Pattern Recognition

nanojath writes "The title of William Gibson's latest release, Pattern Recognition, seems particularly appropriate. While widely noted for its 'departure' from Gibson's usual genre in that it is set in the more-or-less present day, the themes, characters, and plot devices of Pattern Recognition are fully in line with the Gibson canon. Whether this is a good thing will depend greatly on the individual reader, Neil Gaiman's assertion that it's Gibson's best effort since Neuromancer notwithstanding. The short version: readers who enjoy Gibson's later work will probably find this typically fast-paced mystery to be a satisfying read, if not their favorite example among his post-Eighties efforts. Those who feel that Gibson's fire has been progressively dwindling as he navigates middle age will probably feel that Pattern Recognition is more of the same, the fast-forward technology of Neuromancer an increasingly muted backdrop to the main attraction of psychological and sociological themes." Read on for the rest of nanojath's review. Pattern Recognition author William Gibson pages 368 publisher Putnam rating 7 reviewer Jonathan Hamlow ISBN 0399149864 summary Gibson turns his trademark fast-forward speculative lens on the present with a compelling novel of a marketing savant's search for a mysterious artist. Despite its strengths, Gibson's latest novel has serious flaws.

Pattern Recognition's Cayce Pollard is very much a Gibson protagonist -- a somewhat hapless but sympathetic outsider with a unique sensitivity for a particular class of data. Cayce has what is termed an "allergic" sensitivity to the peculiar cultural ephemera of marketing and branding, and employs the sometimes-debility (she experiences something akin to a panic attack, for example, in the presence of too much Tommy Hilfiger) as a highly paid consultant in the survival-of-the-fittest ecology of the 21st century marketing industry.

She is also a "Footagehead," a member of an internet-based community which obsessively follows and theorizes about a series of enigmatic film clips, apparently components of a larger work, which surface anonymously and without announcement in the various uncharted archives of the internet.

Cayce is led by her current employer (a Millennial marketing savant who's Swiftian name, Hubertus Bigend, is easily the funniest thing in the book) into a search for the creator of the mysterious footage. At the same time, she is plagued by an apparent conspiracy of intimidation, involving the systematic invasion of her privacy and an exploitation of her "brand allergy" gift, and haunted by memories of her father, a security consultant who disappeared in New York in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, and seems almost certainly, but not provably, dead. Her search leads her into the labyrinth depths of post-cold-war politics and economics -- depths it seems she may find increasingly difficult to navigate a path out of.

Comparisons to Gibson's earlier works are easy to find in Pattern Recognition. Its main character, with her savant informational talent, brings earlier characters like Case, Laney, and Silencio to mind. Her wealth-facilitated search for the artist of the Footage is strongly reminiscent of Marley's search for the boxmaker in Count Zero (and in fact Hubertus Bigend seems a more benevolent but still creepy combination of Virek and Cody Harwood). Certainly there seems to be a certain self-conscious recognition of these comparisons in the fact that Gibson gives his female protagonist a name phonetically equivalent to Case. Pattern Recognition is also Gibson's first novel since Neuromancer to follow a single point-of-view throughout the entire book. In this and many other respects it has a simpler and more direct story than any other Gibson novel, though it is driven by the mystery angle and contains no shortage of twists and turns.

I tend to like Gibson books better in multiple readings and I'm curious to see if this effect holds for Pattern Recognition. My first reading impression is that, while a well-written and enjoyable page-turner, this is Gibson's weakest work. The translation of his trademark savant talents, ubiquitous technology, idiosyncratic artists and post-modern robber barons to a recognizable present-day reality is hit-and-miss. Story elements that might pass easily enough in a world of the not-too-distant future ring false in this version of the present, where the comparison to what actually is is constantly invited. Likewise, the introduction of September 11th is forced and suspect. There is something slightly off in Gibson's portrayal here, something revealing that after decades as a Canadian expatriate, Gibson cannot fully align with the American viewpoint any longer. And it is perhaps to soon for this very real human tragedy, whatever its sociopolitical lessons and consequences, to be used as a plot device in a work of speculative fiction. I wasn't fully satisfied by the answer to the mystery of the Footage artist, which seemed contrived, and found the resolution of the story to contain altogether too much deus ex machina.

Gibson's facile prose and knack for telling a fast-paced and compelling story prevent these problems from derailing Pattern Recognition altogether. The book is readable, enjoyable, and not without satisfaction. Gibson is to be admired for risking a chance on a fairly radical direction in his genre and taking on the altogether less malleable present in favor of the endless possibilities of the future. The depths to which he mines his own material speaks, perhaps, to the strain of this effort. Fans will probably accept Pattern Recognition's addition to the Gibson canon, detractors of his latter works will no doubt see it as further evidence of his decline. I hope that it indicates a tentative but promising step into a larger world of narrative possibilities for Gibson, and that this promise will prove itself as our stranger-than-fiction present evolves continuously into the future.

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Comments

I hope...

[skermit]

I hope this book is better than Idoru which sucked total balls. Anybody who's read this book knows the book was a couple hundred pages of anticlimatic boredom. Nothing like Neuromancer (which I just read again to reaffirm my like in Gibson), or my favorite cyberpunk book, Snow Crash. I personally think Neal Stephenson has Gibson beat, with Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and of course the behemoth of a book, Cryptonomicron.

Re:I hope...

[parc]

Stephenson has a very hard time actually finishing a book. Cryptonomicon never really ended, it seemed. Stephenson got 8 or 9 hundred pages in and realized he needed to start wrapping things up or people would never read the book, so he just "finished." Snowcrash had that same feeling -- "Time's up, gotta wrap up now." In that sense, Stephenson doesn't match up to Gibson.

That said, neither Gibson nor Sterling have had their best works lately. IMO, they both shone their brightest in The Difference Engine -- another long book, but one that combined the best of both Gibson and Sterling. Interestingly enough, the storyline is set in the past, not the future, with subtle changes that still make it a futurist-type book.

Re:Hard to beat Count Zero

[Elwood P Dowd]

I couldn't disagree more. His writings about the future were for the sole purpose of illuminating the present. He has now achieved the skill to illuminate the present without employing artifice of any kind.

The reason that Gibson is good has nothing to do with his hard hitting plotlines. It is because he has a fantastic understanding of what is interesting. I'm a third of the way into Pattern Recognition, and I think it's his best book yet.

He's a very different person since he wrote about Molly. Watch "No Maps for These Territories." Please, please watch it.

Re:Hard to beat Count Zero

[cmpalmer]

I've always loved the first line of Neuromancer:

"The sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel."

The funny thing about this line is that it meant "TV snow", which is becoming very rare now that most tuners blank out the picture to a neon blue, so now most readers probably think the sky was unnaturally blue and blank.

This ranks up there with kids not knowing what "sounding like a broken record" means or the joke I ran across the other day on the rec.humor.funny "best of" lists where a stupid parent wants to buy her son a blank CD at the record store because she doesn't know what kind of music he likes. Boy, was she stupid. Imagine, a recordable CD :-)

Gibson, at his best, is a poet and his prose relies on free association of words, images, and technology. When we're lucky, there is a story in there, too. As a futurist, he gets the "feel" right quite often, but I don't know if he even tries to really research the science and technology behind what he writes.

Re:Hard to beat Count Zero

[Masem]

Count Zero wasn't bad, in the sense that he knows how to take several plot threads, seemingly disjointed, and slowly, but surely, weave them together, hinting at the events from the other threads, until the finale of the book. He did the same quite well in Neuro and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

But, one thing that annoys me with Gibson is that his writing style has gotten 'easier' to read since Neuromancer. It took me several times through Neuromancer to understand everything that is going on in the book in the grand sense of things thanks to unique verbal constructions and new terminology that only makes sense on multiple readings, and even then, there's probably small details that I'd catch on the next reading. I even remember having to reread some paragraphs just to make sure I understood what I could, that's how complex his language was then. Count Zero wasn't quite as deep with the text, though it did warrent a couple of rereads to catch all the details, and some of the complex verbage was still there. But Mona Lisa Overdrive, while requiring a few rereads to make sure you got all the details, lacked the deep structure in the writing, making it very easy (maybe too easy?) to read, and why some think this was his weakest work.

What I find interesting from this review and one elsewhere (Salon? Wired?) is that the plot sounds like a mirror of that in Count Zero with the art dealer looking for the maker of the shadow boxes. IMO, that part of the plot in CZ got the weakest treatment, despite being the darkest part of the entire story, and it did deserve another relook, maybe that's what happened here with Pattern Recognition.