Nigh Fi

BOOK REVIEW: William Gibson's Spook Country

Human history is the record of Man trying to impose Geometry on Nature.

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In the first 32 pages of Spook Country,William Gibson namechecks at least 37 brands and celebrities familiar to contemporary denizens of meatspace. Johnny Depp, Helmut Newton, Charles Saatchi and River Phoenix are among those getting some much-needed and long-overdue publicity.

And Gibson's just starting to get his Cindy Adams mojo going. This reviewer began a tally for the whole novel, but it distracted too much from, well, the reading part of the reading experience. At an average of slightly more than one boldcappable person or product per page, there are an estimated 400 such references between its covers. He only neglected to ask Chip Kidd to design the text a la Howard Stern's Miss America.

Where Gibson could have typed "Japanese draft" or "Mexican beer" to satisfy his readers' thirst for details of his characters' canned hops preferences, he goes one better: turns out they like Asahi and Tecate. Interesting. Similarly, you might expect that his heroine might tote a fashionably-modded laptop. Just so you know, it's a "sticker-encrusted Powerbook." Now that's a relief. Who could root for a PC user?

This surely must have a point, given that Gibson's steampunk cred is surpassed only by his buddy Bruce Sterling. But after a while one gets the icky feeling that Gibson may seriously fetishize the "high-thread count" sheets in luxury hotels and the flawless leather in custom Maybach sedans. Even when his characters go native with a post-denouement breakfast at a greasy spoon, he just has to make the short-order cook a retired chef from the original Queen Elizabeth who makes the best bacon on earth. Enough, Bill: Take a three-month gig with TimeOut Vancouver and get this out of your system.

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Gibson is a canny, tactical writer, and so one knows this affectation is neither accidental nor a service provided to the highest bidder, but rather a well-considered plan serving some grand literary purpose. Unfortunately, no such purpose ever comes into focus in the book. 

We flatter ourselves that these brands will endure, and that the future will care. Will anyone in the early 22nd Century remember Lego or Starbucks, let alone Pendleton shirts or the Mondrian Hotel?  Raise your hand if anyone here in the early 21st Century knows the early 20th Century cultural symbolism of Wanamaker's or the Hupmobile.

Gibson's dedicated fans (including this one) count on him to spin such drossy questions into something akin to gold, or at least a slightly less precious metal. In Spook Country, however, the conceit proves leaden.

So what is the author trying to accomplish with this plethora of proper nouns? Two theories:

THEORY #1: Gibson has decided to become a writer of the moment, not for the ages. He's said as much in interviews, and this theory is backed by several topical plot twists and political jabs -- for example, the question of what has become of the billions in cash airlifted into Iraq by the U.S. But when a writer's anatomizing such meaty issues, it's superfluous to mention whether he's cutting with a Ginsu or a William Henry steak knife. It's understood that this feels that world events have become stranger than sci-fi (a problem identified 15+ years ago by Tom Wolfe in Harper's) so he's hied himself into the present. Call it nigh fi. It's just unfortunate that this feels more like an attempt to capture the attention of niche audiences he may not have reached before, such as the bright young slacksters* with sticker-encrusted notebooks or the ad execs dreaming of Jetstream ownership.

THEORY #2: Gibson believes not only that in the future that explications de texte will be so thoroughly and easily linked, via <a href="http://www.jeremikarnell.com/2007/08/william-gibson-.html">rapidly-evolving hypermedia</a> we can't possibly imagine, as to render the above complaint moot -- but also that people will care enough about his work to make use of that technology. Like the paintings of Norman Rockwell, which painstakingly and faithfully recorded the most mundane details of mid-20th Century life (what kind of shoelaces did policemen wear in 1949?), books like Spook Country may at minimum serve future cultural anthropologists as a useful distillation of Western consumerism c. 2007.

The latter seems the more likely scenario, as it dovetails with the one truly pungent and prophetic Gibsonian idea in the book: Namely, that in the not-so-distant future the whole world will be completely blanketed with site-specific geotags and video which not only show you where you are now, but what was there previously. An art-world character (whom I unfortunately kept picturing as Edna Mode from The Incredibles) explains:

Odile squinted over the rim of her white breakfast bowl of cafe au lait. "Cartographic attributes of the invisible," she said, lowering the bowl. "Spacially tagged hypermedia. ... The artist annotating every centimeter of a place, of every physical thing. Visible to all, on devices such as these." She indicated Alberto's phone, as if its swollen belly of silver tape were gravid with an entire future.

In such a future, one will be able to stand at a spot such as 9/11's Ground Zero with a pair of virtual reality goggles (eventually to be miniaturized into ordinary eyeglasses, and then contacts) and not only be able to retrieve photos of all current occupants of the new Freedom Tower, but also to see the Twin Towers mushrooming into rubble, and the Trade Center under construction in the 1970s, and Alexander Hamilton building New York into a financial center in the 1770s, and so on back through Peter Stuyvesant, Peter Minuit, and the Manahatta tribe cutting the most short-sighted real estate deal ever. (And why stop there, when there are mastadons and dinosaurs and primordial protoplasmic seas for Matt Barney and/or Pixar to render?

To the extent that human history is the record of Man trying to impose Geometry on Nature, Gibson may be onto something here. He posits that avant-garde artists will lead the charge into total pop-historical recall -- with spooks, military-industrial crooks, and commercial interests (represented here by the blessedly fictional wideboy Hubertus Bigend of the Blue Ant ad agency, previously introduced in Pattern Recognition) swiftly co-opting the artists for less-than-idealistic ends.   

What disappoints most about Spook Country is that this stimulating prediction -- one on a par with Neuromancer's prescient 1984 invention of Cyberspace -- is not meaningfully married to the other main plotlines of the book. [SPOILER ALERT] A secondary narrative involves a radical, autonymous Cuban-Chinese cell aiming to stop government kleptocrats from getting their hands on a shipping container full of ill-gotten war booty. Here the book reverts to the conventions of "run-and-gun" action/adventure genre, as Gibson skilfully but somewhat perfunctorily steers together disparate characters and mysterious agendas toward a conflagration which creates, at least temporarily, resolution for the principles, if not a new world order of the sort sought in previous books by Wintermute or Herr Virek.

This display of mastery of his craft has more appeal than, say, the advent of a new McCartney album; but not much more. Your heart sinks, knowing that Sir Paul's latest songs will be well-crafted, beautifully produced, and utterly lacking his old instant spark of joy. Gibson is nowhere near as accomplished, nor as utterly spent, as the auteur of both Good Day Sunshine and See Your Sunshine.

Even diehard loyalists should acknowledge that Gibson's books all have basically the same trajectory, for until now it's always been an enjoyable ride: the drip-drip-drip revelation of an agenda hidden from a protagonist drawn inexorably by the tractor beam of a secretive patron into the Death Star of a new reality. Without exception, his books contain at least one scene where the scales fall from the eyes of the lead character -- who, whether male or female, is attractive and rugged and vulnerable and talented and jaded and lost and seeking for a meaning which may or may not be illusory, but at least always winds up being highly lucrative. S/he will come to realize, step by step, that while pursuing some rather enigmatic, slightly desperate, increasingly dangerous mission on behalf of a very rich, powerful and shadowy force beyond the ken of mere mortals, s/he has been a just a pawn in their game. The stated mission will always differ radically from the true agenda.

Readers get to ride shotgun with this protagonist, who is kept always off balance and in motion, while we get to feel somewhat superior as we tick off each clue, one step ahead of the manipulated characters. One can look forward to that moment in each novel when Gibson blows your mind with What It All Really Meant, How the World Really Works, and Where that World is Headed Next.

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In this iteration of the once and future Gibsonian plot, the lead charcter Hollis Henry is a former alt-rock cult icon, a composite perhaps of the Pixies' Kim Deal and Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, who has turned halfheartedly to journalism to keep busy, or something. (It is never convincingly explained why such a figure would want to become one of the ink-stained wretches despised by most great musicians. Think: Bob Dylan or John Lennon shredding reporters at press conferences.)

Yet as with Case and Cayce before her, Hollis gets swept into a vortex of perfidious global intrigue which, through a combo of dumb luck, good instincts and an aptitude for surfing the shockwaves set off around her, leaves her on top of the final heap -- having gained insight into who she really is, where she really came from, whom she should (mis)trust from now on. Phew. Along for the ride are both grizzled veterans of a pre-internet hacker/intel culture, and insanely talented youthful heirs to their legacy, to be briefly alluded to in future Gibson novels as legendary figures of the past.

The problem: Gibson has not really committed himself here to making these characters more than placeholders for a certain demographic type or cultural stance. Each of them is consumed with tragic nostalgia: How did my genius grandfather really die? Why did my bandmember have to an overdose? And, will I ever find a partner who understands me who is also really sexy? Unfortunately, Hollis remains an oddly nondescript presence to the end. Though we learn many details of her likes and dislikes and suspicions and memories and desires, she never really transcends her initial character profile. Even the acrobatic young counterspy-cum-keyboard player Tito fails to generate much more than the run-of-the-mill sympathy one might feel for a young hero with an exceptional knack for backflips and rappelling. (What, don't you know anyone like that?)

The action is punctuated with flashbacks intended to tug at the heartstrings. But these have about as much pull as attending a stranger's 20TH high school reunion: means a lot to them, nothing to you. The lone exception is a hapless Ativan-addicted linguist, Milgrim, whose chemical dependency and shabby treatment at the hands of a FBI/CIA/NSA/mercenary handler engenders  at least some sympathy for his feeble attempts to shake loose of his pharmaceutical and human tormenters. When he finally does, you're happy for Milgrim, whereas the other characters' successes are no cause for jubilation.

All of Gibson's favorite tropes and trendspotting talents are on parade here. He remains tops at encapsulating the minute but telling changes in our culture. He hits upon striking images, such as a "swarming, glittering ball of red ants" floating together to survive in post-Katrina floodwaters. He observes how "the windows of army surplus stores constituted hymns to male powerlessness." He makes a strong case that our current government's focus on security is really a fixation with control. He tracks the evolution of our built environment with the astuteness of a good city planner. (In run-down Vancouver, he notes how bars "seemed to possess these vestigial hotels"). And he continues to coin new terminology that will of course become part of the real-world zeitgeist.

But no deeper connections between cutting-edge "locative art" and blunt-force spookery are never made beyond the overlapping interest in certain technologies which both find useful. You don't need a spy satellite to spot  how the Cuban-Chinese gang's quest for poetic justice will physically converge with Hollis' coolhunt for the next big paradigm shift in digital art, and with Milgrim's strung-out bid to escape with enough pills and cash to get himself back together. Yet that cargo container which magnetically draws them together does not really link these characters and threads any more significantly than people in a teenager's MySpace extended network. Strangely for Gibson, the aggregate redemption of all three of the main characters is less than the sum of their meager parts.

Perhaps he has just become a victim of his own proficiency this time out. He can riff on and plot and predict the arc of our popular culture so well, and has the mechanics of storytelling so down, that it's almost guaranteed that on occasion he's going to misfire. It's allowed; Gibson's credit is still pretty high with his readership, and the more easily-digested nature of Spook Country may go down easier with both critics and a wider reading public. One just hopes the next attempt leaves the reader with more to hold onto than a typical installment of a Hollywood movie franchise. The book seems constructed to require a sequel (The Spook Ultimatum? Spy Hard?) and maybe that next installment will redeem some of these seeming deficiencies.

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Like Raymond Chandler, Gibson's clipped potboiler style occasionally flies off into purple flights of sentimentality, and the resulting contrast can either satisfy or feel forced. Up to this point, he's made up for it by unfailingly staking out challenging tech terrain, blazing a remarkable track record of correctly anticipating the next phase of our bit-driven culture. The ability to predict the future never goes out of style, but here Gibson's gift feels more like a fictionalized Wired feature than a true novel.

It's no sin to for an author to try to stay au courant and be popular in his or her own lifetime. Gibson is not obliged to toil in obscurity nor to overreach for the humble immortality of a non-player like Joseph Cornell. Still, one can think of writers who managed to be both highly ideological -- whose characters were stand-ins for various demographic types and philosophical debates raging in their particular age -- and also quite popular. Dickens and Dostoyevsky are two examples of topically-minded authors who transcended the faddishness and specificity of their epochs. Gibson is capable of aiming both high and low, but Spook Country trains its sights only on the knees, not the heart.

* "Slacksters" TM John Cusack and Steve Pink, Grosse Point Blank