One of the reasons that I love reading Gibson's work is that he creates worlds that I don't entirely understand but he presents them to me in ways that totally make sense.
I fell in love with Gibson's writing in my undergraduate Postmodern American Fiction class. I read Idoru and it was, I'm pretty certain, the only book in that class that I finished. On my own time, I devoured the rest of his writing and have squealed with delight every time that he puts out a new book.
Amazon.com's page on Spook Country points out that as time has caught up with Gibson's version of the future, he has taken to writing about the here-and-now. This is something that had been rolling around in my brain, but not something I'd pieced together into an actual theory. It was nice to have my hunch validated.
Spook Country serves as a sequel of sorts to Gibson's previous novel, Pattern Recognition, in that one of the main characters shows up.Hubertus Bigend, founder of Big Ant, makes an appearance in this novel as the publisher of a yet-to-be-founded magazine.
Gibson attempts, in this novel, to weave together three separate narratives. Sometimes this device works, bringing the characters in each story closer together and then pulling them apart again. I think it's a fascinating narrative technique, but one that can fall apart quite easily. The problem with having three stories and three story's worth of characters is that no one really gets fleshed out into a "real" character. Gibson is guilty of this, but I can't help but think this is on purpose. I kept thinking that Gibson wants you to see these characters' outlines, but never really see them completely.
Overall, I thought that Gibson gave his audience a good (and suspenseful) story about what it means to live in our modern world with it's push and pull from reality to virtuality and back again.
It's not Gibson's best work, especially as a companion to Pattern Recognition, but it does offer some interesting ideas and it stuck with me long after I finished it.
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