Spook Country (Hardcover)

William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) not only popularised cyberpunk, its first line-“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel”-dislodged the natural world as foundational imagery and replaced it with a technological referent. This dislocation of metaphor is characteristic of cyberpunk. When digital technology was new, the wires and components of a motherboard were said to resemble the streets and buildings in a city, or the streams and hills of the wild. After cyberpunk, however, the motherboard became the familiar template used to construct the natural, and rivers flow like electrons through a circuitry of forests. Cyberpunk reminds us that imagery, and the ideas of reality it contains, are constructs, whether computer-generated, part of a literary inheritance, or based on the natural, ‘objective’ world.
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)

Starred Review. Set in the same high-tech present day as Pattern Recognition, Gibson's fine ninth novel offers startling insights into our paranoid and often fragmented, postmodern world. When a mysterious, not yet actual magazine, Node, hires former indie rocker–turned–journalist Hollis Henry to do a story on a new art form that exists only in virtual reality, Hollis finds herself investigating something considerably more dangerous. An operative named Brown, who may or may not work for the U.S. government, is tracking a young, Russian-speaking Cuban-Chinese criminal named Tito. Brown's goal is to follow Tito to yet another operative known only as the old man. Meanwhile, a mysterious cargo container with CIA connections repeatedly appears and disappears on the worldwide Global Positioning network, never quite coming to port. At the heart of the dark goings-on is Bobby Chombo, a talented but unbalanced specialist in Global Positioning software who refuses to sleep in the same spot two nights running. Compelling characters and crisp action sequences, plus the author's trademark metaphoric language, help make this one of Gibson's best. 8-city author tour. (Aug.)
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