Gnomon

This was better than any work of fiction I read in 2017. (This is not, as such, a judgement on 2017: I have many books on my to read list published last year and not yet started.) Be warned: the discussion below contains spoilers.

Most works of fiction are only minimally about themselves. Regardless of whether they are "literary" or "genre" the prose is most often designed to provide the reader with the illusion of events "really happening". (This is true even of the impossible events in much SF/F; the illusion is local, affecting the immediate experience of the reader.) This is as true of a book like Mrs. Dalloway, which tries to persuade us that we are experiencing a convincing illusion of the inside of a woman's head, as it is of, say, Cast in Shadow.

A much more limited set of works of fiction are designed to call attention to themselves as artifacts, inhabiting the borderland fiction shares with poetry. Ulysses is up there (especially its second half), Tristram Shandy, the later Henry James, and House of Leaves; on a less elevated plane, so is Illuminatus!.

Gnomon is in that latter set. One of its foreground concerns is narrative structure. There's a framing tight third person point of view, having the initial shape of a detective story, set somewhere about a century or so from now in London. There are four inset first person narratives, broken into parts and arranged chiastically, which are narratives from inside the head of the dead person, Hunter, from the incident being investigated. (This is a future with the ability to record thoughts.) They have links: in their transitions, and in certain themes and images, but this looks like a simple reflection of the mind of their composer.

Or at least that's how they start. Around the middle of the book the status of the framing narrative starts to get a little shaky (and the mode of that narrative shifts more in the direction of certain sorts of spy fiction - the secret history plus paranoia kind). By the end of the book it's not clear who is telling the various narratives, nor what the ontological status of their principals is. It is unclear how much of the main narrative has been real, and exactly who is alive, dead, or imaginary; there is one level of reading in which reality itself is overwritten, and not just the System which records it. At the same time, the novels of Hunter, which we have come to assume are simply cover for a secret identity, rumored to exist but never turning up, turn out to exist after all: in some sense they (or at least the last of them, Quaerendo Invenientis) can be argued to stand in for the book Gnomon itself.

Partway along, the narrative presents another model for itself to the reader: The Canon per tonos of the Musikalisches Opfer, is referenced specifically about halfway through: like it, the book ends having swapped out the conditions for resolution in a feat of sleight-of hand analogous to Bach's change of key. (Harkaway's interpretation of the work's social context is not that if Hofstadter.) Seen in this light, the narrative relations are analogous to musical themes.

At yet another level, it's structured around the mythic Campbellian descent of the hero to the underworld and return.

Moving along from the structure to the themes, there's another rich sheaf of choices. It is most obviously a critique of the modern surveillance state (with occasional reminiscences of Airstrip One in the descriptions of the London of the main thread), and of the clinical model of addressing the antisocial (I have no idea whether Lewis' NICE is an influence here or not). It is explicitly a response to Brexit, particularly in one of the subnarratives (although it did not start out that way; Harkaway indicates on his blog that Brexit overtook the composition of the book). It has a steganographic thread, and a sly recurrent touch of the Law of Fives. The characters, consciously or unconsciously, tread the edges of hermeticism and of knowledge or perception of a special type, that of the seer. (There are no age-old conspiracies running things behind the scenes, though, only a recent one.)

Harkaway just may be the true heir of Wallace, Pynchon and Stephenson: not that the latter two are dead yet, but their recent work moves in different domains from their defining works:Gnomon picks up the custodianship of the Fryeian Menippean satire, in which digression is a structural element.