If anything were needed to demonstrate the great plasticity of the mystery as a form, Gnomon would do it. In a future England where privacy has been all but abolished for the sake of greater social order, a woman dissident with the myth-inflected name Diana Hunter dies while resisting an interrogation. A woman police inspector, Mielikki Neith, is assigned to find out why she died and what if anything she was trying to hide. So begins a whopper of a tale by Nick Harkaway, published in Britain last fall and in America early this year, in which the contents of Hunter’s mind can be probed retrospectively, further mysteries unfold like origami flowers, and the controlled, rational, material world clashes with realms of magic and disorderly human desires as objective third-person narration butts up against first-person accounts.
Je Suis, Ergo Sum 