In one narrative/memory thread, Neith sees the life of Greek investment banker Constantine Kyriakos in the early 21st century where he has a fateful encounter with a great white shark.

In another, Neith sees the 5th century alchemist lover of Augustine of Hippo, Athenais Karthagonensis, as she endeavors to uncover the secrets of a chamber that could lead to the fabled Alcahest following the death of her son.

Neith again poses the question of how the interrogation ought to have been handled, and Pakhet reiterates the idea that "the goal is to collapse the narratives all back to the origin, the real person."

In it, an entity identifies itself as "Gnomon, occasionally called the Eschatogenesist, or sometimes the Desperation Protocol," "the Ten Thousand Ayes, and sometimes the Endlessly Rising Canon," among other names.

It claims to be a being living in a far future where Earth has been forgotten and most people "exist across bodies, [...] their thoughts distributed between a large number of individual brains" by a form of instantaneous communication.

Gnomon is a particularly large hive mind composed of the cast off, undesirable parts of many other individuals and is obsessed with preventing the end of the universe and the birth of replacement ones.

In Hunter's narratives, Kyriakos is kidnapped by Nikolaos Megalos, a man who is ostensibly an Orthodox Patriarch in the Order of St. Augustine and St. Spyridon but who is actually a Greek nationalist.

Athenais, meanwhile, enters the Underworld and crosses four of the five rivers of Hades (Cocytus, Styx, Lethe, and Acheron), at one point becoming the shark that ate the watch Kyriakos dropped.

Despite its purported impartiality, the Fire Judges had become aware that human irrationality would lead to the direct democracy that underpinned the System making terrible choices.

Bekele escapes the safe room; Kyriakos is rescued from Megalos; Athenais returns home in control of the Alkahest (whether or not she resurrects her son is left to the reader to figure out); and Neith remains intact but alone in Hunter's subconscious.

[1] Imagine, if you will, a Pynchonesque mega-novel that periodically calls to mind the films Inception and The Matrix, Raymond Chandler's quest romances about detective Philip Marlowe, John le Carré's intricately recursive Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the dizzying science fiction of Philip K. Dick, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, Iain Pears's hypertextual Arcadia and Haruki Murakami's alternate world 1Q84 and even this week's Washington Post story about China's push for 'total surveillance.'

Dirda's primary reservation was that the book was "probably a little too long", but ended saying, "Like a Cedar Point roller coaster, its final chapters will leave your head spinning.

But what a ride!In The Independent, Darragh McManus gave a negative review,[2] calling the book a "baffling utopian epic ladled with elegant nonsense."

While praising Harkaway for "writing women extremely well" ("Hunter, Neith and Athenais are the book's most vivid creations and strongest elements"), and saying "there are a lot of things to enjoy in Gnomon," she nevertheless felt it was "hugely confusing."

I genuinely couldn't tell you, by the end, who did what and when, whether anything reported here actually occurred, whether any or all of these characters even exist.In The Guardian, Steven Poole also gave the book a relatively negative review.

Progress is routinely halted by sketchy Wikipedia-style exposition-dumps about tidal flow or behavioural economics, or a character asking herself a whole page or two of questions about what just happened, or vague disquisitions on the meaning of identity.

Readers who are prepared to mentally edit the book as they go along, as the author and editor have not, will encounter a host of highly enjoyable fragments and suggestive ideas."

You can't help but be hooked by a detail here, a tic of recursive language there, until suddenly, you know things about Isis, ocean water or the Thames that you never thought would be interesting until Harkaway dangled them in front of you."

[6] "its vast canvas takes in tales of inexplicable ancient history, our appallingly prescient present and, fittingly, the far flung future, all of which orbit Gnomon’s central Orwellian thread like spy satellites on an imminent collision course."

Alexander called the twisting narrative "a puzzle that proves a pleasure to pursue," complaining only that "when answers are handed to us on pretty little platters, it cheapens an experience so rich as to be remarkable in every remaining respect."

Alexander concluded, In its cautionary characters and in its careful construction, in its incredible creativity and in its conversely very credible commentary, Harkaway's latest is likely his greatest.

As in The Gone-Away World and Angelmaker before it, the macro is simply magnificent—Gnomon bursts at the seams with appealing ideas, powerfully put, and perhaps more relevant than ever—but bolstered as it is by the micro that made Tigerman so moving at the same time as being buttressed by the author's inquiries into the meaning of life in the digital era in The Blind Giant, this isn't just a big, brash book about technology or horology, it's a breathtakingly bold, barely-tamed beast of a read about being human in an increasingly alien age.