[via oddmanrush]
The Village Voice has an interesting review of Spook Country which concentrates on the similarities and diffrences with William Gibson's previous novel Pattern Recognition, especially with regard to Hubertus Bigend and the main female protagonists in the two novels Cayce and Hollis.
The Anxiety Maze
Magic capitalism and crazy Russian typewriters in William Gibson's new Spook Country
by Nathan Lee
July 31st, 2007 1:38 PM
"Magic capitalism" invokes the literary style of "magic realism", which was influenced by the pioneering Jorge Luis Borges, an author who William Gibson admires, and who has even written a forward to an edition of the Labyrinth anthology.
There are Santeria deities as well as cyberspace in Spook Country
N.B. may contain plot and character teaser / "spoiler" information, depending on how many reviews you have read so far. If you are in the process of reading a copy of Spook Country you will not be reading this review, or anything else, until you have turned the last page !
It begins with a woman far from home, rising from a strange bed in an immaculate space. Detached but alert, she reflects on her surroundings. Strong winds send palm trees thrashing on the street below, "like dancers miming the final throes of some sci-fi plague." The high-end refrigerator in the empty kitchen is so new, she notes, the interior "smells only of cold and long-chain monomers." Thinking about her job here, she's all alone with her thoughts. Unless you count the robots.This is a composite description of the opening chapter of two different novels by William Gibson. In Pattern Recognition, his 2003 bestseller, a "cool hunter" named Cayce Pollard has arrived in London to consult on the logo of a multinational sneaker company. In Spook Country, Gibson's latest, a woman named Hollis Henry has just arrived in Los Angeles on assignment for a magazine called Node to investigate "locative art," an underground movement of tech-savvy artists into the mapping, annotation, and holographic reshaping of virtual space.
Surely ot is the other way around ? GPS navigation and wireless data links in "Locative Art" or "Augmented Reality" is about annotating and reshaping one's perceptions of real physical locations with a virtual cyberspace overlay, rather than the "reshaping of virtual space".
Cayce and Hollis are in similar circumstances for the exact same reason. Spook Country is a sequel of sorts to Pattern Recognition, an extension of its territory and themes. Masterminding the narrative of both is the sinister and seductive Hubertus Bigend, founder of the avant-garde advertising firm Blue Ant. In Pattern Recognition, he's described as "a nominal Belgian who looks like Tom Cruise on a diet of virgin's blood and truffled chocolates." His Wikipedia entry in Spook Country describes him as the child of a wealthy industrialist and a sculptress with links to the Situationist International.
Will there ever be a real Wikipedia entry on Hubertus Bigend, which quotes the fictional one in Spook Country, or will that level of recursion confuse the Wikipedia editorial swarm, and distract them into an infinite Ko stalemate ?
Bigend is Gibson's image of hyper-capitalist consciousness evolved to such sophistication that it becomes indistinguishable from art, philosophy, even magic. Advertising for Bigend isn't a means to make money, but a method for tapping into the ancient reptile mind at the base of consciousness and culture. In Pattern Recognition, he engages Cayce to locate the author of "the footage," a sequence of enigmatic film clips randomly posted on the Internet that spawn a global cult of enthusiasts and explicators. When Spook Country reveals the utterly banal use that Bigend makes of this knowledge, the effect is chilling. More disturbing is the sense that he may be the only character in these stories who's discovered a way to embrace and diffuse the accelerated terrors and inchoate anxieties of the post-9/11 world.
Is Hubertus Bigend not simply on his way to becoming a sort of ultra rich Joseph Virek from Count Zero ?
- "Many things, Marly, are perpetrated in my name. Aspects of my wealth have become autonomous, by degrees; at times they even war with one another. Rebellion in the fiscal extremities."
Where the thriller mechanics of Pattern Recognition were motored by the energies of two super-savvy media adepts, Bigend and Cayce, the heroes of Spook Country are more evidently puppets.
Surely the characters in Pattern Recognition were also being heavily manipulated ?
Hollis is assigned to the locative-art beat not for her journalistic chops, but because her celebrity as the former lead singer of the indie-rock band Curfew is the precise tool needed to pry access to the goal: the location of a mysterious shipping container known to Bobby Chombo, genius of the locative set (and Curfew fan).Spook Country triangulates the Hollis/Bigend narrative with two other plot lines, each told from the point of view of someone with a limited understanding of their role in some obviously larger and certainly dangerous dynamic.
Limited information is what you get in real life - all seeing, all knowing truly free markets, in the economic sense , are fiction or are very trivial.
Milgrim is a junkie fluent in Volapuk, the pseudo-Cyrillic text invented by Russians grappling with the Roman keyboards of their first computers. He has been kidnapped by Brown, a man with a large supply of pharmaceuticals and a need to eavesdrop on Volapuk text messages. These are being sent amongst members of an elite Cuban-Chinese spy family with ties to the CIA and the KGB, and have direct bearing on Tito, our guide to this wildest of the Spook Country plots, as he engages in such cloak-and-dagger routines as the slipping of a data-encrypted iPod to an operative in the shoe department of Prada.None of which begins to describe the narrative complexity of Spook Country, with its fugue-like advancement of these melodies toward an oddly harmonic resolution at a port in Vancouver.
My reading of Spook Country did detect some recurring phrases and images (e.g. gray - green colours) , which could well be thought of as a musical fugue.
Not that it matters. Compelling for their own sake, the techno-thriller mechanics of these recent Gibson novels are largely beside the point. Gibson doesn't engineer his labyrinthine plots to disclose the meaning at their core: The maze is the message.Why Hollis is at the Standard is ultimately less interesting than how she feels in being there. A thousand novelists could arrange for the portentous arrival of Bigend in the lobby, but only Gibson could describe how "the small dry sound of an envelope being slid under the door" of Hollis's room, "familiar from her life on tour, suddenly triggered, as it always had, the atavistic mammalian fear of nest invasion."
Pattern Recognition was partly concerned with specifying the ambient sense of invasiveness in all aspects of life after the collapse of the towers. Taking that anxiety as given, Spook Country is the more reflective, less unnerving of the two novels. Concentrating on a single protagonist focused the textural intensity of Gibson's prose; splitting his attention over three has diffused its hallucinatory voltage.
There was speculation and comment from critics and from William Gibson himself, about the single person viewpoint in Pattern Recognition. This reviewer seems to prefer that style to the 3 card trick juggling of the three viewpoints, but since the 3 groups effectively merged into 2 towards the end, dramatic tension did not really suffer at all.
Yet even at half-wattage, it illuminates our techno-psychic landscape like nothing else in contemporary letters.
Nathan Lee is giving Spook Country a positive review from a literati viewpoint, rather than a technological or cyberpunk one, or from the perspective of those people who inhabit "Spook Country".