It’s fine, a grabby book, although I may be going easy on it because I still remember being floored by the visionary power chords of Neuromancer and Burning Chrome and don’t want to revise my opinion of the guy who wrote them. From those books, William Gibson has moved on (from cyberpunk, the sci-fi genre he largely pioneered) and back (in time, from the polyglot future to, more or less, the present) to write tight, atmospheric post-9/11 thrillers, first Pattern Recognition (2003) and now Spook Country. But creating a world where computer hackers don’t have cord jacks implanted in their heads, Gibson finds it a little harder to keep the visions intense.
Spook Country follows the not-unfamiliar Gibson structure: disparate characters are, in alternating chapters, slowly pulled toward a decisive event as the mood lighting darkens and the apocalyptic paranoia clots around them. Hollis Henry, a cultish rock singer turned journalist, is on assignment for a shadowy magazine that may not exist. Tito, part of a family of Cuban-Chinese immigrants who middle-man information crimes, delivers iPods full of data to an old spook. Milgrim, a junkie who can read the pidgin Russian that Tito’s family texts in, is pressed into indentured servitude by Brown, who acts like a CIA agent but may not be. And what draws them, along their separate vectors, inexorably together? A mysterious nautical shipping container, its contents somehow connected to the war in Iraq, that blinks in and out of GPS tracking and never quite comes to port.
If I told you what was in the container (and I will if you like, [email protected]), you’d be disappointed; it hardly seems worth the plot mechanics. It’s not the futuristic, cutting-edge, aha! contraband you’re hoping for from the guy who coined the term cyberspace. But screw the plot. It hardly matters. Same with the characters, who, while carefully drawn, mostly feel two-and-a-half dimensional. Gibson has written a high-tech thriller in which moods and ideas substitute for action—a hundred pages in, there will be a moment at which you realize that you’re engaged by a book in which the characters haven’t done much but take meetings. No, the book is Gibson’s way of CAT-scanning modern culture, looking for the deeper structures that manipulate information for ends we’re unaware of.
From Pattern Recognition, you’ll recognize Blue Ant, nominally an ad agency but more like an intelligence network or secret society, as if there’s any real difference anymore (“Huburtus ... says he wishes we could operate as black hole, an absence ...”). From most of his work you’ll recognize elusive avant-garde cultural productions (“locative art,” fantastic visual creations created from GPS coordinates and wi-fi); outlaw social units; a techno-ambiguity (he finds sinister shadings in the seemingly benign technology of GPS); a touch of the otherworldly (Tito is guided by Santeria spirits); and the sharp ideas he scatters everywhere, as when Blue Ant founder Huburtus Bigend tells Hollis, “secrets are the very root of cool,” seven words that link espionage, information-control, media and consumerism into spook country, “the place where we all have landed, few by choice,” as the jacket copy puts it. If this isn’t a bunker-buster like Gibson’s first books, Spook Country is high-level entertainment and might not force me to rethink my opinion of Gibson as much as I’d thought.
Spook Country
William Gibson
*** 1/2
Putnam, $25.95