Tag: Nick Harkaway

Gnomon: kind of a throwback

I had two main high-level thoughts whilst reading Gnomon, and they’ve made me undecided about whether or not I like the book.

The first was: this is a science fiction version of Foucault’s Pendulum. Gnomon has a deep debt to Umberto Eco and his everything-is-a-great-grand-scheme book from 1988. The whole book is a convoluted conspiracy that maybe didn’t start out being a conspiracy but there were patterns that turned it into a conspiracy it was meant to be all along. In this day and age, when so many people want things to be conspiracy theories that aren’t, and that turns out to be really, really damaging to society, I actually had very little patience for this (and it was the reason that I ended up skipping ahead to the ending after reading about half the book).

The second thought is that you can tell, as he’s laying the groundwork for the conspiracy in the early chapters, that he is his father’s son. John LeCarré is, of course, a master at telling these kinds of stories and Harkaway has learned the mechanics from him. It’s well done and to be admired.

So: while the mechanics are very well done, the overall story wasn’t one I wanted to read. So I didn’t.

A Modern Superhero

Tigerman

 

What’s it about?
Tigerman is about war and superheroes and what if the Iraq and Afghanistan wars bred a superhero from the British troops? What on earth would he be like? Why would he be created? What does that say about Western society? Plot-wise, there’s a soldier, suffering from PTSD-lite, who’s been stationed on a make-believe island near Yemen that is about to environmentally self-destruct. There’s an attack on a local cafe, and a boy asks the soldier to avenge the cafe owner. How does he do that under the nose of a local UN force, and what are the ramifications?

Why should you read it?
Because Nick Harkaway is a pretty awesome author. He’s got the right amount of swagger and touch for narrating international politics. (John le Carre is, literally, his father. It runs in the family.) His stories are funny and touching and in this book he has a sentence where he uses the f-word as every major part of speech. I laughed out loud a number of times. Recommended.