To The Last Page

The ambitious concept, the format and the structure don’t immediately strike one as original, but sometimes it’s what you do with an idea that is important and there’s no reason why Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon can’t be better and more purposeful that some of the models it brings to mind. In the case of Gnomon , the obvious comparisons are works by David Mitchell, Christopher Nolan and – almost inevitably these days when you are dealing with high concept science-fiction – Philip K Dick. Gnomon is made up of a number of interconnected stories, exotic in nature, covering cast distances of space and time in the manner of Mitchell’s Ghostwritten or Cloud Atlas – and there’s a little bit of the computer game world and Orpheus mythology of Mitchell’s opera with Michel van der Aa, Sunken Garden . There’s an element of Christopher Nolan’s Inception in that those identities are overlaid, imported into the mind and ‘lived’ in a mental dream-state, adopting a persona from a scanned memory, and the...