There is a plausible narrative reason for this saminess of style, but it doesn’t make it any less monotonous. The Greek finance wizard tells his story in much the same voice as the alchemist of a millennium and a half ago (“Fucking tits of Zeus,” she thinks at one point). It doesn’t help, either, that nearly everything is narrated in the same tone of relentless sweary facetiousness. Had I not been professionally obliged to finish it, I doubt I would have trudged further than a fifth of the way through the novel, because ars longa vita brevis and all that. There’s a lot of laborious mashing-up of Greek mythology with Christianity, and much verbose reader-prodding about how all the different narrative strands might be connected. There is an Alain de Botton-style philosophical interlude on the meaning of tram stations. Things are repeatedly explained, unnecessarily.

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. Gnomon, however, reads like the first draft of what might have been a tighter 400-page book rather than a rambling 700-pager. It reads like the first draft of what might have been a tighter 400-page book rather than a rambling 700-pagerĪ novel can be awfully long without being long-winded. Meanwhile, it begins to look as though someone doesn’t want Inspector Neith to conclude her investigation successfully. There is a fourth-century alchemist searching for a mythical chamber that exists outside time, to resurrect her dead son, fathered by St Augustine. There is an old Ethiopian painter living in London, whose daughter produces a bestselling video game.

There is a Greek finance wizard who can somehow foresee the movements of the stock market and is stalked in his head by a shark.

She finds the vivid experiences of a host of other people. What Neith finds inside the dead woman’s head, however, is not supposed to be there.

Gnomon by nick harkaway