From Publishers Weekly
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From Booklist
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
In the decades following his breakout novel, Gibson has continued to expand the essential imagery of literature and to question the nature of perception. His recent books, Pattern Recognition (2003) and its follow-up, Spook Country (2007), share contemporary settings and draw metaphors from current technology and pop culture. The world as we know it and fail to see it is stranger, it seems, than any possible future.
Spook Country is a mystery, both in story and in narrative construction. Gibson relies on slow revelation to maintain the reader’s interest. He is not building worlds here, but rather showing glimpses of his characters in mundane situations. Chapters alternate between sets of characters, accumulating to reveal the structure of the book. The slow revelation encourages the reader to expect a stunning resolution, and in this way functions as a sort of red herring when the payoff turns out to be a letdown. But this anticlimax might well be its own sort of innovation.
Readers have learned to expect resolution, often at the expense of the narrative itself. We read for climax, rather than for experience. Spook Country, perhaps unintentionally, reminds us that the present is the only relevant factor. If we cannot find purpose in the moment, we won’t find it at the end of the tale.
In Spook Country, rockstar-turned journalist, Hollis Henry, is hired by Node magazine, a “European Wired”, to write a feature on locative artist Bobby Chombo. Locative art, a marriage of virtual reality and GPS technology wherein specific locations are peopled with computer-generated imagery experienced with the aid of a visor, is billed as the next big thing. Like a revved up tourist narrative piped over headphones, the technology creates a spectral world adjacent to our own that can bring to life any historical event-place Martin Luther King behind the podium; reenact the Gettysburg Address-but in the pop-obsessed world of Spook Country recreates the night that River Phoenix died outside the Viper Club. Locative art, as it turns out, is not even central to this novel. It’s another scattered path.
As Hollis tracks down the reclusive locative artist, she wonders who is behind the deeply funded Node. Hollis runs a Wikipedia check on its publisher, Hubertus Bigend-“correctly pronounced ‘bay-jend’”-whom dedicated Gibsonites will recognise as the viral advertising tycoon from Pattern Recognition. The fictional entry contained in Spook Country is now referenced in the actual Wikipedia entry for the novel. In another quirky crossover between fiction and public record, Node magazine has left the page. It is now an electronic magazine (www.nodemagazine.com) established by the author’s fans to document all things related to Gibson and Spook Country.
But Hollis, Node, and locative art are just one strand of the convoluted narrative. Gibson adds to the mix the story of Milgrim, a strung-out translator of Cyrillic text and prisoner to a covert agent named Brown. Also present in an independent narrative is Tito, a spy and devotee to a mystical martial art discipline.
Gibson excels at cataloguing the obsessive quirks of his characters, but good characters are more than a collection of quirks and allusions to past trauma. Overall, the characters in Spook Country are thin, like ghosts or holograms viewed through locative visors.
Readers familiar with Gibson’s work will recognise the pattern: disparate narratives of seemingly unrelated characters that collide for a purpose. Throughout, the reader identifies most with Hollis Henry and her fumbling search for information. She senses that she is being manipulated, led along, that pieces of the mystery will be revealed only when the conjurer wills it. Often, Gibson’s narrative takes on the same heavy-handedness. It’s a fine ride but one to which the reader must actively surrender. Resist the lure and the book falls flat. Early in Hollis’s adventure, she is introduced to the science of steganography, the concealment of information that only the intended audience knows is there. A reader unfamiliar with Gibson’s work might well think of Spook Country as steganographic fiction: something substantial is here, we suspect-hidden, yet indubitable.
Mark Dunn (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
"Despite a full complement of thieves, pushers and pirates, Spook Country is less a conventional thriller than a devastatingly precise reflection of the American zeitgeist, and it bears comparison to the best work of Don DeLillo. Although he is a very different sort of writer, Gibson, like DeLillo, writes fiction that is powerfully attuned to the currents of dread, dismay and baffled fury that permeate our culture. Spook Country -- which is a beautifully multi-leveled title -- takes an unflinching look at that culture. With a clear eye and a minimum of editorial comment, Gibson shows us a country that has drifted dangerously from its governing principles, evoking a kind of ironic nostalgia for a time when, as one character puts it, "grown-ups still ran things." In Spook Country, Gibson takes another large step forward and reaffirms his position as one of the most astute and entertaining commentators on our astonishing, chaotic present." -- The Washington Post's Book World
"Gibson is in no rush to reveal motives or even what it is, exactly, that everyone is after. This allows the reader to sit back and enjoy the ride ... Being a William Gibson book, Spook Country will undoubtedly be considered a science fiction novel, but it's actually a pure page-turner that can be enjoyed by anyone, sci-fi fan or not." -- Quill and Quire
"What makes any thriller more than pulp fiction isn't the paranoia or the plotting, but the elegance of the writing. Gibson's prose is slippery, and the "reality" of his modern world is made up of images that escape our attempts to assign them meaning even as we look at them. He details locations with such precision that you could draw them from memory, and captures precisely the panicky anxiety of crowds in the post-9/11 era. But he doesn't give us meaning. We have to work to find it, and it's worth the hunt." -- NOW Magazine
Book Description
Hollis Henry is a journalist on investigative assignment for a magazine called Node, which doesn’t exist yet. Bobby Chombo apparently does exist, as a producer. But in his day job, Bobby is a troubleshooter for military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. Hollis Henry has been told to find him.
About the Author
Gene Wolfe once said that being an only child whose parents are dead is like being the sole survivor of drowned Atlantis. There was a whole civilization there, an entire continent, but it's gone. And you alone remember. That's my story too, my father having died when I was six, my mother when I was eighteen. Brian Aldiss believes that if you look at the life of any novelist, you'll find an early traumatic break, and mine seems no exception.
I was born on the coast of South Carolina, where my parents liked to vacation when there was almost nothing there at all. My father was in some sort of middle management position in a large and growing construction company. They'd built some of the Oak Ridge atomic facilities, and paranoiac legends of "security" at Oak Ridge were part of our family culture. There was a cigar-box full of strange-looking ID badges he'd worn there. But he'd done well at Oak Ridge, evidently, and so had the company he worked for, and in the postwar South they were busy building entire red brick Levittown-style suburbs. We moved a lot, following these projects, and he was frequently away, scouting for new ones.
It was a world of early television, a new Oldsmobile with crazy rocket-ship styling, toys with science fiction themes. Then my father went off on one more business trip. He never came back. He choked on something in a restaurant, the Heimlich maneuver hadn't been discovered yet, and everything changed.
My mother took me back to the small town in southwestern Virginia where both she and my father were from, a place where modernity had arrived to some extent but was deeply distrusted. The trauma of my father's death aside, I'm convinced that it was this experience of feeling abruptly exiled, to what seemed like the past, that began my relationship with science fiction.
I eventually became exactly the sort of introverted, hyper-bookish boy you'll find in the biographies of most American science fiction writers, obsessively filling shelves with paperbacks and digest-sized magazines, dreaming of one day becoming a writer myself.
At age fifteen, my chronically anxious and depressive mother having demonstrated an uncharacteristic burst of common sense in what today we call parenting, I was shipped off to a private boys' school in Arizona. There, extracted grub-like and blinking from my bedroom and those bulging plywood shelves, I began the forced invention of a less Lovecraftian persona - based in large part on a chance literary discovery a year or so before.
I had stumbled, in my ceaseless quest for more and/or better science fiction, on a writer name Burroughs -- not Edgar Rice but William S., and with him had come his colleagues Kerouac and Ginsberg. I had read this stuff, or tried to, with no idea at all of what it might mean, and felt compelled - compelled to what, I didn't know. The effect, over the next few years, was to make me, at least in terms of my Virginia home, Patient Zero of what would later be called the counterculture. At the time, I had no way of knowing that millions of other Boomer babes, changelings all, were undergoing the same metamorphosis.
In Arizona, science fiction was put aside with other childish things, as I set about negotiating puberty and trying on alternate personae with all the urgency and clumsiness that come with that, and was actually getting somewhere, I think, when my mother died with stunning suddenness. Dropped literally dead: the descent of an Other Shoe I'd been anticipating since age six.
Thereafter, probably needless to say, things didn't seem to go very well for quite a while. I left my school without graduating, joined up with rest of the Children's Crusade of the day, and shortly found my self in Canada, a country I knew almost nothing about. I concentrated on evading the draft and staying alive, while trying to make sure I looked like I was at least enjoying the Summer of Love. I did literally evade the draft, as they never bothered drafting me, and have lived here in Canada, more or less, ever since.
Having ridden out the crest of the Sixties in Toronto, aside from a brief, riot-torn spell in the District of Columbia, I met a girl from Vancouver, went off to Europe with her (concentrating on countries with fascist regimes and highly favorable rates of exchange) got married, and moved to British Columbia, where I watched the hot fat of the Sixties congeal as I earned a desultory bachelor's degree in English at UBC.
In 1977, facing first-time parenthood and an absolute lack of enthusiasm for anything like "career," I found myself dusting off my twelve-year-old's interest in science fiction. Simultaneously, weird noises were being heard from New York and London. I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign. And I began, then, to write.
And have been, ever since.
Google me and you can learn that I do it all on a manual typewriter, something that hasn't been true since 1985, but which makes such an easy hook for a lazy journalist that I expect to be reading it for the rest of my life. I only used a typewriter because that was what everyone used in 1977, and it was manual because that was what I happened to have been able to get, for free. I did avoid the Internet, but only until the advent of the Web turned it into such a magnificent opportunity to waste time that I could no longer resist. Today I probably spend as much time there as I do anywhere, although the really peculiar thing about me, demographically, is that I probably watch less than twelve hours of television in a given year, and have watched that little since age fifteen. (An individual who watches no television is still a scarcer beast than one who doesn't have an email address.) I have no idea how that happened. It wasn't a decision.
I do have an email address, yes, but, no, I won't give it to you. I am one and you are many, and even if you are, say, twenty-seven in grand global total, that's still too many. Because I need to have a life and waste time and write.
I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.
6 Nov 2002 --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.
