Spook Country

William Gibson Spook Country (2007)
I burned out on Gibson a while back when ploughing through all of those cyberpunk novels and noticing how they're all the same book, give or take some small change. This observation isn't intended to be quite so dismissive as it will seem, but for all the man's astonishing prose, he seems to have wrung a lot of mileage out of punky types hunting down some crucial piece of either technology or information in a dystopian setting spattered with brand names. On a bad day, it reads as though he's just getting off on describing designer labels and gadgets, which is a shame because although it could be argued that his narratives tend to be all surface, it isn't like he doesn't have anything to say - and usually something which is best expressed through his seemingly obsessive attention to superficial detail.

Conversely, when he gets the balance right, the books are amazing even with those punky types hunting down some crucial piece of either technology or information in a dystopian setting spattered with brand names. Idoru was pretty great, and Pattern Recognition probably qualifies as a masterpiece. Spook Country has been praised to the hilt. It's not quite Pattern Recognition, from which it follows on in a loose sense, but it gets there in the end.

As usual, the narrative is slightly bewildering, requiring that the reader keep track of a wide range of characters driven by ambiguous motives; but the point emerges like a signal from the proverbial noise, meaning it may not actually have mattered whether you can still remember who was who by the end because the message is fairly clear, despite pertaining to the absence of clarity from the world it describes - which is more or less our world, by the way. Spook Country is about a world which has ceased to make sense in conventional terms, somewhat foreshadowing the rise of the game show host as president and the mess we find ourselves in. It answers the question of how to do satire when that which is satirised is more ridiculous than any fictionalised version could ordinarily manage to be. Spook Country seems to promise the usual narrative of the last minute save as everyone meets up in the town square, the nuclear spectacle averted, the dark forces defeated but - as it is in our world - we don't get that, nor anything which really makes sense.

'I've just seen someone, some people,' she told him, 'tonight, do the single strangest thing I imagine I'll ever see.'

'Really?' He was suddenly grave. 'I envy you.'

'I thought it was going to be terrorism, or crime in some more traditional sense, but it wasn't. I think that it was actually…'

'What?'

'A prank. A prank you'd have to be crazy to be able to afford.'

I have no idea whether Gibson refers to anything which actually happened when referencing funding for the rebuilding of Iraq after the deposition of Saddam Hussein, but given what he describes in this novel, I'm not sure this even counts as fiction.