Review by New York Times Review
IF recent history has revealed an appalling tolerance for prognosticates who are invariably, fatally wrong, it has also been unjust to the farsighted augurs who somehow always manage to get it right. When an author has correctly anticipated the extent to which people's identities would someday be defined by their presence on the Internet, foreseen how the medium would generate its own pantheon of heroes and villains with nicknames like Essjay and lonelygirl15, and even name-checked the Japanese Harajuku scene before it could be hijacked by Gwen Stefani, he tends to have certain labels attached to him, like an old beater priced to sell at a used car lot: prophet, visionary, futurist. But what if he just wants to be a writer? In his 2003 novel, "Pattern Recognition," William Gibson took a startling, and startlingly satisfying, step away from the technologically overwhelming fantasy worlds he had dreamed up in decades past - of steampunk and cyberpunk and all points in between - and began writing about a world we could recognize as our own, where technology is not the only quality that makes it overwhelming. Its inhabitants suffer allergic reactions to trendy couture, fetishize mechanical calculators designed by prisoners of Buchenwald and wonder if airplane flights might cause their bodies to travel faster than their souls. With the sepulchral shadow of 9/11 still obscuring their vision, they are unable to imagine what the future might look like for subsequent generations. "In that sense," one character mordantly observes, "we have no future." Four years later, "Spook Country," Gibson's first novel since "Pattern Recognition," moves farther from science-fiction speculation and immerses itself fully in modernist realism. More than a post-9/11 novel, it is arguably the first example of the post-post-9/11 novel, whose characters are tired of being pushed around by forces larger than they are - bureaucracy, history and, always, technology - and are at long last ready to start pushing back. Structurally, "Spook Country" rotates among the perspectives of three characters. The first is Hollis Henry, a member of a defunct rock band that enjoyed modest cult success. Now a writer for a magazine no one seems to have heard of, she's investigating a high-tech art subculture for an enigmatic employer whose interests in the movement may transcend objective journalism. The second is Tito, a Cuban-Chinese immigrant who's recruited into a series of espionage missions by an old man who Tito hopes can shed light on his father, who died under mysterious circumstances. Finally, there is Milgrim, an amphetamine addict and an expert of sorts in obscure details of communication and cryptography. He's in thrall to a government stooge named Brown, who forces Milgrim to accompany him on his own surreptitious spying assignments by threatening to cut off his drug supply, and whom Milgrim occasionally suspects might not really be a government agent at all, and might just be a jerk with a gun. (Only he doesn't use a word as nice as "jerk.") What initially unites these seemingly unrelated narratives is a theme familiar to Gibson's work: the novice initiated into an alternative reality he or she never knew existed. But in each of these strands, Gibson is also playing on the word "spook," not just in the slang sense of a spy, but also in the more traditional sense of a ghost - of figures who pass through the world unnoticed and unrecognized, and who are about to find out how empowering anonymity can be. At first, Hollis, the musician-turned-journalist, emerges as the novel's most intriguing character. (Surely Gibson didn't need the experience of interviewing U2 for Wired magazine to learn how it feels to be a rock star.) Her investigations introduce her to a form of expression called locative art, in which "spatially tagged hypermedia" and a sophisticated visor allow an observer to view images in the real world that are otherwise invisible to passersby: don the glasses in front of the Viper Room in West Hollywood and see an artist's virtual recreation of the moment when River Phoenix died; stand in the world music section of the Virgin Megastore while wearing them and see F. Scott Fitzgerald suffer a heart attack. It's a setup that lets Gibson riff on the immortality of celebrity, and reveal a side of himself that, though it may not be optimistic about the future, is at least willing to concede that the past is still up for grabs. ("The past isn't dead," Hollis muses aloud, in a nod to Faulkner. "It's not even past.") More important, locative art becomes a potent metaphor for a disjointed world where anyone can experience reality as he chooses to see it, and no two people's observations of the same place or event need coincide in any way. If locative art went mainstream, one character predicts, "The world we walk around in would be channels." But in later chapters, I found myself more fascinated with Milgrim, who sees his relationship to Brown as a twisted, 21st-century upgrade of Tom and Huck, and who wonders just how involuntary his servitude really is. And when Milgrim glances at a beat-up copy of a book on Europe's history of revolutionary messianism that he just happens to keep in his coat pocket, he provides Gibson with another laboratory to synthesize his limitless curiosity about technology with his deep misgivings about the modern world. Under the dominance of Catholicism, Milgrim thinks, medieval Europe was a "one-channel universe ... broadcasting from Rome," a province with "a hierarchy in place and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by techlack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal." OF course, Gibson doesn't have to reach as far back as medieval Europe to find a realm plagued by a unitary broadcast in dire need of being drowned out, and it is not only Milgrim who lives his life alternately in obedience and resistance to his autocratic masters. And as "Spook Country" refers to the spectacle of George W. Bush's jet-fighter landing aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, examines the true function of terrorism ("to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law") and explains how torture fundamentally undermines the process of intelligence gathering, it is not only the novel's central characters who are left to wonder what has become of, as one character puts it, "the country he hoped was still America." When the three narrative strands of "Spook Country" at last converge, almost 300 pages into the novel and just in the nick of time, they culminate in a climactic prank meant to deliver an accountability moment to some shadowy off-screen figures who have so far avoided blame for the world's ills. And you may wonder, as I did, briefly, if this slick, "Seinfeld"-ian resolution was really worth all the events that preceded it. But I don't think that's the lesson of "Spook Country." The point is that its protagonists are ultimately able to channel their feelings of detachment and insignificance into something meaningful and pleasantly destructive - and it is precisely because of their apparent insignificance that they are able to do so. When they breathe a sigh of relief for the invitingly uncertain world that awaits them, Gibson can, too: the future is a clean slate for all of them, and whether his characters realize it or not, the author surely understands that this is a symbol of ultimate freedom. One character wonders what has become of 'the country he hoped was still America.' Dave Itzkoff writes the Across the Universe column for the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Set in the present, Gibson's Pattern Recognition (2002) addressed hacking, viral marketing, global surveillance, and, several years before YouTube and Lonelygirl15, video on the Internet. Spook Country, too, depicts the present, with the future superimposed on it, a layer of data visible only to those who know how to see it. Hollis Henry, formerly the singer in an early nineties band with a cult following and now a freelance journalist, is hired by Node, a Wired-like publication, to write a piece on 'locative art," for which a viewer must don a headset to see three-dimensional virtual renditions projected via wireless to an exact location using GPS. Node's funding comes from Hubertus Bigend (returning from Pattern Recognition), the Belgian founder of the 'innovative global advertising agency Blue Ant," known for his 'ability to find precisely the right person for a given project." In a positively creepy scene, Hollis, upon learning who is funding her job, does a Google search for Bigend and, just after reading a Wikipedia entry on him, gets a phone call from the man himself. Bigend's intentions may be shady, but he is incredibly resourceful. Hollis goes from L.A. to Vancouver to track geo-hacker Bobby Chombo, himself hired by a mysterious outfit to track a missing shipping container. Other colorful characters with cool toys also pursue the container. Still others pursue the pursuers, in typical Gibsonian fashion.--Segedin, Ben Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly 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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Gibson, author of the award-winning -archetypal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, has returned with a book that demonstrates yet again his ability to select from the trends of tomorrow's artifacts that will grab us today. In Spook Country, characters collide-seemingly at random-and interact in a multilayered fashion that has become Gibson's signature style. Hollis Henry, a former singer with a defunct indie rock band, has been hired by Node, a shadowy British version of Wired magazine, to write an article on locative art, an artistic innovation that uses virtual reality environments placed via GPS-tagging into the real world. She crosses paths with a Cuban Chinese Santeria-worshipping martial artist, various hackers, conceptual artists, and several spooks whose loyalties are complex and sometimes nebulous. This slow unfolding of motive and plot may annoy those who dislike being lost for several minutes as it titillates others. Robertson Dean brings a sonorous, classically disciplined bass-baritone voice to the reading; his ability to read the narrative passages with precise diction and careful pacing is contrasted by his use of accents and inflection when conveying conversations. Recommended for public and academic libraries with medium to large collections of speculative fiction.-David Faucheux, Louisiana Audio Information & Reading Svc., Lafayette (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The SF innovator follows up his mainstream success (Pattern Recognition, 2003) with another novel set in the near-present, as three separate groups chase after a mysterious freight container. Hollis Henry, erstwhile singer for a disbanded rock group, the Curfew, is now a freelance journalist with a baffling assignment from Node, a startup magazine that is remarkably averse to publicity. She's researching "locative" art in Los Angeles, though her employer seems mostly to be interested in the GPS expertise of a guy who facilitates this high-tech virtual- reality genre. Tito belongs to a family of Chinese-Cuban immigrants involved in criminal enterprises in New York, aided by knowledge of Russian gained from a grandfather who worked with Soviet emissaries (and the CIA) in Havana. Milgrim is a drug addict who had the misfortune to be plucked from the streets by Brown, a creepy government operative who keeps him prisoner to take advantage of Milgrim's linguistic skills, needed to decode text messages in a Russian-based artificial language sent among Tito's family members. Gibson excels as usual in creating an off-kilter atmosphere of vague menace: Hollis's wealthy employer and the old man to whom Tito is passing iPods initially seem as sinister as Brown. And the narrative features the author's characteristically shrewd observations about everything from global piracy to conspiracy junkies to cultish rock fans. But the characters are vivid two-dimensional sketches rather than human beings, and the plot turns out to be a wish-fulfillment fantasy about getting back at the idiots and corporate crooks currently raking in the boodle in Iraq. There are some lovely metaphors and sharp insights as everyone converges on a Canadian port where Tito and his cohorts will do something to the container before Brown and his cohorts can get hold of it. But when the mists of mystification clear, what's revealed isn't very interesting. Readable and mildly engaging, but not the kind of cutting-edge work we expect from Gibson. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
