Spook Country by William Gibson Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $0.01 You Save: $14.99 (100%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Spook Country
Book Review: Little Gain for the Pain
Summary: 3 Stars
Having read Gobson's more illustrious early work (Neuromancer etc being truly ground-breaking), this book came to be a disappointment. The first author to truly explore the concept of virtual reality, Gibson's efforts here at intregrating VR with GPS suggest nothing more exciting than the "mash" already implemented by Google et al. Worse, is the feeling that is a forced attempt to recreate the success and originality of Neuromancer and worse still, the fact that the technological creativity does not integrate closely into the story itself, and although presented centrally at the opening, is ultimately no more than a curious side-show in a rather plodding and routine thriller.
As a thriller, this book does not achieve the pace or tension of less challenging airplane and beach reading. The plot builds extremely slowly and the various threads (which taken in isolation are not particularly gripping) fail to integrate until at least the halfway mark. When at last the book does come to life, the anticipation leads eventually to disappointment because the final development of the plot becomes predictable and routine. In terms of characterization, the slow development is an opportunity missed: most of the players are one-dimensional, and the only interesting dynamic is between the childlike interpretor and his handler.
Unlike typical airplane reading, the book is at least well-written in its precise use of English. Having said that, Gibson has an unfortunate tendancy to combine multiple concepts in a single sentence and to produce "garden path" sentences which only give up their proper meaning at a sencond reading.
The two most positive things I could say are that (a) it is intellectually more demanding than the average thriller and (b) the photographic portrait of the author on the back cover is exceptionally good. In general, I would say that unless you are a dyed-in-the-wool Gibson fan, give this one a miss and pick up a Nora Roberts or a Clive Cussler for your beach reading this summer.
Book Review: Not Gibson's best, but...
Summary: 4 Stars
Spook Country
William Gibson
Penguin/Viking
William Gibson is justifiably renowned as one of the key founders of the now vast realm of cyberpunk. His 1986 novel Neuromancer was a foundation stone for a new style of futuristic fiction; high tech but gritty. The opening line of the novel said it all: "The sky above the port was the colour of television tuned to a dead channel."
In Gibson's world voodoo met with artificial intelligence. It was a dark realm of worrisome virtual realities. It was a soaring burst of imagination that, at the time, had no equivalent.
Since that time Gibson has gradually been re-inventing himself, coming closer to the present day with each book. His latest, Spook Country, is very much placed in the here and now, resonant with references to 9/11, the Iraq war and corruption within the current American administration. At heart it is a thriller, without the flourishes of remarkable futurism that marked Gibson's earlier works and as such it will be a disappointment to those hoping for the surreal leaps of vision in his earlier works. But Spook Country remains resolutely a Gibson book, replete with references to the gods and goddesses of voodoo belief. Here the iPod meets the goddess Ochun and a drug called RIZE clashes with the muscular, athletic god Oshosi.
The promotional blurb for Spook Country claims that the novel is "J.G. Ballard meets John Le Carré", but the novel is far too American for it to fit into such a bizarre English context. One suspects that the Canadian-born Gibson is more influenced by the paranoiac sci-fi of Philip K. Dick and the stylistic tropes of Raymond Chandler, both denizens of Los Angeles where much of the novel is set.
Sense of place is a major aspect of Spook Country. Elements of LA and New York City are captured brilliantly. As one of the key protagonists, the youthful Cuban exile Tito, sprints through Canal Street in New York one can envisage the setting immediately. But although this is New York post-9/11 - a fact that is central to the story - Gibson fails to capture the sense of displacement many New Yorkers still feel, a sensation rendered palpable in Don DeLillo's latest novel, Falling Man.
Like DeLillo, Gibson uses an artist as one of his triggers to get the action rolling, in this case an artist who uses a kind of virtual reality recreation of past events such as the death of River Pheonix. The artwork is the ostensible subject of a feature story for a not-yet existent magazine called Node to be written by a former indie-rock singer Hollis Henry. It rapidly becomes apparent that Node will probably never exist and its' supposed publisher is seeking something else entirely. Running parallel to this story are the mysterious goings on of a group of Cubans, especially the athletic Tito who summons the aid of Ochun and Oshosi when necessary, a CIA-type thug and a drug addled character called Milgrim.
Central to the book is the `producer' Bobby Chombo, a paranoid and reclusive troubleshooter for manufacturers of military navigation equipment who refuses to sleep in the same place twice. Hollis Henry has been told by her editor to find him but not told why.
With his sprawling matrix of characters the narrative moves along at break-neck pace. Mis-information transfer run by the Cubans - often via i-Pod - constantly misleads shadow-agents of the government. Also central is the fortune of American cash set aside to help re-build Iraq that has been pirated away for other, unspecified, but clearly corrupt, uses.
At times Gibson's narrative soars, at others it is dogged down by slightly lame character development. It is ideal Winter reading but fails to claim anything like the cultural potency of Neuromancer.
Book Review: Not anticipating the next one
Summary: 2 Stars
I'm not sure I'll be rushing out to buy the next novel from Gibson if this book is an indication of where his writing is going. I thought Pattern Recognition was a brilliant story, but Spook Country was just flat. I had no feeling whatsoever about the characters, and although the prose was as deliberate as ever, I didn't feel that the trip made the goal bearable. There was so much potential here that just seemed skipped over. Ultimately disappointing. Like reading a textbook.Book Review: Not feelin' it
Summary: 2 Stars
The only reason I gave two stars instead of one is that I like the fact that Gibson injects some meta-criticism of his older thinking (in particular the reason why virtual reality isn't what it used to be). But as far as a "literary thriller," this book doesn't fly. There was never a point where I was feeling anything. The characters were completely passive and flat, the plot listless, without any interesting twists or turns, and just a smattering of media theory (the best part). None of the characters were believable or made sense. Their motivations were mostly inexplicable.
It's ironic that Stockholm Syndrome is mentioned more than once considering that a) most of the characters were captives to their fate and destiny, and b) like story's various hostages, I as a reader felt captive by a droll narrative because I am hugely sympathetic to Gibson's mind and his books. I particularly loved his last book, Pattern Recognition, so I'm a little disappointed by the follow-up (yes this is a sequel in the vague way that the Sprawl trilogy connected through through peripheral characters).
Book Review: Overly stylized
Summary: 3 Stars
I didn't realize this was a sequel to "Pattern Recognition". Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more if I had read Pattern Recognition first. I found Gibson's style to be very hard to wade through here. Lots of ambiguous determiners, lots of parenthetical phrases, complicated grammar that is very stylized and hard to get the flow of. I found the ending to not be worth the very long, hard journey to get there, and I didn't empathize with any of the characters. Just not my cup of tea. I did enjoy the descriptions of Vancouver, Gibson's home town.