Spook Country | William Gibson

Spook Country | William Gibson | Gotta get this off my chest

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Spook Country

	Spook Country William Gibson Berkley Trade, 2008 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 152 reviews view larger image
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The New York Times bestseller from ?one of the most astute and entertaining commentators on our astonishing, chaotic present.?( Washington Post Book World)

Hollis Henry is a journalist on investigative assignment for a magazine called Node, which doesn?t exist yet. Bobby Chombo is a producer working on cutting-edge art installations. In his day job, Bobby is a trouble-shooter for military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one.

Hollis Henry has been told to find him.

Conjures Reality

I've never read a book by this author that disappointed me. This latest work by him continues his increasingly evolved and highly distinctive style of writing. Some of the chapters in this book are a page, koan-like in their effect; some are much longer, approaching the length more familiar to readers. In presenting several alternative lines of narrative that gradually intersect and twine to create the capstone of the story, Gibson conjures the texture of life, which is less like an everything-explained-point A-to point B event, than it is variously fragmented, more or less comprehensible and clear. This book invokes both the Orishas of Cuban voudon and the technology of assassination. As with all of Gibson's work, the outcome is ambivalent, partially hidden and seen. For those who require a traditional, linear story line with all things made plain and finished, this will prove an irritating and disappointing read. For the rest of us, it is exceptional.

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Gotta get this off my chest

I've been reading William Gibson since he was first hailed as the Cyberpunk messiah back in the late Eighties. At the risk of being savaged for this review, all these years later, I am still asking myself why this guy is so popular as an author and why I keep falling for the marketing hoopla and buying his books. He is not a bad author but he is certainly not a great one either. Spook country isn't any better than previous novels, nor is it any worse, it's just another mediocre book. Frankly, I have found all his books tolerable but none of them particularly exciting, memorable or terribly inventive.

Gibson gets a lot of mainstream recognition in the press for his books but honestly there are much better Science Fiction authors out there and even many better Cyberpunk authors out there. Bruce Sterling, who came up the ranks at the same time as Gibson, even colloborated with him on occasion, wrote more inventive and imaginative fiction but never got the same level of recognition. Many other authors since then have written extremely good cyberpunk including Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon, Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book) and Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book), and Peter Hamilton's Greg Mandel series which starts with Mindstar Rising.

I'm not bashing on Gibson, more power to him that he captured the mainstream attention, I'm merely trying to point out that in my honest opinion he is certainly not the best writer in the field. I think I actually enjoyed Spook Country a little more than most of his fiction, particularly because of the Cubano/Asian crime family in NYC city he introduces into the story. They were particularly interesting in this story of a missing shipping container and the secretive manouverings of the government, billionaires, and rogue espionage agents who are all contending against each other in a race to be the first to find the container. The denouement was well thought out and satisfying and in general I don't have a lot of negatives to say about the book. After finishing it though my thoughts were simply that this was an OK book, not a wonderful one, and I think Gibson gets a lot of attention that other writers may more appropriately merit.

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Still good, but far from the best

Since Pattern Recognition, Gibson is bringing his stories to the present time, leaving his previous choice of staging the plot in a nebulous future. But there are some strange things going on in the present; in Pattern Recognition, storie moved around the social network space - more precisely, a group of people the followed some posts of movie fragments. In this "Spook Country" the forward-looking feature is the geolocation, and the action moves around a group of artists that create their work aroun GPS-enabled devices. There are also lots of military types - the spooks from the title - and the story goes back and forth from the art to the war. I think that Gibson's main point is described somewhere in the book - technology advances through the army and the artists.
The starting point is intersting, but for the readers that enjoyed Pattern Recognition this new work lacks action and chemistry. The idea is indeed original and well crafted, enough to make you keep the interest until the end of the story. But don't expect a new Pattern Recognition.

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Another in the Gibson formula

Spook Country is in the same formula as Pattern Recognition. A young hip female protagonist is pulled into a job to find a shipping container for an unknown reason. The organization that is funding her is a secretive advertising agency with an over funded over bearing own who keeps showing up at improbable times. We never learn who the mysterious container belongs to, nor do we learn much about the other group competing for the container.

So Spook Country like Pattern Recognition features a number of mysterious organizations, a strange activity being done for a vague reason. These things are never really explained in the book, or if they are the explanation is not satisfying.

Gibson is a good writer so Spook Country is engrossing. It features his vivid descriptions of the objects and locations that help set a scene. In my opinion it has very little else to recommend it.

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