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nigellicus 's review for:
Gnomon
by Nick Harkaway
It's only January and already I've had my head wrecked by this monster, chewed up and spat out by its sharp multi-layered convolutions. In a future British State of total surveillance, a woman dies under interrogation. An Investigator looks into the case, but in reviewing the interrogation - which involves one's entire life being scanned via invasive brain-reading machinery - she discovers not one life but five, and as she immerses herself in a a series of increasingly impossible stories that may be a kind of camouflage or may be a kind of trap, we find ourselves on a deep dive into human consciousness and identity, not to mention ideas of freedom and the consequences of technological innovations.
It's a big, dense, intense, sprawling book, and the one where Harkaway completes the transformation from the clever-clever silly-satirist-with-a-heart of The Gone Away World to something terrifyingly literate and intelligent, grappling with enormous ideas that he inserts carefully into our heads so they can cause all sorts of trouble.
It's a big, dense, intense, sprawling book, and the one where Harkaway completes the transformation from the clever-clever silly-satirist-with-a-heart of The Gone Away World to something terrifyingly literate and intelligent, grappling with enormous ideas that he inserts carefully into our heads so they can cause all sorts of trouble.