Spook Country | William Gibson

Spook Country | William Gibson | Pick up idoru instead

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Spook Country

	Spook Country William Gibson Berkley Trade, 2008 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 151 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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Pick up idoru instead

I've read all of William Gibson's recent books and I think this one is the least enjoyable. The unique subcultures in most of his recent books have been engrossing but in comparison spook-country's art scene seems cobbled-together and tacked-on. Entirely too normal to be a Gibson book.

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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