SPOILER ALERT! In the final pages of Gnomon we are left with a fourth wall breaking address to the reader from Gnomon (the character), a fiction within the fiction who was not (as portrayed through most of the book) a trans-human intelligence from the future traveling back in time to escape the ultimate entropic death of the Universe, but instead (it is revealed) a digital counter-virus making it's way from a woman's mind out into the corrupt computer system ruling England (the world?) to save the Brits (us all?). Gnomon (the character) tells us that in truth it is not this counter-virus either (at least not the digital, computer coded kind), but it is a thing that has been taken in by us, and become part of us. So Gnomon, after all, is really the book we have been reading (well, of course it is, the title of the novel tells us as much, yes?) What a beautiful grace note to end on, and how well this mini love letter to the power of literature dovetails with the themes of the novel: information is precious and powerful; it is so much of what we are as humans, and what we have to give each other, our words; it is the vehicle to know another person, to change a society, to bring a smile or a tear, a laugh or a grimace, a furrowed brow or the mental peace of greater understanding; information may crush us or set us free.
In the final pages of Gnomon we are left with a fourth wall breaking address to the reader from Gnomon (the character), a fiction within the fiction who was not (as portrayed through most of the book) a trans-human intelligence from the future traveling back in time to escape the ultimate entropic death of the Universe, but instead (it is revealed) a digital counter-virus making it's way from a woman's mind out into the corrupt computer system ruling England (the world?) to save the Brits (us all?). Gnomon (the character) tells us that in truth it is not this counter-virus either (at least not the digital, computer coded kind), but it is a thing that has been taken in by us, and become part of us. So Gnomon, after all, is really the book we have been reading (well, of course it is, the title of the novel tells us as much, yes?) What a beautiful grace note to end on, and how well this mini love letter to the power of literature dovetails with the themes of the novel: information is precious and powerful; it is so much of what we are as humans, and what we have to give each other, our words; it is the vehicle to know another person, to change a society, to bring a smile or a tear, a laugh or a grimace, a furrowed brow or the mental peace of greater understanding; information may crush us or set us free.