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Pattern Recognition

Berkley

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Unrecognizable Patterns, Extraordinary Book

Like (probably) most folks reading Gibson the first time, I had to stop, swear, restart, stop and swear again (at the lack of progress and enjoyment in a book which 'everybody' said was great), go back and restart all over again. When I (finally) read the first pages sloooooowly, *then* it began to dawn on me that here was a unique author who couldn't help but obsessed with every line that he wrote, the full appreciation of which demanded that the novel be read on Gibson's terms, not the reader's.

One simply cannot 'skim through' a Gibson novel. The beauty is in the micro-descriptions, the layers and layers of psychological minutae (applied to anything from coffee to curtains to airplane seats). The impatient reader raised on a diet of, say, Dan Brown or Jeffrey Archer who just wants to get the 'thrill of the plot' will all but HATE Gibson's work. On the other hand, Gibson is no Rushdie and thus won't offer you surprising tale-twists every other 10 pages or so. That said, no plot doesn't equal no suspense. PR keeps you guessing about almost everything: who created the video footage and why? who's Parkaboy? who's the 'real' bad guy here? what happened to the missing dad? and how does it all cohere?

Gibson disturbingly yet irresistibly mind-cuffs you to his protagonist (in a way which only Ian McEwan betters, IMO) till you think and act and fear like, in PR's case, Cayce Pollard the key protagonist - 'coolhunter', obsessive, logo-phobic, single yet craving relationship from the strangest people in strange places (e.g. a softie who keeps a gun under his bed, a documentary creator who excavates graves in Russia, a monogamously challenged network executive who can't decide whether to lie or be truthful and an anonymous Web surfer who doesn't sleep, talks funny and spends hours researching mysterious online video footages).

Along the way we get an express tutorial in upcoming technology, emerging Web trends (or the peculiar habits of selected Web communities), marketing tactics (one character has a full-time job of going to pubs to say how she liked a certain product or idea!) and even jobs we'd have trouble believing were/could be real, e.g. designing the hats worn by characters in video games.

What was the book 'about', then? It was about perceiving geo-techno-politics and the Web through the eyes of Cayce Pollard and two weeks of her already unusual world made even more volatile with new questions, new challenges, new people.

PR isn't exactly the greatest novel in the genre (of Sci-Fi or Contemporary Thrillers), but this could be due to its categorical misfit. It's fresh (in a maladjusted yet delightful kind of way), its themes are more than relevant (without going 'over-the-top' Michael Crichton style) and it mitigates against traditional narratives structures i.e. there's a Start and there was an End, but I can't classify everything else in between. There's anything but a recognizable pattern here.

Gibson could be Murakami with a hard-edged cyber-attitude, just as confusing but no less lovable for being so.

Neuromancer, rebooted

It isn't immediately clear that Pattern Recognition is a rewrite of Neuromancer. This time it is set in the actual earliest days of the 21st century, rather than the early 21st century as imagined in the last quarter of the 20th.

While the structure is nearly identical, the texture is completely new. We follow a familiar framework, but the walls of this gallery display an entirely new set of images and objects.

Case has turned into Casey, though the two names sound exactly alike. While Case is a former hacker that is literally burned out by a job that went wrong, Casey is a freelance marketer troubled by overexposure to brands and the traumatic events of 9/11. While Case hacked computers, Casey sensitivity to branding is used by the marketing world to better hack into consumers' brains.

Other present-day sci-fi worth reading include Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and Stross' Merchant Princes series.

Interesting

Book plot line follows a the main female character as she passes through phases of ridding herself of "brand name " phobia that flattens her. She comes out the heroine and is rewarded in a strange twist of events that brings her very near the edge of no return into pushing up daisies. Has a very happy ending.

A Waste of Time

Other than having the phrase "He took a duck in the face at 250 knots" being repeated more times than I want to think about, there was nothing else even remotely interesting in this book.

A much better book about computers and such is "Digital Fortress"

The myth of the solitary artist

I've read Neuromancer, of course, and appreciated (as opposed to "enjoyed") it. Gibson's other books have frustrated me. Have you ever had a serious conversation with someone whose accent is difficult to follow, or tried to listen to a dinner-party companion in the middle of a very noisy restaurant? You can follow the gist of what's being said; you get the main points; but there are large stretches of time when you just keep smiling and nodding, waiting for the next audible words. Islands of meaning rise up out of the inaudible fog that obscures the rest. You're mostly adrift in the mist.

That's my experience when I read Gibson. Usually I have to reread two or three times before I can follow him. I don't like this. It makes me feel stupid.

That sense was present but muted during my reading of Pattern Recognition. The book isn't cyberpunk (a genre I don't think I really have an affinity for), but Gibson's still got his allusive, present-tense, real-time, proper-name thing going, and it doesn't take much of that before I start struggling. ("Still doing heels, she checks her watch, a Korean clone of an old-school Casio G-Shock, its plastic case sanded free of logos with a scrap of Japanese micro-abrasive. She is due in Blue Ant's Soho offices in fifty minutes.")

Plus, I have absolutely no idea why Gibson decided to drag 9/11 into his plot. It didn't fit when he introduced it; it still wasn't fitting at the book's end. It was totally extraneous to the novel's world.

Despite that I was drawn into the plot (eventually; it helped that I got stuck on an airplane with nothing else to read). To put this in a spoiler-free fashion: among other things, Gibson's writing, in a way that strikes me as very personal to him, about the impossibility of existing in today's world as a solitary, independent artist. You can create all you want; you can lock yourself in your lair, your studio, your retreat, your chicken-shed, and turn out the most innovative, beautiful, gripping stuff in the world; but if you don't have an enormous, powerful, and very rich publicity machine behind you, no one will ever see/hear/read what you do. And the most effective publicity machines of all are those with enough money and clout to disguise marketing ploys as spontaneous interest.

Which I know to be true. It was a heart-felt and very depressing read.