BookJack tells about the novel by the English writer Nick Harkway "Gnomon". In the not too distant future, female detective Mjelikki Nate must investigate the death of an elderly patient who died during a consciousness test. Unexpectedly for himself, Nate discovers in the head of the deceased several subpersonalities existing in different times and contexts - and this strange circumstance gradually leads the detective to discover a worldwide conspiracy. We explain why this extremely complex text will be a real challenge for the reader - and why it is worth it.
Nick Harkaway was born in Cornwall, UK in 1972. He is possessed of two explosively exciting eyebrows, which exert an almost hypnotic attraction over small children, dogs, and - thankfully - one ludicrously attractive human rights lawyer, to whom he is married. He likes: oceans, mountains, lakes, valleys, and those little pigs made of marzipan they have in Switzerland at new year. He does not like: bivalves. You just can't trust them.
"Gnomon" by the Englishman Nick Harkway (we know him from the post-apocalyptic novel "The World That Perished") is like a gigantic - after all, as many as 900 pages - funnel: starting at a measured pace along a wide spiral, the reader will gradually begin to slide towards the center and accelerate. At some point, pictures flash in his eyes with an almost unbearable speed, and this will be followed by a dizzying fall into the rabbit hole, into blackness and obscurity - towards a new, transformed light. Katabasis and apocatastasis, the overthrow into the realm of death and the subsequent re-creation of all things from emptiness, become for Harkuei a key metaphor, on which he string five intricately intertwined and partially nested stories. And yes, if at this point you have already suspected that the author does not stand on ceremony with his reader, forcing him to give all the best (as well as memorize sophisticated Greek words and complex philosophical concepts), your fears, most likely, are a little short of reality: “Gnomon "Will be a difficult test even for an experienced and trained reader.
However, as already mentioned, it all starts deceivingly innocently. In a boring and structured world of the not too distant future, where human life has become perfectly transparent, and therefore completely safe, during a routine examination of consciousness (now this procedure is considered something like a visit to the dentist), an elderly patient named Diana Hunter dies. During her lifetime, she was a stubborn otkaznik, that is, a fighter against the new digital order, and it seems that she died, resisting the penetration of the "Witness" (the so-called program of total anonymous surveillance) into her brain. A young woman detective Mjelikki Nate is assigned to investigate Diana's death (whether she was the result of an accident or was there any malicious interference): she has to study a virtual "cast" of Diana Hunter's personality and figure out what happened.
At first, everything is going well: as expected, in the victim's head there is mainly the grumbling of the eternally unhappy old retrograded pepper shaker. However, pretty soon the situation loses its comfortable clarity: inside the consciousness of Diana Hunter, unusually voluminous and convincing subpersonalities are found, which simply cannot be there, should not be there.
A mathematical genius, a playboy, an inconsolable Orpheus, who lost his Eurydice, and part-time successful banker Konstantin Kyriakos, a native of the early digital era, meets a giant shark in the waters of the Aegean Sea, and this meeting gives him an irrational and inexplicable power over the stock markets. At the end of the 4th century A.D., the learned woman Athenais, the former beloved of Blessed Augustine, becomes a victim of abduction and a witness to a murder, and then gets a precious chance to return from the kingdom of the dead her only son, who had died shortly before from a fever. Berihun Bekele, an old artist from Ethiopia, together with his granddaughter, a young and talented entrepreneur Annie, is involved in the creation of a computer game "By the Witness", unpleasantly reminiscent of the reality of Mjelikki Neith. And somewhere in the distant future, a super-being, infinitely extended in time and space, named Gnomon, converges in opposition with its equally powerful brother.
All this ghostly and absurd polyphony, heard in the head of the dead old woman, at first seems to Neith the result of some ridiculous breakdown in the program code. However, little by little, through her bright and reliable vision of what happened, the contours of the first brutal crime begin to appear (and his alleged accomplice, a sinister androgyne named Regno Lenrott, is already following the trail of Mjelikki Neith), and then a global conspiracy, too large-scale to believe in him, and too dangerous to be neglected. The edge of reality will shift and sway (including for the reader, with whom the book at some point will start talking directly, shamelessly breaking the notorious "fourth wall"), and all that Mjelikki Neith will have is to move blindly into the abyss, clinging to an unreliable chain of evidence stretching into the gloomy darkness.
Due to the colossal complexity of the author's intention, the most convenient way to describe the "Gnomon" is metaphors. Therefore, we will allow ourselves to supplement the initially proposed image of the funnel-novel with one more - the image of the network-novel, which changes its architecture depending on which of the many joints the reader pulls.
Clinging to the images of late antique mythology scattered throughout the text (it is no coincidence that the name of the heroine "Diana" in combination with the surname "Hunter" gives Diana the Huntress at the exit, one of whose incarnations is the ancient Egyptian Isis - also not the last character in the world of Harkuei), we have the opportunity to see in "Gnomon" is an exquisite mystical novel-allegory, referring to the philosophy of the Gnostics. Starting from the name of the antagonist of the main character Lenrott and the mythologem of the foolish detective, popular in postmodern literature, we will read "Gnomon" as a detailed homage to Jorge Luis Borges - specifically, his famous pseudo-detective story "Death and the compass is not the same name" as the villain of Harkway. Taking as a basis the image of virtual reality, suspiciously similar to material reality, we will see exemplary cyber-punk in the text. We pull the conspiracy "knot" - and now we have a story about the gloomy (and discouragingly plausible) digital web that has entangled all of humanity. Let's focus on the symbolism of numbers - "Gnomon" will turn into a sophisticated numerological treatise.
However, the compelling beauty of Nick Harkway's novel, among other things, is that we don't have to make choices. All these reading options (as well as many others, a little less obvious) coexist in it equally and at the same time, complementing each other, dutifully responding to the reader's request, scattering, and then reassembling in the order he needs. All this together makes "Gnomon" an intricate toy, an ideal novel-constructor, allowing modifications both on a formal and essential level. Or, if you like, the best reading skill trainer - difficult, energy-consuming, and in some places downright puzzling, as it was said, but definitely worth the effort.
This article was sponsored by Larisa Kady
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