Nick Harkaway Meet the Author

We're finishing earlier than normal

on Thursdays this month because next

on the BBC News Channel is meet the

author.

Sometimes, an author makes

a big demand of a reader.

Nick Harkaway does that

in his novel Gnomon -

an intricate, complicated story

on a vast canvas, set in a future

Britain where we're living

in a surveillance state,

although it's one that most

people seem to believe

is fundamentally good.

But this is, among many other

things, a murder mystery.

Something's gone wrong

and there is a fiendish puzzle,

many fiendish puzzles,

to be solved.

Gnomon, after all, is the name

for the part of a sundial

that casts a shadow.

Welcome.

It is a tough challenge

for a reader, this book.

You even put a puzzle

on the frontispiece,

which is like an entry

test for GCHQ.

Something encrypted.

You're saying right

from the beginning, look,

I hope in a good way,

but you're going to

have to work at this?

Yeah, absolutely.

And it's actually not

the only puzzle in the book,

it's just the only one that

announces itself right

on the front page.

How do you go about planning a book

like this that is full

of ambiguities, double meanings,

people who come and go

in terms of time?

It's extraordinary complicated.

Very difficult to plan in advance,

I would have thought.

Yeah.

In fact it was impossible

to plan in advance.

I didn't really understand what I

was getting into when I started it.

I had a direction and then

I sort of dived in.

But what I have to keep doing

was write a piece and then write

around it and then go back and make

sure it all married up.

In a sense, it is not so much

planned as it is layered

or accreted, like a rock formation.

And it was difficult, but also

incredibly exciting for that.

I had to trust that I'd done it

right the first time.

We are going to have to explain

something of the plot,

although it is extraordinarily

difficult.

We could be here for half an hour.

But we are talking, in effect,

rather touchingly, about a murder

mystery at the heart of it,

but it is set in the future,

in this country, in which people

are experiencing the ultimate

surveillance state.

But the irony is they think

it's quite a good thing,

a lot of people think

it is a good thing.

Yeah, and it's not just

a surveillance state,

it's also a rolling plebiscite

democracy, so they're

all deeply in mould.

The fact that they're

transparent is actually

supposedly to their advantage,

because they want everything to be

known so they can have all these

amazing services they get.

But I just sort of...

I find it weirdly seductive

at the same time as being terribly

alarming, because it wants to solve

so many of your problems for you.

We are in science-fiction territory,

really, to give it a genre title.

But you must have felt...

I know this book took you two

or three years to write,

as it inevitably would,

you must have found that events

around you were moving

at a breakneck pace which made

you rethink the whole time.

Absolutely.

The thing is that when I started

writing the book, I was writing

a science-fiction novel,

or a novel with a

science-fictional shape.

But, actually, by the time it came

out, it's actually not

science-fictional any more

in that the technology I amended

of surveillance is all now

pretty much existent.

In the summertime, a woman called

Doris Tsao at Caltech, in America,

announced that she and her team had

successfully pulled an image

directly from the brain of a monkey.

And it is a passport

photo quality image.

So the central McGuffin of the book

that made it fantastical

when I started writing

is now just plausible.

You've given it the name Gnomon.

Explain that title,

because it is something that

will be arresting people.

A gnomon is, apart from anything

else, the bit of a sundial that

actually tells the time.

It is also just something that

sticks out, something

that is perpendicular to the rest

of the world.

And, obviously, detective stories...

Different.

Exactly.

..are about things that stick out,

clues and so on automatically things

that attract your attention.

You must be a puzzle fiend.

It is pretty clear from the book.

To be honest, I'm

terrible at puzzles.

I want to be a puzzle fiend.

I love to have that kind

of mind and I can set them,

but I'm not very good at solving.

You mentioned a code at the front

of the book earlier and I set it.

It took me for ever to do it.

And I am convinced it is either

something people will get almost

immediately, by making one intuitive

leap, or actually the method I used

is too lossy and you can't get

the information back.

Because you don't tell anybody

what the puzzle is meant

to produce in the end.

There is no indication

of what you should do with it.

But if you have, if you say,

that kind of mind...

Do you know anybody

who has broken it?

I don't know anybody who has broken.

I know two or three people

are working on it and they resist...

They may still be working

on it years from now.

They may, or they may be working

on it right now and solving it.

They resist hints from me,

so I can't...I have no

notion of what's going on.

Take us through the plot a little

bit because it would be quite nice

to get some of the names.

We've got Diana Hunter.

Now, speak about the name that has

classical resonance, that's...

Yes, absolutely, names are very

important in this book

and they all have sort of hidden

meanings and so on.

Nothing is only one thing.

Everything is ambiguous.

We have Diana Hunter,

who is a refusenik, who rejects this

surveillance society.

She, we know on the

first page, is dead.

It is her death that Mielikki Neith

must investigate through this sort

of strange landscape.

She is the police officer?

Yes, well, the inspector

of the witness, which is

the police equivalent.

The witness - it is almost...

We are in an Orwellian world,

although it's good rather

than bad, we think.

But the witness is a little bit

reminiscent of where we are in 1984.

Well, and where we are in 2017.

We live in an absolutely very

heavily surveilled country

and it is becoming more true.

The witness is the collected

surveillance and phone cameras

so on of the society

in which Mielikki Neith lives.

We talked about it being science

fictional, but actually,

we could have that society within,

say, five or ten years,

if we decided to put

the infrastructure together.

That trend is in ours

in Britain today.

The story is very complicated

and at various points in the story

people are bound to say,

hang on a minute,

have I got this right?

That doesn't seem to bother you.

No, I think it's OK for a book

to ask you to try hard

and maybe to read it again.

It is interesting.

I was delighted, I had a first note

back from somebody who is reading it

for the second time and saying it's

almost even better.

Which is incredibly reassuring.

It is just desperately

what you want.

You want something that

people will pick up

for a second time for a start.

Gnomon itself, if I can call it

and it, it is a kind of intelligence

that operates backwards

as well as forwards.

Is that a reasonable

way of putting it?

I think it is.

Yes, I mean Gnomon is the overtly

science-fictional strand that

runs through the book.

Because, give no, and I'm completely

comfortable with saying that.

It is interesting, I had been

querying whether the book as a whole

this science fictional,

because I think we use that term,

particularly in news

broadcasts in the UK,

we use that to say, oh, by the way,

you can stop listening now,

because this isn't real.

And I worry about that,

because very often you hear it

in connection with deep

data-processing and with biological

advances like Crispr Cas,

where you can manipulate the gene.

And the sort of tenor is, oh,

by the way, this isn't part

of the important cultural discourse.

And it really is.

We have to start paying attention.

We live technologically

and scientifically in

an extraordinary time and I have

very little patience with literary

writing that refuses

to engage with that,

because I think technology has

become the substrate,

the underlying layer of our society

and of ourselves.

You can't be writing about humanity

now and pretending we don't

have a technological society.

You're suddenly writing a kind

of historical fiction

based in sort of 1981,

and it's not real, it's not honest.

And, also, a technological society

that can, at the flick of a switch,

the blink of an eye,

makes an extraordinary leap forward

that we can hardly imagine.

Yeah, but the reason we can hardly

imagine is because very often

we won't talk about it

until after it's happened.

There was a case in Ohio,

a little while ago, where pacemaker

evidence was admitted to break

a suspect's alibi.

Well, you know, if there is anything

more intimate and private

than the actual beating

of your heart, it is

what is in your head,

and here we have technology

which is, in the first instance,

a medical research, medical

technology that is supposed to heal

that has the potential to be part

of criminal justice,

and if we are going to allow that,

we should talk about how

and when and how much,

because otherwise it

becomes very sinister.

In other words, it's a book

that makes you think,

or should make you think?

I hope so.

Nick Harkaway, author of Gnomon,

thank you very much.