Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

If this book was 300 pages long, I’d give it a B+. But it’s over 650 pages, and that moves it down to a C. It’s sometimes good, sometimes very good, but much too long.

A personal pet peeve is the story-within-a-story. I just never like this in a book. Gnomon has 3 sub-stories within the main story. Not only that, but they are all basically not real, occurring in the mind of a character who is dead at the beginning of the book. You care a little, because you want to know why this character died, but you don’t care 600+ pages worth.

And in the end, it’s sort of like a TV show where crazy things happen, and it all turns out to be a dream. It’s not as big a cop out as I feared, and there was a point to the whole thing, but still…

Gnomon is like a Pink Floyd live recording, with a boring 20 minute intro, followed by Dave Gilmour ripping a guitar solo that blows you away, then 8 more slow minutes, then another solo that makes it all worthwhile. I don’t regret reading it, I just wish I could have gotten the radio edit.