Spook Country by William Gibson
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Book Reviews of Spook Country
Book Review: Couldn't put it down...
Summary: 5 Stars
I could not put this book down, and I'm a notoriously hard-to-please reader. This was the first book I'd read by this author, and I'm really pleased; don't let the negative reviews here scare you off.Book Review: A dark paranoid tale from one of the genre's masters
Summary: 4 Stars
There aren't many writers alive today who are credited with creating an entire genre of literature, but the realm of cyberpunk still has its founder in William Gibson. He didn't invent the term - author Bruce Bethke coined it in 1980 with the eponymous short story - and authors such as Bruce Sterling and Pat Cadigan also made significant contributions, but it's Gibson who made it mainstream and earned the title of "noir prophet." 1984's "Neuromancer" was an imaginative epic, seeing ideas of cyberspace and virtual reality before personal computers were even mainstream.
After following "Neuromancer" with a series of equally speculative novels, Gibson has turned his vision into the modern world, where advancements in technology has caught up with several of his innovations - but also verified his predictions of control and paranoia. "Spook Country" is the second of these novels, and it proves everything readers have come to expect from him: tense, innovative and superbly written.
Set in February 2006, "Spook Country" centers on the activities of three very different individuals. Hollis Henry, former lead singer of punk band The Curfew, is now a music journalist assigned to cover the elusive technical genius Bobby Chombo, a pioneer of creating virtual reality artwork. Tito, a musician and member of a Cuban criminal family, is contracted to deliver coded iPods to an old man with intelligence background. And Milgrim, a drug addict with a penchant for stolen coats, is abducted by a government official and forced to translate Russian code in exchange for continual drug doses.
All three of these characters find themselves involved in a strange plot, involving a "phantom" shipping container that seems to pop up in various locations. Eccentric entrepreneur Hubertus Bigend (first seen in Gibson's earlier "Pattern Recognition") simply wants to know what it is, the old man wants to get Tito close to it and a shady maybe-government operative wants Milgrim to help him learn what Tito knows. It's a constantly vague tale, with the true intent and content never clear to the players even when they think their lives could be in danger.
Even with an overarching conspiracy the book could easily become fragmented, but it's held together by the same fact that made "Neuromancer" so popular 25 years ago: Gibson is a writer of remarkable skill. His phrasing is descriptive without being overwhelming, and creates a sense of immersion in both the grime of New York City and the unsettling modernity of Los Angeles. On the character side the dialogue is terse and realistic, conversations feeling natural and each character's voice defined.
With the exception of Chombo's virtual reality art (images broadcast in public places, only visible with VR helmets) Gibson doesn't spend his time speculating on future technology. Rather, his focus is on how current technology infiltrates our lives and changes the order of business, ranging from iPods encoded with secret data to portable door alarms to tracking devices in cell phone scramblers. The feeling established is one of paranoia and disconnect, a sense that you're never quite sure if you're being watched or if it even matters.
And dealing with this paranoia is "Spook Country's" strength. Hollis, Tito and Milgrim aren't even featured in the same chapter until two-thirds of the way in (and even then only share one scene) but each one deals with their strange circumstances in their own solitary way, be it faith or drugs or attempting to apply reason. Each character fixates on certain objects throughout the course of the book - envelopes of money, blue vases and books on European religion - and this adds to the feeling each is trying to stay grounded in unfamiliar circumstances.
There are many other threads - the threat of government control after 9/11, information lost in the shuffle of bureaucracy, celebrity gone by and the oddities of the rich - and the tension in each goes to make our own world as immersive as "Neuromancer's" cyberspace. It's to Gibson's credit that he can not only perceive the way these influences have shaped us, but express it in such a dark, eminently readable piece of literature as "Spook Country."
Book Review: A little scattered at first, but wraps up really nicely
Summary: 4 Stars
This is my second William Gibson novel, after the classic, Neuromancer. I saw it on the shelf and didn't receive any recommendation for Spook Country, so I didn't have any particular expectations. I found Spook Country to be a well-planned, wholly believable vision of the present/near-future with characters who I can relate to. The tie-ins of high technology, art, business, and world politics all ring true for me as I have some experience in each of those areas. I recommend this book to anyone interested in underground, counter-culture fiction.
The story begins rather disjoint and scattered across 3 or 4 primary characters (or more, depending on how you define characters) and their individual stories. It remains somewhat disjoint and vague (as to what the goals of the different characters are) for a long time -- probably about 3/4 of the book. But then, at the end, all the different threads come together like a high-tensile rope that made me eager to go out and buy another Gibson novel.
All-in-all a very pleasant read. There are some concepts that may be a little too far-fetched with respect to technology and art, but I believe Gibson has written a story that is closer to our current reality than some may realize.
Book Review: A Gibson story in a Bush universe
Summary: 3 Stars
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there was a terrorist attack and a president who used that attack as a pretext for torture, secret wire-tapping, war, the enrichment of private mercenary armies, and the distribution of war spoils to his ten thousand closest friends and unindicted co-conspirators. This time and place is the setting for William Gibson's latest novel, SPOOK COUNTRY. Like virtually all of Gibson's novels, this one concerns a widespread conspiracy that is embodied in a mysterious central object--in this case, a shipping container being sought by at least three different groups. Three relative innocents -- former rock singer Hollis Henry, former Russian translator Milgrim (no first name given), and current crime family underling Tito (no last name given) -- find themselves involuntarily drafted into the hunt on opposing sides. In typical Gibson fashion, the mad rush -- or, rather, the meandering stroll -- towards the objective is heavily laden with brand-name dropping and cultural-reference-heavy riffs on developing technologies. Atypically, however, it is also punctuated with explicit political commentary on torture, secrecy, and how we're letting the terrorists win. These uncharacteristic political outbursts, which are framed in terms that were commonplace in the political discourse of 2004, make SPOOK COUNTRY seem dated and quaint.
Gibson has always been fascinated, repelled, and in equal measure attracted to personal (and corporate) wealth and its trappings. Although he positions himself as a champion of has-beens and never-wases, and even though he has vividly portrayed the abuses and humiliations visited on the have-nots by the have-too-muchs, Gibson has always remained politically non-committal. In SPOOK COUNTRY, though, Gibson is a man with a mission. Sort of. On one hand, he just has to let us know that something is going awfully wrong in post-9/11 America. He does this in the moments where he (through secondary characters) lectures us about the CIA plotting with Somali pirates and about how the government's torture techniques are directly modeled on those used by the North Koreans to prep prisoners for political show trials. On the other hand, he remains the detached, knowing writer he's always been, tying a generic solve-the-riddle plot to the excesses of the Bush years. It doesn't work so well.
Regardless of how contemporary (or historical) this novel is, it still feels like a Gibson novel, where everything is slightly unreal or hyperreal, and exciting new horizons -- like the "locative art" that Hollis Henry is supposedly writing about for "Node" magazine -- are opening up all of the time. Mainstream readers are unlikely to expect a novel where, of three major characters, one is a well-educated homeless man addicted to anti-anxiety drugs that induce amnesia and disconnection from reality, and another is a undocumented Chinese-Cuban crime family member who speaks Russian, lives his life within KGB-originated protocols, and experiences himself as being "ridden" by santeria spirits. This inspired (?) weirdness is a plus for those who enjoy Gibson's writing. On the other hand, some of Gibson's well-known tendencies get out of hand in the first 50 or so pages of the book -- he gives the reader so little information about what's going on, over-writes so badly (e.g., "[Now] he could admire Brown's surgically gloved hands, like undersea creatures in some fairyland aquatic theater, trained to mimic the hands of a conjurer." p. 19), and switches so rapidly between viewpoints that most readers (me included) will be confused and turned off. After the first hundred pages, the book is hard to put down.
In the end, this is a less than stellar novel by an important science fiction novelist. You (probably) won't regret having read it, but you won't have missed much if you decide not to.
Book Review: Another Gibson Novel, Another Disappointment
Summary: 3 Stars
I've read all of Gibson's novels, and the earliest--Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive--are still the most memorable. They were so memorable, in fact, and so outlandishly inventive, that I've been hoping for another fix ever since.
Gibson remains an excellent technician. He writes so lucidly and knowingly that everything is entertaining on some level. Yet even at his best his novels tend to revolve around a handful of fascinating concepts or images or characters--the idoru, the prescient virtual reality videogames, Molly with her razor fingernails--and plot or deeply drawn characters aren't his forte. So when he writes a novel without such attention-grabbing devices, their absence is nagging. Spook Country is like that. Finely-drawn vignettes, to no particular effect.
The hype about Spook Country is that it's about the "post-9/11 world." Nonsense. It could just as easily have been written any time since World War II. The few references to events of the past decade are of no real consequence, and offer no insights. References to "pirates" or other seemingly interesting or at least timely cultural phenomena are literally limited to a casual sentence.
The structure is identical to All Tomorrow's Parties, which was similarly mediocre. Several characters or groups of them converge at the end of the novel, their fates intertwined. Along the way, we follow each of them separately, in alternating chapters, as Gibson weaves their trajectories together, heading for the big payoff at the end that the reader anticipates almost from the outset. And just as in All Tomorrow's Parties, none of the characters are particularly interesting; their significance is only the role they will play in the jigsaw puzzle Gibson has carefully constructed. And as in All Tomorrow's Parties, the big payoff turns out to be what we used to call a fizzler--a firecracker that spurts a little spark but doesn't explode. The ending of Spook County, in fact, is so flaccid that I couldn't believe he'd carried us along all that way for such a weak purported climax.
I'll probably pick up the next Gibson from the remainder bin as well, again hoping for a few of those mind-bending nuggets, but by now I'm resigned to just another well-written but pointless story.