Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
5 out of 5 stars using Qi's 5-star system
I just finished and most highly recommend Pattern Recognition (“PR”), the latest novel by William Gibson, a highly influential science fiction writer whose first book Nueromancer is considered groundbreaking because it spawned the “cyberpunk” sub-genre (it also achieved the popular honor of serving as the basis for the Matrix trilogy of movies). PR feels a bit like another great science fiction story, but it takes place just after 9/11 and makes use of strictly current technologies as familiar as Google and iBooks. Yet Gibson’s entertaining techno-nerd perspective on the symbiosis between technology and culture in our society makes our present look so exotic that he doesn’t need to invent wild new technologies to make the book read like good SciFi. It’s as if he’s telling us to stand up and notice that we’ve become akin to those “billions of consensual players” making up the Matrix in Nueromancer. How does Gibson make today in PR seem like his science fiction tomorrow in Neuromancer? For one, Gibson points out that if we shift our perspectives ever so slightly we’ll suddenly notice the existence of a technology, cheap and currently available to all of us, that’s so powerful it provides nearly instantaneous transport, with only a minor glitch that tends to leave the soul lagging far behind. Fortunately there’s a parallel technology, also cheap and currently available, that allows one to access one’s missing soul remotely until it catches up a couple of days later. Sounds like hard core SciFi, right? In fact it’s just Gibson’s riff on a bad case of jet lag and the comforting ubiquity of internet connections to home no matter where we are in the world. It’s representative of the twists in PR that take the everyday and shows it in an edgy, hyper sensitive light. In the case of jet lag, Gibson takes a mundane aspect of life and leads us to pause and consider its strangeness, the strangeness of the instantaneous movement from one culture to another that we take for granted, the potential psychic costs of skipping measures ahead in our circadian rhythms; “jet lag…it shrinks the frontal lobes. Physically. Clearly visible on a scan,” observes one of his characters.
This is one of many bizarrely entertaining, even enlightening, observations we share with the delightful characters Gibson has chosen to interact with his exotic perspective on our present day. We spend a lot of time in the head of the heroine, Cayce Pollard, a thirtyish woman who’s literally allergic to bad fashion and cheap logos. She first realized her condition during a childhood visit to Disneyland, breaking out in a rash when confronted with the brand name masquerading as Mickey Mouse. She feels ill at the sight of the Michelin Man to this day. (Cayce reveals to those of us who didn’t know that her tormentor the Michelin Man has a proper name, the rather ominous sounding Bibendum.) At the beginning of the story we learn she’s managed to her turn her allergy into a lucrative career as a consultant to the world’s leading advertising agencies and fashion houses, who pay her big money to see if she’ll break out in hives at the sight of their latest designs. Tommy Hilfiger’s entire product line doesn’t make the cut. “A glance to the right and the avalanche lets go. A mountainside of Tommy coming down in her head. My God, don’t they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready-to-wear with liberal lashings of polo kit and regimental stripes. But Tommy is surely the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from source, more devoid of soul.”
Cayce is hired by a Belgian billionaire, name of Hubertus Bigend, to track down the maker of a mysterious sequence of video footage, 135 segments and counting, which have shown up on the web and engendered a passionate cult following of which Cayce is an obsessive member. Bigend, an advertising genius, regards the footage as “the single most effective piece of guerilla marketing ever”, is intent on using the footage to benefit his billions, even though he vows “I don’t count things in money. I count them in excellence.” Although highly suspicious of Bigend’s motives, she accepts Bigend’s backing to better pursue her own obsession with the footage. She’s soon joined on her hunt for the ‘maker’ by a set of partners in obsession, some virtual like a witty eccentric Cayce only knows by his nickname Parkaboy through an online forum devoted to the footage, and one named Boone Chu, a dashing tech wizard bouncing back from a spectacular but vague dot-com era venture that ended badly. The adrenaline starts to increase when Cayce finds her at first merely annoying professional rival has industrial espionage in her past and might be behind the break-in at Cayce’s apartment and Cayce’s alarming discovery that someone is tracking her every move, both virtual and physical.
I found the characters very appealing. One aspect that most characters in the book share that I really enjoyed is acute obsession, a condition which has always had a strong perverse appeal to me. After all, surrendering to a great obsession has some major benefits, as many of those annoying obligations of everyday life, e.g. financial responsibility, punctuality, personal hygiene, etc. fall by the wayside in favor of that singular all powerful focus. Pathological, yes, but amazingly comforting too. I had great fun embracing the well crafted obsession that Gibson has provided in compulsion-soaked abundance. Case and Parkaboy obsessed with interpreting the footage for its own sake. Bigend obsessed with exploiting the footage for financial gain. A stray acquaintance named Voyteck obsessed with building a sprawling work of art out of decaying scaffolding and a collection of obscure mechanical calculators invented under duress by an inmate in a Nazi concentration camp. Cayce’s best friend Damien obsessed with spending a fortune (not his own, of course) filming the excavation of WWII carnage from a fetid Russian swamp. Another character, obsessed with early computer technology, is currently “negotiating to buy Stephen King’s Wang.” The characters’ collection of obsessions drives the narrative along at an addictively manic pace.
Beyond the great characters, which are obviously very funny by design, the repartee between the characters is as hilarious as it is thought inspiring. The humor can be clinical, detached and cynical yet one might argue it is the most appropriate, even healthiest, reaction by characters who feel alienated from a world dissociated from its psychic core and left to compensate with the internet and a wealth of cell phone spectrum. Gibson delivers his humor with real compassion for his characters using precisely crafted language and superb pacing that I find a joy to read, and re-read.
The last thing I want to share about PR is the rather amazing critical reaction. The kudos arrive from every quarter, with the Washington Post critic describing PR as “…one of the first authentic and vital novels of the twenty-first century” and the Seattle Times critic describing it as a “defying all the usual superlatives…Pattern Recognition is more than the sum of these parts. It’s a whole that examines the wholeness and its lack in the debris-filled light of our post 9/11 lives” [note: Wow, I never realized how silly that review was until I typed it out just now! “a whole that examines the wholeness”. You must be joking!]. Although I found PR tremendously entertaining and highly recommend it I must say that I find the level of critical acclaim very surprising. I say this because I found PR entertaining in the way one enjoys overhearing a debate between accomplished coffeehouse intellectuals, albeit in this case the coffeehouse has WiFi, the debaters have iBooks and they frequently pause to check their Wittgenstein facts on Wikipedia. In other words, while I find Gibson’s “nerd intensity” (words he uses to describe one of his characters) very cool and fun, perhaps we should leave the compliments at that level.
Here’s a link to a collection of reviews.
If you read it, please let me know if you share my impressions!
Andy J
I just finished and most highly recommend Pattern Recognition (“PR”), the latest novel by William Gibson, a highly influential science fiction writer whose first book Nueromancer is considered groundbreaking because it spawned the “cyberpunk” sub-genre (it also achieved the popular honor of serving as the basis for the Matrix trilogy of movies). PR feels a bit like another great science fiction story, but it takes place just after 9/11 and makes use of strictly current technologies as familiar as Google and iBooks. Yet Gibson’s entertaining techno-nerd perspective on the symbiosis between technology and culture in our society makes our present look so exotic that he doesn’t need to invent wild new technologies to make the book read like good SciFi. It’s as if he’s telling us to stand up and notice that we’ve become akin to those “billions of consensual players” making up the Matrix in Nueromancer. How does Gibson make today in PR seem like his science fiction tomorrow in Neuromancer? For one, Gibson points out that if we shift our perspectives ever so slightly we’ll suddenly notice the existence of a technology, cheap and currently available to all of us, that’s so powerful it provides nearly instantaneous transport, with only a minor glitch that tends to leave the soul lagging far behind. Fortunately there’s a parallel technology, also cheap and currently available, that allows one to access one’s missing soul remotely until it catches up a couple of days later. Sounds like hard core SciFi, right? In fact it’s just Gibson’s riff on a bad case of jet lag and the comforting ubiquity of internet connections to home no matter where we are in the world. It’s representative of the twists in PR that take the everyday and shows it in an edgy, hyper sensitive light. In the case of jet lag, Gibson takes a mundane aspect of life and leads us to pause and consider its strangeness, the strangeness of the instantaneous movement from one culture to another that we take for granted, the potential psychic costs of skipping measures ahead in our circadian rhythms; “jet lag…it shrinks the frontal lobes. Physically. Clearly visible on a scan,” observes one of his characters.
This is one of many bizarrely entertaining, even enlightening, observations we share with the delightful characters Gibson has chosen to interact with his exotic perspective on our present day. We spend a lot of time in the head of the heroine, Cayce Pollard, a thirtyish woman who’s literally allergic to bad fashion and cheap logos. She first realized her condition during a childhood visit to Disneyland, breaking out in a rash when confronted with the brand name masquerading as Mickey Mouse. She feels ill at the sight of the Michelin Man to this day. (Cayce reveals to those of us who didn’t know that her tormentor the Michelin Man has a proper name, the rather ominous sounding Bibendum.) At the beginning of the story we learn she’s managed to her turn her allergy into a lucrative career as a consultant to the world’s leading advertising agencies and fashion houses, who pay her big money to see if she’ll break out in hives at the sight of their latest designs. Tommy Hilfiger’s entire product line doesn’t make the cut. “A glance to the right and the avalanche lets go. A mountainside of Tommy coming down in her head. My God, don’t they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready-to-wear with liberal lashings of polo kit and regimental stripes. But Tommy is surely the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from source, more devoid of soul.”
Cayce is hired by a Belgian billionaire, name of Hubertus Bigend, to track down the maker of a mysterious sequence of video footage, 135 segments and counting, which have shown up on the web and engendered a passionate cult following of which Cayce is an obsessive member. Bigend, an advertising genius, regards the footage as “the single most effective piece of guerilla marketing ever”, is intent on using the footage to benefit his billions, even though he vows “I don’t count things in money. I count them in excellence.” Although highly suspicious of Bigend’s motives, she accepts Bigend’s backing to better pursue her own obsession with the footage. She’s soon joined on her hunt for the ‘maker’ by a set of partners in obsession, some virtual like a witty eccentric Cayce only knows by his nickname Parkaboy through an online forum devoted to the footage, and one named Boone Chu, a dashing tech wizard bouncing back from a spectacular but vague dot-com era venture that ended badly. The adrenaline starts to increase when Cayce finds her at first merely annoying professional rival has industrial espionage in her past and might be behind the break-in at Cayce’s apartment and Cayce’s alarming discovery that someone is tracking her every move, both virtual and physical.
I found the characters very appealing. One aspect that most characters in the book share that I really enjoyed is acute obsession, a condition which has always had a strong perverse appeal to me. After all, surrendering to a great obsession has some major benefits, as many of those annoying obligations of everyday life, e.g. financial responsibility, punctuality, personal hygiene, etc. fall by the wayside in favor of that singular all powerful focus. Pathological, yes, but amazingly comforting too. I had great fun embracing the well crafted obsession that Gibson has provided in compulsion-soaked abundance. Case and Parkaboy obsessed with interpreting the footage for its own sake. Bigend obsessed with exploiting the footage for financial gain. A stray acquaintance named Voyteck obsessed with building a sprawling work of art out of decaying scaffolding and a collection of obscure mechanical calculators invented under duress by an inmate in a Nazi concentration camp. Cayce’s best friend Damien obsessed with spending a fortune (not his own, of course) filming the excavation of WWII carnage from a fetid Russian swamp. Another character, obsessed with early computer technology, is currently “negotiating to buy Stephen King’s Wang.” The characters’ collection of obsessions drives the narrative along at an addictively manic pace.
Beyond the great characters, which are obviously very funny by design, the repartee between the characters is as hilarious as it is thought inspiring. The humor can be clinical, detached and cynical yet one might argue it is the most appropriate, even healthiest, reaction by characters who feel alienated from a world dissociated from its psychic core and left to compensate with the internet and a wealth of cell phone spectrum. Gibson delivers his humor with real compassion for his characters using precisely crafted language and superb pacing that I find a joy to read, and re-read.
The last thing I want to share about PR is the rather amazing critical reaction. The kudos arrive from every quarter, with the Washington Post critic describing PR as “…one of the first authentic and vital novels of the twenty-first century” and the Seattle Times critic describing it as a “defying all the usual superlatives…Pattern Recognition is more than the sum of these parts. It’s a whole that examines the wholeness and its lack in the debris-filled light of our post 9/11 lives” [note: Wow, I never realized how silly that review was until I typed it out just now! “a whole that examines the wholeness”. You must be joking!]. Although I found PR tremendously entertaining and highly recommend it I must say that I find the level of critical acclaim very surprising. I say this because I found PR entertaining in the way one enjoys overhearing a debate between accomplished coffeehouse intellectuals, albeit in this case the coffeehouse has WiFi, the debaters have iBooks and they frequently pause to check their Wittgenstein facts on Wikipedia. In other words, while I find Gibson’s “nerd intensity” (words he uses to describe one of his characters) very cool and fun, perhaps we should leave the compliments at that level.
Here’s a link to a collection of reviews.
If you read it, please let me know if you share my impressions!
Andy J
posted by Andy J at 4:03 PM
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