Spook Country
a book by William Gibson
Wiki | Amazon
Overall Rating: 7/10
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 5/10
In my opinion, William Gibson’s novels vary, sometimes one book will be amazing and really resonate then the next (whether a sequel or no) might be mediocre. I doubt Mr. Gibson considers Spook Country to be a sequel to Pattern Recognition but a number of similar entities occur, namely “Blue Ant” which appears to be some sort of hyper-real PR firm that creates trends even doing R&D on them.
In Spook Country, there is that common cyberpunk technique (which was adopted by most science fiction writers) of multi-threaded plots. What I mean by that is one chapter has a character experiencing some aspect of the story, the next chapter will have a different character experiencing a disjoint part of the story— without any knowledge of the first character. At some later climactic point, these threads converge in some manner, usually bringing the various characters in contact with one another. This book has a handful of these threads and the reader is jarred sequentially through them in endless repetition so none of the characters becomes familiar and the end of the chapter is something to be dreaded. The transitions in this book are harsh.
The contrast with the relatively mono-focused Pattern Recognition book, where the more lyrical tendencies Mr. Gibson has available is tremendous. Oft times while reading Pattern Recognition, I found myself nodding while reading something insightful, like the main character’s belief that jet lag is caused by the soul’s inability to be carried via airplane and the body feels disconnected in the new place, not because of the time change, but because the soul is missing. Regardless of spiritual beliefs, that explanation makes a lot more sense to me than it being about the time change, since it is possible to rearrange one’s schedule in advance but this does not stave off jet lag very well.
At several points in Spook Country, the currently focal character was in deadly peril and my reaction was extremely negative… “Just kill [him/her] already. They’re obviously not important enough to star in a whole book.” I admit that there were some lyrical moments, but my irritation with the storytelling style tended to overwhelm them before they could sink in. I did not recognize any of them as profound. I was annoyed by the constant transitions. Partially because of inept technique, but partially because they seemed so unnecessary. We see lots of detail for innocuous characters’ lives, making them seem disproportionately important.
In discussing this with others, the common complaint was a wish for an electronic version which could be sorted by character’s POV/thread. The chronological approach, where every chapter break really needs to start with, “Meanwhile, back at the ranch….” but just drops the reader into a new pot of soup, that made me want to hand the author 600,000 Scrabble tiles and claim to have found a plagiarized copy of his novel. I doubt Mr. Gibson would understand from that, that I think the story was ruined by a lack of appropriate organization. In further thinking, I am not certain that 4/5 of the threads were important at all. I think it would have been better served as a book if it had been told with some sort of omniscient overseer for the plot and had a single character stumbling through the plot and discovering the hidden aspects of the story.
If I had to do it again, I would not read Spook Country, I would reread Pattern Recognition, but I do not think my disappointment is an accurate reflection of the quality of the second novel in this particular world setting. I really think it was probably an average book, unless you were comparing it to something which had been more personally satisfying.
