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Virtually William Gibson
Vancouver author's new novel, Spook Country, confirms his role as 'noir master of the web'
Robert Wiersema, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Sunday, September 09, 2007
The Book

Spook Country

By William Gibson

Despite common belief and surface appearance, the success of the best speculative fiction (fantasy or science fiction) typically owes far less to the author's range of imagination than it does to their skill at re-imagining the world around them.

The best example of this remains, as it has for more than a quarter century, Vancouver writer William Gibson. While his early works, including the stories in Burning Chrome and his ground-breaking debut novel Neuromancer, are often referred to (and rightly so) as visionary, it was vision of an extrapolative kind, rather than purely imaginative.

Needless to say, it took a tremendous leap in 1981 to imagine a virtual world, a limitless electronic network into which people would submerge themselves for hours at a time, but Gibson's notion of cyberspace (he coined the term more than a decade before the creation of the World Wide Web) was rooted in the academic and military communication networks which were, at that point, beginning to expand.

Gibson's extrapolative vision has come increasingly to the fore in his later fiction. His recently released new novel, Spook Country, is no exception, creating a brilliantly imagined, largely unfamiliar world out of the very dross and dung of our contemporary culture.

Set in early 2006, Spook Country follows three distinct storylines which gradually coalesce to a shared climax in the streets and on the docks of the South Carolina writer's adopted home city. It's a construction which Gibson has used to good effect in his previous novels, and it's a perfect approach for Spook Country.

Hollis Henry, formerly a member of cult-favourite band The Curfew, is attempting to build a second career as a journalist.

She's been commissioned by Node magazine ("A European version of Wired, it seemed, though of course they never put it that way") to write an in-depth piece about "locative art," a new, beta-stage form which uses virtual reality and GPS technology to create ghostly installations (including a re-enactment of River Phoenix' death outside LA's Viper Room).

Her mysterious employer, Hubertus Bigend (founder of the below-the-radar consulting firm Big Ant, and a character in Gibson's previous novel Pattern Recognition), clearly has ulterior motives: his request of Hollis to investigate Los Angeles facilitator Bobby Chombo has less to do with his work with locative art than with a phantom shipping container Chombo is tracking as it wends its way around the world.

In New York City, Tito is a low-level criminal, charged with passing iPods to an aging Russian in Washington Square Park.

Twenty-two year-old Tito, a Cuban emigree, is a worshipper of Santeria, trained in a high-level martial art, and a member, by birth, of a small (and, as becomes clear, very effective) criminal family. He has no idea of the value or the origin of the iPods he passes off.

Spook Country's third focal character is Milgrim, a drug-addicted translator. Held captive and fed drugs by the mysterious Brown (an intelligence officer, a "spook," though his allegiances and motivation are unclear), Milgrim is tasked with monitoring and translating the text messages of Tito and his family; Brown is charged with recovering one of the mysterious iPods, and Milgrim is involved as his largely unwilling partner.

The three storylines weave and converge, drawn together eventually by the arrival of the mysterious shipping container at the port of Vancouver.

Spook Country is a compulsively readable thriller, with a terse, pared narrative voice and a heedless momentum. The short chapters, alternating glimpses of the three characters and their storylines, lend themselves well to an up-all-night read. On the surface, Spook Country is part detective-story, part-conspiracy theory thriller, and it more than satisfies on those levels (though the eventual revelation of just what the shipping container holds does rob the sea-borne macguffin of much of its power). It is one of Gibson's most accessible works, and can easily be enjoyed by even those readers who would normally balk at science fiction.

Looking more closely at the novel, however, reveals an astonishing depth. Like much of Gibson's post 9/11 work, Spook Country is a novel of death and loss, of questions of identity and value in a digital age. Ranging as it does across classes and races, from the splendour of LA hotel suites and False Creek apartments to one-room New York walk-ups and grotty Korean laundries, the novel is a vivid depiction of a world haunted.

The "spook country" of the title is not simply a world of intelligence agents and covert data, but a world steeped, fundamentally, in loss, populated with the ghosts of its recent history.

What is both inspiring and terrifying is that the world Gibson depicts, on the surface foreign and alien, is our own. There are moments in the reading of Spook Country in which the reader is forcibly reminded that this is not an alternate reality: this is the world we inhabit, largely unknowingly, projected back to us through the lens of one of our great creative visionaries.

It is a tremendous achievement to create a world utterly new, utterly captivating; it is even more impressive to reflect our own reality back to us in a way which requires a re-setting of our perspectives, a re-evaluation of our own surroundings, our own perceptions. That Gibson is able to achieve this with such seeming ease is testament to his skills as a writer, and key to his role as avatar of our digital age.

Author Robert J. Wiersema lives in Victoria. His most recent work is Before I Wake.

quote:

The "spook country" of the title is not simply a world of intelligence agents and covert data, but a world steeped, fundamentally, in loss, populated with the ghosts of its recent history

That line means Wiersema gets it.