SPOOK COUNTRY

"He looked up at a 1992 calendar, level with his eyes, and about ten inches away. Someone had quit pulling the months off in August. It advertised a commercial real estate firm, and was decorated with a drastically color-saturated daytime photograph of the New York Skyline, complete with the black towers of the World Trade Center. These were so intensely peculiar-looking, in retrospect, so monolithically sci-fi blank, unreal, that they now seemed to Milgrim to have been Photoshopped into every image he encountered them in.
—pages 96-97, Spook Country by William Gibson

This novel is a collision of people of different backgrounds, different worlds, each trying to navigate the complexities of a post-9/11 landscape. There is Hollis Henry, former lead singer of the band Curfew, now turned journalist. She is freelancing for the perhaps nonexistent Node magazine, based in London, but operating under the guise of the Blue Ant company, owned by the Belgian Hubertus Bigend. Bigend throws his money, influence, and power around to obtain information. There is Tito, of Cuban-Chinese descent, who is fluent in Russian, is a minor player in a crime family whose members may or may not be related, and relies upon Voudon gods to help him out of tight spots. There is Milgrim, a Rize addict, infatuated by early Christian heretics, who has been abducted by Brown. Brown needs Milgrim to translate Volpuk, a pidgin-Russian used by Tito's "family" when text-messaging one another. Brown is in search of a particular shipping container. There is Bobby, who knows the location of that container, as well as being the technical brains behind a movement of virtual, hypertagged, locative art.

All of their paths eventually converge in Vancouver, British Columbia. This novel, which is taut in pacing for most of the narrative, suddenly unravels during the climax, which is really more of an anticlimax. It also plays as false and unreal. And, that, I believe, is what is so brilliant about the book. The anticlimactic, cinematic, untruthful event upon which the story collapses is probably Gibson's point—it cannot sustain itself. The implosion of storyline and the overhyped non-event event seems to be pointing back at 9/11—which is mentioned or alluded to many times throughout the various narrative threads.

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"If he wasn't lying, he'd been paying people to tell him about secret government programs. The war on terror. Were they still calling it that? She'd caught some, she decided: terror. Right here in her hand, in Starbucks, afraid to trust her own phone and the net stretching out from it, strung through those creepy fake trees you saw from highways here, the cellular towers disguised with grotesque faux foliage, Cubist fronds, Art Deco conifers, a thin forest supporting an invisible grid, not unlike the one spread on Bobby's factory floor in flour, chalk, anthrax, baby laxative, whatever it was. The trees Bobby triangulated on. The net of telephony, all digitized, and all, she had to suppose, listened to."
—pages 157-158, Spook Country by William Gibson

Gibson's favorite toys are present—computer technology, the Internet, cellular telephony, virtual reality. They are wrapped up within some of his favorite themes—the real versus the unreal versus the virtual, privacy and paranoia, the individual versus the collective, the realm of the "gods" leaking into the world of humans. Spook Country is not as brilliant or effective as some of Gibson's best work, such as Neuromancer and Idoru, but still one of his best efforts.

The novel strongly resonates because it is prescient and timely, as all of Gibson's work. Some of the narrative threads are believable enough that they could have been stolen from the front page stories of the New York Times. Others are just crazy enough that you know they have to contain some element of truth. And, the constant surveillance of characters by other characters, amplified through the use of current technology—the classic stakeout, the everpresent sidekick/toadie of one's boss, GPS tracking units, cell phone scramblers, electronic "bugs"—makes one question one's own security and privacy, especially in a nation with The Patriot Act in place.

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Spook Country hints at a culture that trusts in celebrities because of their place of prominent media exposure. It hints at the grandiosity of events that are so unreal and ridiculous that they cannot, they will not, be taken seriously; they are merely games to be played, distractions to be embraced. It hints at a world where our very lives are constantly exposed and examined, where there are no secrets. That kind of place scares me. Oh, wait. We already live there.