You’ve put on your virtual reality helmet and gloves, picked up your Wiimote, dropped a tab of dex and hit the mainline, pure crystalline geometries unfolding in your mind… this is cyberspace, the final frontier. From a distance it appears as a glowing cube but as you approach you find that like the consciousness of language, each point of light can expand to infinite folds of parallel spaces. As you reach an apex of complexity, a culmination of connection, suddenly you find: a microwave.
That is how I would summarize William Gibson’s “Spook Country,” the novel of his which owes an obvious complete tribute to Thomas Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49.” Like Pynchon’s work, it starts with vast potential and ends up being the same old thing, buying into some failed philosophies from the past that my generation and I reject. At the beginning, it is mystical; at the end, it is as much an off the shelf offering as the latest microwaves from Samsung and GE. It fails because it cannot constrain all of its initial complexity to make a complex point, and so we end up with a simple dichotomy: good people versus bad people, good ideas versus bad ideas. That would be well and good, except that we’re in a book that argues against such dichotomies. Oh well.
Gibson trots out the usual brilliant, in-depth Googling of consumer culture and writes with a Burroughsian depth of abstract metaphor. He also in Pynchon/DeLillo style has brought to the table a number of paired divided abstractions, the best of which is characters describing themselves as “agnostic” regarding data. Do they fully believe, or are they sceptical? Hence agnosticism, which is a hilarious and eerily accurate. It mirrors the main point of the book, which is a semi-amorphous plot about Homeland Security Republicans versus the New World Order Multi-National hipster. Could it get more boring or obvious, or more product-oriented, since we know (gnostically) that there’s a paying audience for such views?
As usual, Gibson is at his best when writing female leads, and in this case, Hollis Henry is as real as Oedipa Maas and then some, which is odd for someone who says little about what she believes. Some of the devices are trite, like the dead former friend, the dubious past, the hip single city kid trying to live a life away from the system without admitting they hate society. A lot of the other observations Hollis offers us are more mature, a Nietzschean fusion of aesthetics and ideology coming out in a simple preference which like most Gibson characters she emphasizes with her feet, dramatically attempting quiet exits from any number of failed situations.
His male characters are tempting as belief-objects but hollow in that they show up like Hollywood actors making cameos (think of the hamfest that was the final half hour of Ocean’s Twelve) and are too aware of how slick they are and how much they can over-gesticulate their emotions. Like most books founded on an aesthetic premise, this one starts out promisingly mysterious (even gnostic in its mystical depth) but after the halfway point, falls to pieces as it tries to tidy all of its complex observations into a simple dichotomy. The promisingly neurotic characters who are from the bad side turn into dumb thugs like Hollywood Russians, and the promisingly neurotic characters from the good side turn into… neurotic Wonder Women and Clark Kents.
In this tendency, the book is most like Pynchon’s longer works, from Gravity’s Rainbow to Mason & Dixon. After the middle crease, it’s a more coherent narrative that is incoherent compared to the sense of ambiguous space previously created, and a boiling down of complexity into a handful of divided concepts. What made The Crying of Lot 49 different was what Pynchon left out, which was an attempt to make sense of his world of observations, which made the book truly like a cyberspace in which we could read anything into it, at first, but that would lead us through a series of logic gates to test our own faith against the observations of the incredible, quite credible observer in Oedipa Maas.
Maas was a sort of Marlowe on a raft of confusion drifting past the ruins of colonial Africa as she tours California in search of an unknown protagonist or manipulative force, finding nothing except different groups who have dropped away from the dystopia and constructed their own realities which in some cases are sustainable. There was more of that vision in Pattern Recognition, which I’m already going to say is what we’ll remember Gibson for outside of Neuromancer. We get none of that sense of survey in Spook Country, because where it reaches its apex it backs away from the depth it has discovered in order to present us some tidy, gift-wrapped conclusions that don’t change our outlook at all.
Parts of this book are as embarrassing as the now-dated 3MB of RAM in Case’s Hosaka from Neuromancer, in a time when wristwatches have more than that amount. The unpaid iPod commercials throughout the first one hundred pages are embarrassing. Some of the praise of 60s garage rock seems slick until, like the really neat guy who seemed to have all the answers you met at the record shop, you look through the references and see it’s little more than a namedrop. The real sadness is the last one hundred pages, when all of that crystalline interconnectivity of geometric parallels that Gibson built us up to expect folds down into a story as divided between hollow ikons of good and evil as the Gore-Bush debates. I still believe in Gibson, but not this book. Eschew this disconnected pile for the greater clarity of Neuromancer or Pattern Recognition.