Open onto a room in L.A.'s Mondrian Hotel; the French art curator's white lego robot bumps about the legs of an Aegean-blue table while Hollis Henry, the female lead-singer of a now defunct indie rock band, receives a 3 am call from her editor at Node, a yet unknown British version of Wired Magazine. Did I happen to mention the empty can of Asahi Draft on the bedside table and the intricate designs of an oriental carpet projected in light across wood floor? Yes - you've unmistakably found yourself in the middle of the latest William Gibson novel, Spook Country.
Ostensibly hired to write an article about locative art (think virtual-reality placed via GPS-tagging into the real world) Hollis Henry learns that Node is something of an ethereal entity owned by Blue Ant, a large Belgian viral-marketing firm, at whose helm is Hubertus Bigend, first introduced in Spook Country's predeccesor, Pattern Recognition (2003). Bigend's ("more correctly pronounced 'bay-jend', sort of, but seldom is") underlying designs involve tracking the position of a mysterious shipping container, the contents of which remain unknown. And he's not the only one interested in its whereabouts.
Ostensibly hired to write an article about locative art (think virtual-reality placed via GPS-tagging into the real world) Hollis Henry learns that Node is something of an ethereal entity owned by Blue Ant, a large Belgian viral-marketing firm, at whose helm is Hubertus Bigend, first introduced in Spook Country's predeccesor, Pattern Recognition (2003). Bigend's ("more correctly pronounced 'bay-jend', sort of, but seldom is") underlying designs involve tracking the position of a mysterious shipping container, the contents of which remain unknown. And he's not the only one interested in its whereabouts.
Enter the spooks. Brown, a thuggish, square-jawed, governmental operative with nebulous affiliations, has taken an Ativan addict by the name of Milgrim prisoner for his unique translating abilities. Brown is tracking an old man, possibly ex-CIA, who is, like Bigend, interested in the mysterious shipping container's whereabouts. The old man is being aided by a Chinese-Cuban spy family who communicate with each other and the old man using Volapuk, an encoding of Cyrillic messages with Latin characters in which Milgrim is proficient. At the center of the spy family's operations with the old man is Tito, who periodically passes the old man iPods encoded with information pinpointing the container's whereabouts.
Tito acts according to his family's protocol, a complex system of rules and methods for any situation in which he might find himself. He is also a practitioner of a particular form of African-Cuban mysticism and able to enlist the aid of a pantheon of elemental spirit beings, the orishas, who not only guide him in his actions but intervene on his behalf in a manner which recalls Gibson's insinuation of Voodoo into the cyberspace realm of Count Zero (1986).
Tito acts according to his family's protocol, a complex system of rules and methods for any situation in which he might find himself. He is also a practitioner of a particular form of African-Cuban mysticism and able to enlist the aid of a pantheon of elemental spirit beings, the orishas, who not only guide him in his actions but intervene on his behalf in a manner which recalls Gibson's insinuation of Voodoo into the cyberspace realm of Count Zero (1986).
Gibson devotees will find the multilayered plot comfortably familiar. As the story unfolds, plotlines in L.A., New York, and Washington D.C. all converge in Vancouver, William Gibson's home since the 1970's and whose denizens, Milgrim notes, appear to have a very low "fuckedness" quotient:
"Cities, in Milgrim's experience, had a way of revealing themselves in the faces of their inhabitants, and particularly on their way to work in the morning. There was a sort of basic fuckedness index to be read, then, in the faces that hadn't yet encountered the reality of whatever they were on their way to do. By this standard, Milgrim thought, scanning faces and body language as Brown drove, this place had an oddly low fuckedness index."
"Cities, in Milgrim's experience, had a way of revealing themselves in the faces of their inhabitants, and particularly on their way to work in the morning. There was a sort of basic fuckedness index to be read, then, in the faces that hadn't yet encountered the reality of whatever they were on their way to do. By this standard, Milgrim thought, scanning faces and body language as Brown drove, this place had an oddly low fuckedness index."
Over time the real-world has had a chance to catch up with William Gibson's early visions of cyberspace and these days we unsurprisedly find Gibson writing less about hackers jacking-in to virtual worlds and more about the emergent cultural impact of the information age, phenomena that are riveting to explore through the eyes of a man who has for decades stood on the prow of technology's forward motion.
Spook Country's ending along with its unveiling of the mysterious container is, I'll admit, a bit of a disappointment - more than a whimper, but certainly less than a bang. I recall however having the same response to the ending of Pattern Recognition, and it wouldn't forestall me recommending either of these novels to friends. Gibson's books fascinate me on a sentence to sentence level, his signature style with motif, imagery, and wordcraft persistently holding my attention. I know what to expect upon cracking a William Gibson novel, and in Spook Country, the author does not fail me.
Spook Country's ending along with its unveiling of the mysterious container is, I'll admit, a bit of a disappointment - more than a whimper, but certainly less than a bang. I recall however having the same response to the ending of Pattern Recognition, and it wouldn't forestall me recommending either of these novels to friends. Gibson's books fascinate me on a sentence to sentence level, his signature style with motif, imagery, and wordcraft persistently holding my attention. I know what to expect upon cracking a William Gibson novel, and in Spook Country, the author does not fail me.
