bear strong similarities with the outer story’s putative villain Lönnrot. Some real world it turns out to be.
Again, I’m simplifying. But only because I need your weary neurons to focus on this next bit. You’ve missed the magic trick–somehow you misdirected yourself and ended up looking at the empty hand–but no matter; maybe you can at least have it explained. (I do like explaining things!) See, you know I made you associate the Janson portions with real-worldness before going ahead to encapsulate the frame story itself in the recording, with me as multifarious avatars permeating the entire system (ho ho ho). The whole of the book, up until the end, has therefore taken place inside the recording, though the links to and reproductions of the world proper are many. However, some of the last few sections do take place in the world proper. The font that’s used? Good memory skills–the inner story one.
You can make several things out of this:
- The Janson font as well as the usage of third-person are really signifying that their portions are the counter-narrative (as opposed to the frame story set in the world proper) which has been inserted into the recording and is told by me and if you don’t remember what any of that means you might as well stop reading now,
- I am a properly omniscient narrator, which means I am not an entity of the recording,
- One of my narrators weighs, at some point, the oft-discussed notions of the reality onion and the ouroboros against each other: the innermost, realest story might also be the outermost, fakest one, with each story being but a fantasy of the one that came before and the very last fantasizing the very first. That would mean that when I say that every explanation I ambiguously offer is, from a certain perspective, true, I mean exactly that. Even the zanier ones with the distributed people in the deep future and the reprogrammed former employee are equal citizens of the polysemy. Lastly:
- I am not a mere sentient book. I am metafictional recursion personified, nay, incarnate: I am Gnomon within which I am Gnomon within which I am Gnomon, ad infinitum.
Suffice to say, my power of phasing through fourth walls should concern you.
My power’s domains are the book’s two megathemes: Personhood and imagination. (I mean, I say so much in the end. The old impossibility of knowing another. What if you’re all there is? What if Gnomon is all there is?) You started reading about the ethics of plugging into another person’s brain with read/write access and ended up with the possibility of imprinting a person upon another, by means of high-res narrative i.e. damn big book. And you read about the Chamber of Isis summoned into existence by means of occult literary prank, among other instances of the fantastic spawned within the realm of the real (the shark in the tunnel). You are but another in a series of readers engrossed in a book that keeps telling you it’s a vehicle for Gnomon-imprinting and should come with a sticker saying Warning: may cause sharks to materialize.
Are you looking behind your shoulder yet?
If yes, let me soothe you with a quick segue into my Modesty Section, which concludes this Gnomon module with a brief discussion of my literary flaws. Brief. Clearly.
The book might read easier if it was communicated rather than explained. There are a few too many characters going into disquisitions. Come to think of it, for such a thick novel, there are only a few characters in general, and when there are they mostly elaborate on the mythic shapes of regenerated Hellenic society or the semi-legal hacker tools of the future or Go. Of course it’s all about the narrators, the heroes (and that they are), whom I love profusely and I’m not afraid to say so. But I would argue that after the book’s initial portions of brilliantly evocative prose Kyriakos’ jackassery is a bit too much for him to be likable, and him sharing the same brand of cock-sureness with Athenais and Diana means the first-person portions just aren’t that variegated. Bekele I like best, after me. All of us really are exploration vehicles for the book’s meticulously world-built terrains, though we have tragedies haunting us and are undertaking journeys to bargain our salvation.
The fact that the hero’s journey is frankly discussed does add to the book’s layered appeal, but I feel the book goes to far in lampshading its own tropes and thrills in the third-person portions. It’s cool that the terminal makes the Inspector think of Bogey, but does she consciously evoking Chandler make her story itself any less Chandleresque? It’s a bit like, get out of your own way, you know? Anyway, I liked how she’s also supposed to be a videogame.
So much book. Does anybody need so much book?
the book is about itself, more charitably about writing and reading, the power of literature, about the world building you
in the very end , though the recording has ended along with the interrogation that spawned it it’s unclear what sort of fictional spaces the recorded heroes go off to live in blog posts, maybe
I am Gnomon and I am a whole lot of book.
Beware sharks.
the Budafoki amended 