There is a system beneath the System designed to make us feel the way a secret group called the Fire Judges wants us to feel, and, meanwhile, a counterculture of refuseniks has sprung up, determined to opt out of the System altogether.Īn intriguing premise, yes, but so far not all that unusual in the world of postapocalyptic fiction. The System and the Witness, that is, are designed to enhance freedom, not curtail it, to make possible a harmonious rather than an unruly democracy.

But the System is theoretically driven by our needs-to be healthy, to avoid breaking the law, etc. Yes, our lives are controlled by the System, the outgrowth of a computer game expanded to the real world, and, yes, all our actions, emotions, and biological processes are monitored by an electronic police force called the Witness, which can detect when we are soon to experience a health crisis or commit a crime as well as how we feel about various public issues. The world of near-future Britain has become a total surveillance state, but this Big Brother isn’t evil, or so we want to believe. The notions of apocalypse and postapocalypse have been key ingredients in all of Harkaway’s previous novels, but here he takes them in an altogether new direction, both thematically and narratively. With every new novel, Harkaway manages to further explode the idea of boundaries as useful tools to contain our understanding of character, genre, and story.

Gnomon novel