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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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Spook
Country by William Gibson |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Global William
Gibson’s new novel, Spook
Country, may increase whatever paranoia you feel. The plot is just
confusing enough to keep you interested, but not so confusing as to create
frustration. A virtual magazine called Node
doesn’t quite exist, but its publisher hires a former rock star,
protagonist Hollis Henry, to do a story on art that exists only in virtual
reality. One thing leads to another as Henry the journalist investigates this
genre, and she and readers bump into an artist who uses GPS to create art and
to decide where he sleeps every night, a passel of criminals, and a flock of
spies. The action intensifies in the interest in the contents of a mysterious
cargo container. Here’s an excerpt, all of Chapter
4, “Into the Locative,” pp. 20-24: The
Standard had an all-night restaurant off its lobby—a long, glass-fronted
operation with wide booths upholstered in matte-black tuck-and-roll, punctuated
by the gnarled phalli of half a dozen large San Pedro cacti. Hollis watched Alberto slide
his Pendeltoned mass along the bench opposite hers. Odile was between
.Alberto and the window. "See-bare-espace,"
Odile pronounced, gnomically, "it is everting." "Everything'? What
is?" "See-bare-espace;' Odile
reaffirmed, "everts." She made a gesture with her hands that
reminded Hollis, in some dimly unsettling way, of the crocheted model uterus
her Family Life Education teacher had used as an instructional aid. "Turns itself inside out;'
offered Alberto, by way of clarification. "Cyberspace.' Fruit salad and
a coffee." This last, Hollis realized after an instant's confusion,
addressed to their waitress. Odile ordered cafe au lait, Hollis a bagel and
coffee. The waitress left them. "I guess you could say it
started on the first of May, 2000' Alberto said. "What did?" "Geohacking. Or the
potential thereof. The government announced then that Selective Availability
would be turned off, on what had been, until then, strictly a military
system. Civilians could access the GPS geocoordinates for the first
time." Hollis had only vaguely
understood from Philip Rausch that what she would be writing about would be
various things artists were finding to do with longitude, latitude, and the
Internet, so Alberto's virtual rendition of the death of River Phoenix had
taken her by surprise. Now she had, she was hoping, the opening to her piece.
"How many of those have you done, Alberto?" And were they all
posthumous, though she didn't ask that. "Nine," Alberto said.
"At the Chateau Marmont"—he gestured across Sunset—"I've most
recently completed a virtual shrine to Helmut Newton. On the site of his
fatal crash, at the foot of the driveway. I'll show you that after
breakfast?' The waitress returned with
their coffees. Hollis watched as a very young, very pale Englishman bought a
yellow pack of American Spirit from the man at the till. The boy's thin beard
reminded her of moss around a marble drain. "So the people staying at
the Marmont," she asked, "they have no idea, no way of knowing what
you've done there?" just as pedestrians had no way of knowing they
stepped through the sleeping River, on his Sunset sidewalk. "No," said Alberto,
"none. Not yet?' He was digging through a canvas carryall on his lap. He
produced a cell phone, married with silver tape to some other species of
smallish consumer electronics. "With these, though . . ." he
clicked something on one of the conjoined units, opened the phone, and began
deftly thumbing its keypad. "When this is available as a package .
." He passed it to her. A phone, and something she recognized as a GPS
unit, but the latter's casing had been partially cut away, with what felt
like more electronics growing out of it, sealed under the silver tape. "What does it do?" "Look," he said. She squinted at the small
screen. Brought it closer. She saw Alberto's woolen chest, but confused
somehow with ghostly verticals, horizontals, a semitransparent Cubist
overlay. Pale crosses? She looked up at him. "This
isn't a locative piece," he said. "It's not spatially tagged. Try
it on the street?” She
swung the duct-taped hybrid toward Sunset, seeing a crisply defined,
perfectly level plane of white cruciforms, spaced as on an invisible grid,
receding across the boulevard and into virtual distance. Their square white
uprights, approximately level with the pavement, seemed to continue, in
increasingly faint and somehow subterranean perspective, back under the rise
of the Hollywood Hills. "American fatalities in Odile squinted over the rim of
her white breakfast bowl of cafe au lait. "Cartographic attributes of
the invisible;' she said, lowering the bowl. "Spatially tagged
hypermedia:' This terminology seemed to increase her fluency by a factor of
ten; she scarcely had an accent now. "The artist annotating every
centimeter of a place, of every physical thing. Visible to all, on devices
such as these." She indicated Alberto's phone, as if its swollen belly
of silver tape were gravid with an entire future. Hollis nodded, and passed the
thing back to Alberto. Fruit salad and toasted bagel
arrived. "And you've been curating this kind of art, Odile, in "Everywhere." Rausch was right, she decided.
There was something to write about here, though she was still a long way from
knowing what it was. "May I ask you
something?" Alberto had gotten through half of his fruit salad already.
A methodical eater. He paused, fork in midair, looking at her.
"Yes?" "How did you know the
Curfew was over?" She looked him in the eye and
saw deep otaku focus. Of course that tended to be the case, if anyone
recognized her as the singer in an early-nineties cult unit. The Curfew's
fans were virtually the only people who knew the band had existed, today,
aside from radio programmers, pop historians, critics, and collectors. With
the increasingly atemporal nature of music, though, the band had continued to
acquire new fans. Those it did acquire, like Alberto, were often formidably
serious. She didn't know how old he might have been, when the Curfew had
broken up, but that might as well have been yesterday, as far as his fanboy
module was concerned. Still having her own fangirl module quite centrally in
place, for a wide variety of performers, she understood, and thus felt a
responsibility to provide him with an honest answer, however unsatisfying. "We didn't know, really.
It just ended. It stopped happening, at some essential level, though I never
knew exactly when that happened. It became painfully apparent. So we packed
it in." He looked about as satisfied
with that as she'd expected him to be, but it was the truth, as far as she
knew, and the best she could do for him. She'd never been able to come up
with any clearer reason herself, though it certainly wasn't anything she
continued to give much thought. `We'd just released that four-song CD, and
that was it. We knew. It only took a little while to sink in." Hoping
that would be that, she began to spread cream cheese on one half of her
bagel. "That was in "Yes." "Was there a particular
moment, some particular place, where you'd say the Curfew broke up? Where the
band made the decision to stop being a ' band?" "I'd have to think about
it," she said, knowing that was really not what she should be saying. "I'd like to do a
piece," he said. "You, Inchmale, Heidi, Jimmy. Wherever you were.
Breaking up:' Odile had started shifting on
the tuck-and-roll, evidently in the dark as to what they were talking about,
and not liking it. "Eenchmale?" She frowned. "What are we going to see
while I'm in town, Odile?" She smiled at Alberto, hoping she signaled
Interview Over. "I need your suggestions. I need to arrange time to interview
you;' she said to Odile. "And you too, Alberto. Right now, though, I'm
exhausted. I need sleep." Odile knit her fingers, as well
as she could, around the white china bowl. Her nails looked like something
with very small teeth had been at them. "This evening, we will pick you
up. We can visit a dozen pieces, easily." "Scott Fitzgerald's heart
attack," suggested Alberto. "It's down the street?' She looked at the crowded,
oversized, frantically ornate letters inked in jailhouse indigo down both his
arms, and wondered what they spelled. "But he didn't die then, did
he?" "It's
in Virgin," he said. "By the world music?” After they’d had a look at Alberto's memorial to Helmut Newton,
which involved a lot of vaguely Deco-styled monochrome nudity in honor of its
subject's body of work, she walked back to the Mondrian through that weird,
evanescent moment that belongs to every sunny morning in West Hollywood, when
some strange perpetual promise of chlorophyll and hidden, warming fruit
graces the air, just before the hydrocarbon blanket settles in. .That sense
of some peripheral and prelapsarian beauty, of something a little more than a
hundred years past, but in that moment achingly present, as though the city
were something you could wipe from your glasses and forget. Sunglasses. She'd forgotten to
bring any. She looked down at the
sidewalk's freckling of blackened gum. At the brown, beige, and fibrous
debris of the storm. And felt that luminous instant pass, as it always must. Spook
Country is one of those post modern novels that will leave thoughtful
readers pondering. The author has been prolific as a science fiction author,
and as his time frame has become the present, the difference between science
fiction and the daily news has almost disappeared. Steve
Hopkins, December 20, 2007 |
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Go to Executive Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the January 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Spook Country.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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