quote:

I didn't realise how much I was enjoying Spook Country until I had finished it. As ever, I was captivated by the flow of words and ideas, and came to the end all too quickly.

I try, when reviewing a book, not to say too much about the plot, and, particularly in this case, there are mysteries, gradually revealed, which add to the pleasure of the experience.

William Gibson is known, primarily, for his science fiction. He has a substantial back catalogue of six novels and a volume of short stories in the sf genre, and one modern novel - Pattern Recognition.

There is a connection between Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, other than the fact that they have a character in common. Both are set in the present day, and both have at their core some generally recognized tragedy - 9-11 and Iraq, respectively. These world events, though essential to the stories, are nevertheless tangential to them, just as they are to most of our lives.

The starting point Gibson uses in Spook Country is one he often uses. A mysterious authority figure hires a specialist to find out something for him. The specialist eventually succeeds, and the result is a surprising revelation.

It's a good plot outline for a novel, and Gibson has played extensive variations on it. As with all good literature, you read it for the journey rather than the destination. Gibson's prose is not everyone's cup of tea, but it certainly is mine. To tell the truth, there seems less of Gibson's trade mark "verb-light" writing in Spook Country than in previous books. To a large extent, it reads like a rather complex thriller. His characters are engaging, his insights fresh, nothing is obvious, his locations are convincing.

quote:

With Oshosi at his shoulder, Tito rounded the corner of the playground fence and ran toward East 16th. Oshosi wanted him out of the park and its calculable geometries of pursuit. A cab slid in front of him as he darted into the traffic on Union Square East; he went over its hood, meeting the astonished eyes of its driver as he hurtled past the windshield. The man slammed his horn and held it, and other horns woke reflexively, a sudden uneven blaring that mounted to a new crescendo as his three pursuers reached the stream of traffic.

Tito looked back and saw one of them maneuvering between bumpers with queer, high steps, as if trying to avoid wetting his feet, while holding something aloft like a token. A badge.

In Pattern Recognition, Gibson used a single protagonist method of narration. The reader experienced the whole story from Cayce Pollard's point of view. In Spook Country, he returns to the multiple viewpoint method he employed in all of his earlier novels.

To an extent, I found this a harder book to get into than Pattern Recognition, partly because of the multiple viewpoints. I was never quite sure whose "side" I was on until near the end. I miss the sf technology William Gibson used to bring to his books, but I welcome the persona he used for sf being brought to a modern novel.

quote:

Milgrim was feeling better. He’d asked Brown for a Rize, in the little park, and Brown, engrossed in whatever he was doing on the laptop, had unzipped a pocket on its bag and handed Milgrim an entire unopened four-pack. Now, behind Brown’s upright screen, Milgrim popped a second Rize from its bubble and washed it down with the tea-water. He’d brought his book in from the car, thinking Brown would probably work on the laptop. Now he opened it.

He found a favorite chapter: “An Elite Of Amoral Supermen”.

“What’s that you keep reading?” asked Brown, unexpectedly, from the other side of the screen.

“’An elite of amoral supermen’,” Milgrim replied, surprised to hear his own voice repeat the chapter-title he’d just read.

“That’s what you all think,” said Brown, his attention elsewhere. “Liberals.”

In pre-publication interviews for Spook Country, Gibson has revealed more of his writing techniques than he has in the past. Most notable to me was his assertion that he starts the plot and characters and lets them roll, rather than plotting the book in detail first. He backs off if he spots himself forcing the action. This is not an uncommon technique among authors. Apparently, he had no idea what was in the plot-pivotal shipping container when he started the book. I guess we just have to be grateful that his subconscious writes a great story.

My initial judgement was that Spook Country is not as engaging as Pattern Recognition was. Fewer cool concepts and less exotic writing. But, like great music, Gibson's novels never seem to reveal their full richness at once, and my second reading proved more rewarding. But, importantly, it's a William Gibson novel, and there aren't enough of these in the world.

quote:

'Spook Country,' a novel by William Gibson
Technology and consumerism mingle and turn monstrous as a young journalist pursues an elusive lead for a story.
By Ed Park
August 5, 2007

Spook Country

A Novel

William Gibson

G.P. Putnam's Sons:

374 pp., $25.95

CONSIDER this frank greeting in William Gibson's "Spook Country": "I've just checked the number of your Google hits, and read your Wikipedia entry." This is what translates as fame today: a foothold in the ether, an identity composed by a faceless committee of unknown size. Gibson famously coined the term "cyberspace" in his reality-crashing, paradigm-shifting 1984 debut, "Neuromancer," and his conception of its "consensual hallucination" rings truer now, more than two decades later, as we pursue terminally framed existences teeming with hyperlinks and blogs, worlds of Warcraft and second lives.

The Googlee in question is Hollis Henry, singer in a defunct 1990s cult band, the Curfew. She's now a journalist working on a story for a shadowy magazine, Node, that hasn't published an issue yet. (It's variously and hilariously described as a would-be Wired, generating sub-rosa buzz by its very anti-buzz.) Cults, shadows, secrets: in other words, Gibson country.

Hollis is a character in the mold of Cayce Pollard, the logo-allergic "coolhunter" of Gibson's 2003 novel "Pattern Recognition." Both of these appealing heroines -- curious, charismatic and essentially chaste -- share DNA with Oedipa Maas in Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49," all of them women on the verge of nerve-wracking conspiracies in which, Gibson writes, "possession of information amounts to involvement."

The ostensible subject of an article that Hollis is writing is Alberto Corrales, a holographic artist who painstakingly constructs virtual-reality celebrity death scenes at their actual locations. Hollis' research takes her into unexpected places, and suddenly she finds herself plowing the dark in search of a nebulous shipping container. Corrales explains to Hollis how his project suggests that "the world we walk around in would be channels" if everyone had their own VR helmets, tuning in only to what they wanted to see. ("We're all doing VR, every time we look at a screen," he says -- Gibson has axioms to burn.)

The narrative of "Spook Country" overlays two other frequencies -- two other protagonists -- and the connections among all three are initially unclear. Milgrim is a code cracker and addict who is dependent on Brown, a violent man who might be with the CIA; their quarry, Tito, is Cuban-Chinese ("indeterminately ethnic") and a preternaturally limber young man whose family has roots in counterfeiting and intelligence: His actions are guided by the spirits of Santería. Needless to say, everyone's questing for the enigmatic shipping container, wherever it might be.

"Spook Country" is an oblique sequel to "Pattern Recognition," or, better yet, the book is its antic anagram, expanding themes and re-upping a few characters. Here again Gibson gives us a present (more precisely, early 2006 -- Tower Records lives!) in which the skies are the color of steel, no matter the city, and the outlines of a chaotic future can be discerned. Sentence for sentence, few authors equal Gibson's gift for the terse yet poetic description, the quotable simile -- people and products are nailed down with a beautiful precision approximating the platonic ideal of the catalog. An ex-bandmate now wears a " 'Bladerunner' soccer-mom look," a "Bluetoothed bouncer" patrols a bar and, when Gibson registers a "delirious surge of graffiti, a sort of street-fractal Hokusai wave," the phrasing is itself a delirious surge of pleasure-center prose.

Still, mystery abounds, myriad paranoias pulsating underneath the immaculate surfaces. Hollis sometimes visualizes a "Mongolian Death Worm" -- the "mascot" of her anxiety -- burrowing beneath the dunes of her consciousness, a nod to the amplified annelids of Frank Herbert's "Dune." Gibson continues to unofficially tout all things Apple, but in "Spook Country" this product placement has a twist: iPods are used to ferry deceptive data, and at one point Tito imagines what would happen if you could "crack its virginal white case like a nut, and then draw forth something utterly peculiar, utterly dire, and somehow terrible in its contemporaneity." Even the sleekest products can host demons, crackling with as much potential malice as the anonymous-looking container at the heart of this story.

Hollis learns that Node magazine is a project of Hubertus Bigend, the zeitgeist-infiltrating force behind Blue Ant, a Belgian-based advertising enterprise that calls itself the "first viral agency." "He doesn't want you to have heard of him," one of Bigend's minions tells Hollis. He operates on the principle that secrets "are the very root of cool." The irony is that readers of "Pattern Recognition" have already heard of him, and there's something deliciously sinister in the fact that the antihero forms the most obvious link between Gibson's two most recent novels. Spoiler alert: In "Pattern Recognition," Bigend funded Cayce's search for the source of haunting film fragments appearing on the Web; here we learn that Bigend successfully harnessed that sublime technology (whose online scholars represented "the first true freemasonry of the 21st century") to sell shoes.

Googling "Hubertus Bigend" in real life leads you to a discussion board where Gibsonites muse, a bit futilely, on the significance of his somewhat anatomical name. This reviewer wonders whether his odd moniker is an allusion, or at least a fortuitous parallel, to a minor character in another labyrinthine book concerned with art, imitation and money by another William G. -- William Gaddis, in his novel "The Recognitions" (1955). When Bigend explains his philosophy to Hollis by telling her, "Everything is potential," she responds: "Everything is potential [bull]." In Gaddis' book, the same is true as the odious Recktall Brown collaborates with an art critic dealing in expensive forgeries. For all of Gibson's lavish products, he's given his main moneyman a name that evokes the vulgar. Anything that can be sold instantly loses its cachet, a point brought home again when Bigend suggests to Hollis' ex-bandmate Inchmale that they sell a Curfew song for a Chinese car commercial.

Any reader of Gibson understands that to follow the flow of, say, his novel "Neuromancer," with its vigorous, carpet-pulling tempos, you have to read the landscape for clues. The titular character (or cipher) speaks of the "patterns sometimes you imagined you could detect in the dance of the street. Those patterns are real." Does this mean that, with Gaddis in mind, the title of Gibson's "Pattern Recognition" is really a homage to "The Recognitions"? The title -- the concept of that novel -- drives the reader to enter into a state of apophenia, which is defined by Cayce's father, Win, as "the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things," a gift Cayce also has. Should we pay special attention, then, to the fact that a late-arriving adventurer in "Spook Country" is described as resembling William S. Burroughs -- as is Win (who'd gone missing after Sept. 11) in "Pattern Recognition"?

More apophenia: In "Spook Country," we learn that Inchmale has retired to Buenos Aires. This year, New Directions published a 45th-anniversary edition of Jorge Luis Borges' "Labyrinths" with an introduction by Gibson, in which he calls the Buenos Aires native's book a "singular" milestone in his reading life. It's a collection in which books are the seeds for nightmares and vice versa, and every passage is lined with mirrors. (Perhaps the most potent Web prophecy before "Neuromancer" is Borges' 1949 story "The Aleph.") Despite its thriller trappings, "Spook Country" is a puzzle palace of bewitching proportions and stubborn echoes. Hollis' band was the Curfew, which means it's time for you to come inside. •