Harkaway takes the epigraph for Gnomon from The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuscinski. “When the first question was asked in a direction opposite to the customary one, it was a signal that the revolution had begun.” Ethiopia, as portrayed in The Emperor is a land of whispers and intrigues, barely contending with modern technology, shaped by the personal rule of one man applied to a country of some thirty million. It nearly directly opposite to England with the System and the Witness.

Inspector Neith experiences imperial Ethiopia through the narrative of Berihun Bekele, a painter who was a young man in the waning days of Emperor Haile Selassie’s reign and a grandfather by the time of the story that Neith encounters. His granddaughter Annie is a brilliant technologist and is leading the development of an immersive computer game called Witnessed. The features of both the in-game world and the gameplay bear a close resemblance to Neith’s world of System and Witness. Is she seeing the early days of the world she knows? If she is, how did it get into Diana Hunter’s mind?

Inspector Neith also pursues the truth about Diana Hunter outside of the interrogation recordings, but the people she finds connected to the case are no less unsettling than the personas yielded up in the interrogation. One person, for example, turns up inside of Hunter’s house, which has been built as a Faraday cage, a place where the Witness cannot look. Neith encounters this person on subsequent occasions, and each time they seem to be invisible to Witness surveillance which is, at least in theory, ubiquitous. She talks to a person from an obscure corner of infrastructure governance who knows an improbable amount about interrogations such as Hunter’s; later Neith learns that the obscure agency also plays an important role in the Ethiopian narrative. Similar interactions with a bookseller, a technician who speaks of glitches in the System, a professor of semiotics and others point toward elements of Hunter’s various narratives and are pointed to by those same stories. Which way does the causation run? Is there any way to tell? Is there, in fact, a difference?

Neith finds herself drawn in deeper when one of her “real-world” interlocutors is murdered by something from within one of Hunter’s narratives. The event is impossible, and yet the evidence is incontrovertible. Moreover, it echoes an equally impossible killing inside another of Hunter’s narratives.

By this point, enough gnomons have burst in perpendicularly to make telling time by their shadows quite a challenge. Harkaway manages the act, showing events first in one light, then in another, with each flip of the switch casting a new illumination. It all comes together in the end of this hugely ambitious novel. It is not tied up in a bow, wrapped for the audience; instead, the lights converge leaving some things clear, others in shadow, with interpretation of the intersection of gnomon and plane ultimately up to the reader.

Some time past the middle of the twenty-first century, Britain offers its citizens the safest, most democratic, best-adjusted society in human history.

Every person under the System is encouraged — though not compelled — to spend a certain amount of time each week voting, and is semi-randomly assigned to decision-making bodies for the duration of their session. Each body will most likely be around two hundred individuals strong, and will deal either collectively or in subcommittee jury group with anything from asylum requests or the allocation of medical resources to commercial disputes. It is the most nuanced and democratic system of direct governance ever devised, and it requires genuine participation from the polity. For the body of the state to perform its function properly, each person must make his or her own decision in the light of their personal experience and opinion without being influenced by others at the formative stage, so sessions are initially private and remain anonymous throughout. Each problem is proposed to each person in a way that is fractionally different, tailored precisely to pique their interest and understanding, their self-interest and their altruism, so that every choice is made with the greatest awareness of consequence and meaning. (p. 25)

But the workings of a utopian participatory democracy are not what Gnomon is about. They are the necessary foundation of a story — or more properly a nested set of stories — that is both wider and deeper. It begins with Inspector Mielikki Neith making a televised statement about the death of a suspect in the custody of the Witness, while people use the System to examine her microexpressions to gauge whether her pained honesty about how everyone at the Witness feels this failure is faked, and Neith herself follows the polling numbers that trail across her screen. Or maybe it begins with the death of Diana Hunter, the death that distresses Inspector Neith because of the failure it implies, though Hunter’s case will do much more than distress her as Gnomon proceeds. Or maybe it begins with Hunter being called in for interrogation. The first words that she gives to the System are the title of the first section of Gnomon, “my mind on the screen.” In fuller form:

“I can see my mind on the screen.”
Hunter’s first thought during the examination is like the barb on a fishhook, and Neith instinctively loathes it. These eight unremarkable words cause her to tighten her jaw as if expecting a blow. The phrase is, to be sure, unusually clear and strong, quite ready to be vocalised. One must assume that Hunter was deliberately recording a message, in which case: to whom? To Neith, as the investigating officer? Or to an imagined historian? Why does the tone, the clean, discursive flavour of Hunter’s mind, trouble that part of the Inspector that is devoted to a professional mistrust of appearances? (p. 10)

A gnomon is the bar sticking out from a slab that turns a flat surface into a sundial. Its intrusion changes a physical phenomenon into a source of meaning and measurement. “In geometry, a gnomon is a plane figure formed by removing a similar parallelogram from a corner of a larger parallelogram; or, more generally, a figure that, added to a given figure, makes a larger figure of the same shape.” Gnomon is filled with such irruptions, things that intrude among planes, cast shadows, and change meanings.

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