Pattern Recognition by William Gibson Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Pattern Recognition
Book Review: Good start, bad finish...
Summary: 2 Stars
I have been a reader of Gibson since the "Burning Chrome" collection, and I have been less and less enamoured of his work as time has passed. In spite of a great premise and some good characters, "Pattern Recognition" fail in the end, when Gibson is unable to sustain the mystery and give us a decent payoff. After all the build-up regarding the "footage", the resolution is so flat I re-read it to make sure I hadn't missed anything. Unfortunately, I hadn't.
This will be the last Gibson novel I pick up, because he is no longer cutting edge/visionary/intriguing - (...)
Book Review: Great Reflection on The Present Way of Life
Summary: 5 Stars
Pattern Recognition, unlike Gibson's other novels, is set in the present day, in the hyperconnected cyberlinked yet increasingly chaotic and uncertain world of the post-9/11 era. Into this background steps the wonderfully quixotic, quirky, loveable character of Cayce Pollard, an enigmatic 30-something freelance "coolhunter" with a pathological evasion to certain trademarks and logos.The main thrust of the novel's plot involves unraveling the mystery of who is secretively releasing snippets of film footage in digital format onto the world wide web. But the novel is really about the way we interact and relate to each other in this digitally charged age, the way in which the internet and its modes of personal interaction are changing the web of human relationships in ways both known and surprising.
Gibson's prose is fluid and at times electric, wonderfully joyous to read and savor. His cast of characters is interesting, particularly the principal character of Cayce Pollard, whom we can hope we will see again in a future Gibson work. The novel is somewhat marred by a weaker ending than was probably justified by the balance of the work, together with a love-related ending that did not seem likely based on the previous interactions between the characters involved. But in all and on balance this is a very fine, clever, insightful and ultimately relevant novel, and an important read as we all embark upon our digital journey into the 21st Century.
Book Review: Great fun to read, but as ephemeral as a video game
Summary: 4 Stars
With this un-punk cyber-thriller, William Gibson makes a formidable entry into Robert Ludlamland. His unlikely heroine, Cayce Pollard, finds herself over her head in a shadowy international underworld of post-Cold War spies, Russian oil baron-mobsters, Japanese hackers, American web-geeks, Italian thugs, and cutthroat European marketing executives.
Her mission, and she reluctantly chooses to accept it, is to find the mysterious source of the "footage": segments of a film--perhaps already completed, perhaps in process--that has generated a lot of Internet buzz, the type of hype that makes advertising directors unsheathe their Exacto blades. Armed with little more than an iBook and a Hotmail account, she floats from one Starbucks to another, dipping into a dangerous whirlpool of global intrigue and slowly realizing that there may be good reasons why the source of the footage is behind a wall of impenetrable security. Cayce's search is hindered by disreputable colleagues she knows she can't trust and by her visceral psychological allergies to toxic trademarks and noxious corporate identities.
At its page-turning best, "Pattern Recognition" is a tightly spun mystery with a sympathetic (if wholly improbable) lead character and some admirably sharp, cynical descriptions of the transnational global culture. Gibson describes a world nearly bereft of boundaries, whose observable dissonances are no longer a function of culture but rather a temporary result of jet lag.
Some readers have compared "Pattern Recognition" to a scaled-down, up-to-the-minute version of Pynchon's "Crying of Lot 49," but often as not it reminded me, with far less favorable results, of Bret Easton Ellis's "Glamorama" (albeit, mercifully, without Ellis's notoriously insecure put-downs of the pretty-people set). Gibson wants us to believe that his finger is on the pulse of the cultural Zeitgeist, but his pop-art references both "high" (Rodeo Drive, Louis Vuitton, and countless mentions of Prada) and "low" (The Gap, Tommy Hilfiger) have all the staleness of an old issue of Marie Claire found in a dentist's office. Only the gratuitous appropriation of the September 11 tragedy (which Gibson fails to weave convincingly into the plot) and the circa-2002 computerese place the reader firmly in the new millennium.
As ephemeral as a well-designed video game, "Pattern Recognition" is less interesting for its satirical and metaphysical underpinnings than for its bumper-car joyride and impressively executed wordplay. I greatly enjoyed it, couldn't put it down, and found it acerbically amusing at times, but, as a work of literature, it will surely resemble a musty time capsule within a couple of decades.
Book Review: Gripping and satisfying
Summary: 5 Stars
Gibson is back with a compelling read that provokes, entertains and enlightens. Gibson understands modern culture in unique way and brings you along.Book Review: Haunting
Summary: 4 Stars
This was my first book by Gibson, and I will certainly read more.
It was hard to get into for the first few pages. It reminded me uncomfortably of Bret Easton Ellis's need to name every brand of everything, as in "American Psycho." After a few pages, though, I realized how Gibson was using those touches, not to appear clever and hip, but to draw the reader in.
As others have remarked, one of the most interesting things about the book is that, although it takes place in the recent past, it is so futuristic that one gets the impression of reading a story set about 5 years in the future.
The book is a page turner and certainly gets inside the reader's head. In a way, one wonders why. A young woman is on a quest. For what? Some mysterious clips of film footage. Why? What do they "mean," if they mean anything at all? What is the compelling interest, on her part and those of apparently hundreds of other enthusiasts worldwide?
Today's standard "quest" thriller involves an ancient manuscript, hidden for centuries in a monastery, rediscovered by the Nazis, and now in the vaults of a multinational conglomerate, whose scientists are harnessing the document's secrets to achieve world domination. Nothing of the kind is at work in this book. Even when you learn the "solution," you are tempted to think, "Yes...and???'
But then you find that, for some mysterious reason, the book seems to have exposed you to something haunting, transcendent, and deep. You want to know more about a pair of characters and spend more time with them. You may still wonder why you feel this way, but the effect is inescapable.
In this regard, the book reminds me of the novels of Martin Cruz Smith, one of my favorite authors, who takes rather formulaic thriller plots and somehow makes them resonate, on some existential level, much more powerfully than the reader would have expected.