If you’ve never heard of William Gibson, or read any of his stuff, shame on you. He is the premier bad-ass of sci-fi. You ever heard the term “cyber-space?”
Out in the malls and plazas, moths were batting themselves to death against the neon, but in Bobby’s loft the only light came from a monitor screen and the green and red LED’s on the face of the matrix simulator. I knew every chip in Bobby’s simulator by heart; it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the “Cyberspace Seven,” but I’d rebuilt it so many times that you’d have had a hard time finding a square millimetre of factory circuitry in all that silicon.
William Gibson, Burning Chrome
That’s right. Gibson invented a term so awesome it became a buzzword for an entire generation. Then it became uncool, the sort of things politicians use when making arguments about banning game-violence, and that just goes to show how far he’s permeated tech culture.
His first novel, Neuromancer, is widely considered the birthplace of the cyber-punk movement. What’s more, it’s all about hacking, and Gibson wrote it without knowing anything about hacking at all. He just read about it and thought it was awesome. That’s like Jackie Chan, the cornerstone of modern cinematic martial arts, just turning up on the set of his first film saying “What, me fight? No, never tried it. Never practiced. But I read a book about it, how hard can it be?”
So if Gibson is such a bad-ass, why is his most recent novel such a let-down?
Let me just begin with a disclaimer – Spook Country isn’t a terrible novel. Even when Gibson is at his worst he’s still passable. I read the whole way through SC in a few days and was genuinely frantic about getting back into the book on my tram rides so I could know what happened next. There are some things it does very well. But all the good bits are wrapped in a tortilla of sloppy execution that has left me very, very sour. Gibson should know better, and that’s what hurts so much.
Spook Country is set right-about-now, and it’s all about secrets. Granted, most of Gibson’s novels are about secrets, but this time around it isn’t just a strong theme but the core of the macguffin. Spies from both sides of the cold-war divide vie for information that may or may not even be useful. You don’t know if it’ll help you until you hold it.
At the core of Spook Country is a three-way tug-of-war. The Old Man sits in the park, taking covert deliveries of iPods filled not with music but with strange data. He is tracking something important and possibly very valuable, but what? Brown is an agent from an unnamed government department. He’s watching the Old Man, trying to determine whether the Old Man knows where the special something is yet, and planning how best to arrest him. Finally, Hubertus Bigend is the head of a viral media company, and he’s watching everybody – trying to find out what the special something is, and whether he can exploit it for media gain.
Brown, Bigend, and the Old Man. Three intelligent, calculating, and flawed characters, all secretly watching the others. It has the makings of a great thriller.
Except Gibson doesn’t let us see their machinations, watch their plans from behind the scenes. He doesn’t allow us to know how they adapt when things go wrong. Instead he sticks us behind the eyes of three lackies. Dogsbodies. Hench-folk.
Hollis Henry is a wannabe journalist hired by Bigend to investigate some lackies of the Old Man. Tito is a Cuban immigrant hired by the Old Man to deliver the iPods. Milgrim is a translator kidnapped off the street by Brown to decipher SMS messages sent by Tito. These three characters aren’t flat or inherently uninteresting. It’s just that they have absolutely no influence on the story in any way.
Hollis goes wherever Bigend sends her. She makes no decisions of her own. She never solves any problems. When anything difficult comes up, Bigend solves it for her. Tito is the same. He only has to do two difficult things over the course of the novel, and both times he is given an extremely specific plan by the Old Man. So long as he follows the dots, everything works out. Milgrim is the worst. Literally a prisoner, he doesn’t even sleep until Brown allows him. He gets dragged around town performing translation duties – something that Brown could easily have phoned in to Babelfish, and then gets to sit in the car while Brown does all the interesting stuff.
Three side-characters that serve no function but as roaming viewpoints who get to show us the cool stuff from a distance, or by running errands that any hired-help could do. So we’re always one step behind the larger machinations, never quite understanding why anything just happened, simply accepting that things just are. It’s frustrating and fundamentally backwards. This is not the way stories should be, especially techno-thrillers.
As a result of not being shown any of the planning or behind-the-scenes magic you usually get in a political/scifi thriller, Spook Country feels very… thin. Hollis doesn’t need to figure out where the others have escaped to – she just gets handed a plane ticket. When Tito has to run, he is given turn-by-turn instructions and a free escape van. Milgrim… does nothing at all. So there’s a lot of filler. Milgrim is the worst offender – I think, at one point, he spent three consecutive chapters stoned, sitting on his bed, wishing he could be anywhere else.
To his credit, Gibson does his best to keep us interested. The language is always sharp and precise, some of his very best.
She was no longer certain why Jimmy had needed to borrow that much money in Paris, why she’d been willing to part with it, or how it was that she’d been able to lay her hands on cash.
She’d given it to him in francs. It had been that long ago.
The water was deep enough that is rose along the sides of her face as she settled the back of her head against the bottom of the tub. A child-sized island of face above water. Isla de Hollis…
…She raised her sunken head partially out of the water and began to work shampoo into her hair. “Jimmy,” she said, “you really piss me off. The world is already weirder and stupider than you could ever have guessed.” She lowered her shampooed hair back into the water. The bathroom kept on filling with the absence of her dead friend, and she’d started to cry before she could start to rinse.
This is in sharp contrast to his early dialogue, when he had a terrible tendency to mix metaphors until nothing made sense:
He rose in my mind like a cheap religious hologram, glowing, the enlarged chip on his shirt looming like a reconnaissance shot of some doomed urban nucleus.
William Gibson, Johnny Mnemonic
Even so, language won’t sustain a whole novel. Gibson also uses and abuses extremely short chapters. The longest would be about ten pages and the shortest two. Sometimes this works, but often it feels artificial. You hit a twenty page section of nothing and, instead of deleting it and writing something else, Gibson breaks that section into 5 chapters of 4 pages each, spread out between the three narrators. The twenty pages flies by and you’re left staring, unsure of what just happened or why.
The real shame in all this is that Spook Country is a damn fine premise for a novel. The smaller character twists set against the larger arc of the Old Man’s cat-and-mouse game with Brown are well crafted and exciting. Hollis Henry, as the introductory POV character, is interesting and sympathetic. When the macguffin is revealed it’s a little bit of a letdown, but also somehow very plausible. I didn’t even subtract points for Gibson’s abuse of parkour (a standing backflip over a speeding car? That just pushes through “cool” into the land of “ridiculous”).
It’s just such a let-down that the POV characters are so disconnected from proceedings. It’s a case of right plot, wrong story – or even right plot, no story. This is spaghetti and meatballs with no meatballs and no cheese. Basically filling, but with no real personal touches and nothing to bind the meal together.
I don’t regret buying Spook Country, but I won’t be reading it again. No thumbs up, no thumbs down. Let’s hope the finale in Gibson’s Pattern Recognition trilogy is a return to form.
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