Is It Any Good?

Spook Country: All's well, that ends in cyberspace

29 Oct 2007

W.H. Chong writes:

Spook Country by William Gibson
Viking, Sci-fi, pbk, $32.95

Readers under a certain age, say fifty-five (Gibson is 59), will know of the "father of cyberpunk", author of Neuromancer et al, who has alternatively been called prophetic and a poseur (though the Yanks prefer "poser") -- his remarkable sci-fi and nominally sci-fi books have been praised, derided, imitated and parodied.

Gibson had a fidgety patch in the 90s, producing the goodish if disappointing trilogy of Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties, and a screenplay which became the depressingly prosaic Johnny Mnemonic, starring celebrated Noh actor Keanu Reeves.

His previous book, however, the intriguingly named Pattern Recognitions, slid him right back onto the bleeding edge of brink-of-the-future fiction. Spook Country, his latest, delivers us into the vertiginous Gibsonesque zone of global networking, GPS determination and art that employs geohacking. It displays a new, light touch, though nicely undercut by the peripheral pings emitted by the neocon production that is Iraq.

Set in the US and Canada, the book is highly populated: Hollis Henry, an ex-alt rocker gal turned reporter; her ex-bandmate with the wonderful name of Inchmale; a neurotic hacker; a wealthy adman (name of Bigend); an old, covert ex-spook; a Cuban family which acts like a Mafia subcontractor; an amphetamine junkie cum Russian translator and a kinda CIA operative aiming to eliminate "assets". The MacGuffin of the plot is a turquoise blue shipping container that blips into and out of the electronic net of sea lanes.

As usual, the story takes a leisurely approach through brief chapters on alternating characters. You can feel the velocity build as the storylines converge implacably. And in a story with some of the effects of a Shakespearean comedy, the characters have distinctive souls (or weirdnesses). I found myself wanting to hang in there with them; caring, even. (I was a bit chuffed to note that in his review, SF encyclopedist John Clute uses some of the same terms as I have here, but he's less impressed and rather regrets that "Spook Country is a comedy". His penetrating and baroque reading is found at SciFi.com. Here is a taste of the Clute: "SF is no longer about the future as such, because 'we have no future' that we can do thought experiments about, only futures, which bleed all over the page, soaking the present. [Cognitive estrangement is us.]")

There's not much point in making a precis of the convoluted plot -- it's very satisfactory -- the pleasure Gibson affords us is in his prose style and the sidelong glances at the world today as it shivers on the edge of tomorrow. There's this too -- the lustre of melancholy that sometimes (and comically) gleams into view: as a character, Odile, "gnomically" intones in French accents, "Cee-bare-space, it is everting."

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