quote:

"One of the things I discovered while I was writing Pattern Recognition [Gibson's previous novel] is that I now think that any contemporary novel today has a kind of Google novel aura around it, where somebody's going to google everything in the text ... there's this nebulous extended text. Everything is hyperlinked now."

What the author is outlining here is the theory of a new and innovatively creative reading practice. [...]

Node-man, a Gibson fan, has duly set up a website with the devotional URL node.tumblr.com. Node-man also got a very early copy of Spook Country. The fan is unidentified: Gibson knows who he is, and says he lives in small-town USA and wants, apparently, to stay anonymous.

Node-man mobilised a volunteer army of fellow enthusiasts and set out to create what Gibson above terms the "Google aura", or what he prefers to call the critical "cloud" that hovers over every work of literature. We can now "map" this in ways we never could before - thanks to Messrs Google and Wikipedia.

What this means, at the basic level, is a new kind of annotation. Read that first sentence again, and hit the following URL (the second chapter of Spook Country shifts to New York: there are three lines of geographically separated, but GPS- and Google Earth-locatable, narrative which finally converge in Vancouver, Gibson's current hometown): node.tumblr.com/page/23.

The website has created a version of the cloud. It can only be a version. As Gibson states in the novel, when we watch TV, flipping our remote, we are not 'viewing', we are 'channelling'. So too, when we read a novel, we create our channel through it. Which is why my Da Vinci Code is different from your Da Vinci Code and each of ours are different from the five million others. Dan Brown's novel should be seen as a gigantic piece of Emmental, with millions of wormholes threading through it.

If you asked me what are the two best-annotated texts available to scholar and student in canonical English Literature, I would say the Alistair Fowler edition of Paradise Lost and the Ann Thompson edition of Hamlet. Colleagues would probably come up with alternative contenders. But they would be the same kind of footnote / endnote enterprises. Old school.

What the unknown Node-maestro has done is poles apart, both from this, and from the usual website-based 'everybody pitch in' mess. He's channelled the raw material supplied by his volunteers into a sign-posted route through Spook Country. It opens the way, I believe, to a new kind of critical commentary on texts. One can see, easily enough, how it could be extended to Paradise Lost, or Hamlet.

It's a two-step thing. Clearly, you need the Googleised data. But then, it needs to be shaped. Not definitively shaped - no reading or interpretation is ever final - but formed into a critical route. One of many possible routes, but one which gets you to the destination.