Spook Country
Oct 26th, 2007 by Alex
Proper kudos to the public library, I just finished reading Spook Country. While the book flap reviewer from the San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle praises William Gibson’s ability to “craft sentences of uncanny beauty”, it makes for a convoluted mess of a read. I’m a fairly educated man who loves to read, but I found myself struggling with some of his sentence construction. What follows is more of a commentary on the author’s niche versus the book itself.
Due in no small part to the release of Neuromancer a decade ago, Gibson is credited with the creation of the cyberpunk theme. When I read it a few years ago I thought it was a good read. I followed up with the next couple books he wrote, each set in the not-so-distant future with technology that wasn’t wholly unbelievable. The only book I haven’t read is All Tomorrow’s Parties, where characters from Virtual Light and Idoru collide. Lately, it seems that his books have been set in the present day. Instead of unbelievable technology, he’s been getting into the detailed guts of existing technology. Never in an incomprehensible way, but in a way that feels like… grandstanding. As if he were trying to sell the concept of the technology versus the books themselves. I don’t know how else to describe it.
Now, about Spook Country. Its less of a whodunit caper than a tale of whatthefuckishappening. While just as well written and richly detailed as the rest of his books, I didn’t care for it. The mechanics of a richly detailed book are there, but the storyline itself is weak; usually Gibson augments a decent storyline with technological babble. This time around there was more tech than story, and it isn’t a good thing. I’ve come to expect more from the author. Of his more recent set-in-the-present stories, I liked Pattern Recognition better. I know that most authors couldn’t stop writing if they tried, but this one feels forced. I feel like when an author starts running out of steam they sometimes resort to Faulknerian sentence structure to cover up shortcomings in the storyline or their storytelling ability.
Fans of the author will read it regardless (if they haven’t done so already) out of habit, sheer curiosity or for karma. I didn’t dislike it enough to wish that I could have the time back that it took me to read it, but I definitely wouldn’t recommend it.
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There was some big hoopla when this book came out, where Gibson did a reading of it in Second Life, where he’d made an avatar of himself. I listened to the recording of it, and he just sounded like a dithering old man. It was disheartening. I skimmed a few pages of the book, and found the remark about his prose to be, well, ironic. I don’t think Gibson’s prose ever crackled. Most of the time he seems like he’s fighting the urge to rant about technology.
I do still keep promising myself to read Pattern Recognition someday though. It sounded interesting.
I liked the puzzle in Spook Country better than Pattern Recognition, but PR was better written. I saw Gibson at a signing in Virginia a while back.