The Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive) by Wiliam Gibson were seminal books for me, changing the way that I thought about Science Fiction. They were fresh, intelligent, cool and gloriously cyberpunk.
Then Pattern Recognition was William Gibson writing Not Science Fiction, and instead a modern day thriller that somehow still felt like tomorrow. I loved it.
Spook Country (UK / US) feels like it is about today, not tomorrow, and yet from the opening it still felt as wonderful and foreign and fresh as the Sprawl books. The trick is that Gibson still writes about the fringes of society, about cool obscure movements and ex-rockstars and mysterious people, and writes about them with such intriguing simmering passion that I want to know more. So when he describes a virtual Locative art movement empowered by GPS I wanted to Google it and find some blogs and learn about it. The foreigness not only comes from the obscure sides of society but also the way he never writes down to the reader, he uses colloquial cultural references and expects you to know about them, or at least figure it out. The names of US hotel chains and corner shops and the geography of Hollywood were completely foreign to me, and added an extra level of suction at the start.
It also appears to be the most personal Gibson novel I've read, or maybe it's just that I'm more aware of how it could be more personal: I read (on Gibson's blog maybe?) that he needs to be writing a novel to collect his Magpie array of ideas and thoughts; and the descriptions of one of the characters on tranquilisers in a hotel room conjured up images of Gibson on a fatiguing book tour. And then of course, Vancouver, Gibson's home town, is also a location for the novel and is described in some great passages.
The language is wonderful. Really... well just brilliant, words fail me. It's the sort of book where I savoured sentences and paragraphs.
The plot and characters are in many ways secondary to the language, yet it's not a trivial story, it's a story which affects three characters lives significantly, and whose plot consists of clever and subtle manipulations. It is also a plot with a lovely sense of resolution, I felt satisfied at the end. In fact I just sat there and grinned and wondered about reading it again straight away because I enjoyed it so much.
A William Gibson story about now.
Lovely stuff.
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