My first volley into reading 50 books in 2008 is William Gibson's Spook Country. Gibson is probably best known for the groundbreaking cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, a prophesy of the internet age written on a typewriter. He wrote a loosely-tied together trilogy including Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, then wrote a second trilogy (starting with Virtual Light) set a little closer to our time. Then he started what I suspect will be another trilogy more or less set in this era, the first being Pattern Recognition (largely dealing with viral video on the Internet) and then this one, Spook Country, with artistic uses for GPS technology at its core. I don't know if this closing in on the modern era is intentional, or whether Gibson stays in one place while the world is catching up to him.
Nonetheless, Spook Country is a somewhat meandering tale of various characters--a journalist for a mysterious European magazine, a prescription drug addict, a strangely talented member of a small crime family, and other eclectic sorts, following various tangents leading towards a mysterious cargo shipping container wandering around the world. The story ambles along for the first two-thirds, finally winding up the various threads in the last third.
All of Gibson's strengths and weaknesses are on display, from his deft prose style to his very loose-limbed plotting and his oft-flaccid denouements. Fans will be with him, but others might be better served seeking out a dog-eared paperback of Neuromancer.
I checked this one out from the Morrison-Reeves Library in Richmond, Indiana.
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2 comments:
Hmmm. I keep going back and forth on Spook Country. Neuromancer changed my life and I followed and enjoyed the rest of his cyberpunk stuff. I got Pattern Recognition as a gift and I actually ended up quite enjoying it. But this one just seems to skim off my mind. There is nothing there that I can really grab onto that makes me want to read it. Maybe I need to get stuck on a plane with it.
I am finding that I have a limited attention span for cyberpunk. I love the high style of it, but if you read too much at once the glitz wears off. (I feel the same way about British humor.) I am reading The Scar right now, which has the same punk sensibility with more of a fantasy twist. The cool imagery powered me through the first 250 pages. Now I find myself reading it in drips and drabs.
Thanks for the review of Spook Country. I was on the fence about reading that one.
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