Pattern Recognition – Novel Review
- By William Gibson
- Published by Penguin/Viking
I’ll be straight with you. I don’t like capital-ell Literature. At least, I don’t like the brain-rapingly boring self-obsessed, self-important post-modernist asswipings that win contemporary Literature prizes.
There was a time when English literature was worth reading. Writers were allowed to develop interesting characters. Their narratives were permitted to have actual plots in which things occasionally happened. But somewhere in the ‘70s, I think — probably about the time that word processor technology began turning every novel into a fucking doorstop — it all went to shit. Nowadays, lifelong reader that I am, I would rather watch a Uwe Boll movie marathon than essay the turgid waters of the latest Big Lit Book. At least you can get a few laughs out of Uwe’s on-screen stumblings. There’s nothing funny at all about three hundred pages of meditation on post-colonial suburban angst.
Naturally, the Literature people would insist I’m some kind of knuckle-dragging illiterate, but then they’ve got reputations and scholarship and academic appointments to protect. They can’t afford to admit that their emperors are naked as a Pam Anderson home video. After all, it would appear that Literature writers are no longer capable of writing anything actually interesting. Sometimes they try, and you get sad little travesties like “The Accidental Terrorist” from Richard Flannery — a shrill political tirade masquerading very poorly as a clumsy, generic thriller. So Literature is their one-and-only home, and to save face they must insist it is a castle, a high Fortress of Solitude that looks down on everything else, rather than admit that it has become a squalid ghetto, empty of life and barren of ideas.
On the other hand, when you look at the writers from genre fiction, you find that quite a number of them seem to be capable of crossing the boundaries at will. People like Ursula LeGuin, whose SF and fantasy material includes some of the most elegantly written and thought-provoking prose of the last forty years. Or Margaret Atwood, who desperately denies writing SF while producing beautifully written novels set in post-apocalyptic worlds, or future societies of religious repression… it’s all Literature, honest guv! Or even Peter Carey, who began in advertising, then wrote a couple collections of incredibly fine science fiction and fantasy stories, and gradually worked his way deep into the heart of Booker Prize territory. (Full disclosure: the last time I tried to read a Peter Carey novel, I realised I would never, ever need another sleeping tablet in my life.)
And then there’s William Gibson.
Blazing into print back in the 80s, Gibson unashamedly borrowed from Raymond Chandler — himself one of the most brilliant and literary writers of the golden era of pulp fiction — to create vivid, kinetic stories of a world not too far down the track from our own. Gibson’s short stories were followed by the now-classic “Neuromancer”, and it quickly became clear there was a nova in the skies of science fiction.
It’s difficult to over-estimate Gibson’s influence. His hot, crackling prose, full of colour and vigour and detail, put his characters on a careening runaway bullet-train through complex plots devolving on cutting-edge technology that was always marvellous — and yet so elegantly realized and integrated that it inspired real-world scientists to pursue Gibson’s dreams. Gibson and a few others like him made science, technology and computers goddam cool. Those stories took technology out of the hands of soldiers and scientists, and gave it to artists and students and criminals and businessmen and then smeared the picture until you couldn’t tell who was who any more. Gibson taught us that we weren’t just consumers of the new information technology: we were makers and wielders and explorers and goddammit, we could be dangerous. And the shape of the Internet today, with all its hackers and pirates, file-sharers and mash-ups and social nets and artists and live-videographers, changing the world, changing the way we think and talk and interact and live — Gibson went there first, and bigger, and bolder.
So it’s with a some trepidation that I come to a book like “Pattern Recognition”, out on the Penguin/Viking label. Because after reading it from one end to the other in the space of three days, all three hundred pages of trade paperback, I gotta tell you: this book isn’t science fiction. There’s not a single moment of SF anywhere in it, not an item of tech, not a futuristic idea, not even an alternative-world kinda vibe. This is a book of the here and the now, embedded firmly in the society that we’ve built for ourselves.
And it’s pure Gibson, and its fucking marvellous.
Cayce Pollard is a classic Gibson character: obscurely damaged, forced to be an outsider, yet she is also uniquely empowered, and the keenest of social observers. Cayce has a peculiar sensitivity to logos, brands, and corporate sigils. She is much in demand from high-end marketing people for her ability to discern at a glance whether or not a new image or logo will be ‘cool’, hip and effective, or turn out to be a disaster like “New Coke”. Yet with this ability comes vulnerability; certain images and brands make her physically sick. Tommy Hilfiger makes Cayce dizzy and nauseous, while Bibendum — the Michelin Man — becomes a leering, greasy-fleshed monstrosity that can produce all-out collapse and seizure. And of course, such is the ubiquitous penetration of corporate imagery into modern life that Cayce must rigidly discipline and control every single daily act of living in order to function as a human being.
The story is classic Gibson too. Somewhere out there on the Internet, someone is anonymously releasing tiny snippets of film footage so elegant, so heartbreaking that it has inspired tens of thousands of people the world over, including Cayce. These ‘Footageheads’ scour the web for new clips, and argue at great length over every aspect of the mysterious movies. So powerful is this footage and its effects that marketing uberguru Hubertus Bigend commissions Cayce privately to track down the makers of The Footage — and almost against her will, Cayce finds herself drawn into the quest.
“Pattern Recognition” is so very Gibson-esque that it becomes almost a play on itself. Even the name of the protagonist — Cayce — is a near-homonym with Case, the cyber-cowboy protagonist of Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’. As in so many of Gibson’s books, we find oddly broken people turning to technology to make them human, and more than human: Cayce is no ‘Count Zero’, no Tally Isham, but her peculiar talents and vulnerabilities give her a slender edge, an intuition which leads her through the increasingly dense maze of leads and betrayals, friendships and dead ends, to uncover the identity of The Makers, the people behind The Footage.
Even there, the mirror-reverse linkages to Gibson’s early works continue. For the film-maker herself, producing these heart-stopping moments of cinematic art, is a badly damaged woman, nearly destroyed by technology, permanently bonded to it, martyred by it, simultaneously uplifted and annihilated by it, and the little moments of her art are truly the last vestiges of human identity that she possesses. Compare this with the “art boxes” created by the broken remnants of the orbital Artificial Intelligence in Neuromancer — tiny pieces of jewel-like perfection created from junk by a sentience with both human and cybernetic origins, now reduced to a mute, expressive near-idiocy.
What I’m saying: this book is not only interesting, and compelling — it’s fucking clever as all hell. It picks up the threads of Gibson’s more recognisably science fiction novels, and it weaves them into a brand new tapestry that nevertheless reveals the same images, the same concerns, the same meditations on humanity and society and technology, without ever once making you, the reader, feel like you’re just being dragged over the same old territory. Feels like an SF crime thriller of the highest quality, yeah, but in truth, it’s just now, today, the way Gibson understands it, and it’s fantastic
If you read SF and you’ve never read Gibson, you’re missing something luminous and rare. Start with Neuromancer, and read your way through his list until you get to Pattern Recognition and its sequel (which I’m about to read.) From there, you can branch out and tackle Big Ell Literature if you like, secure in the knowledge that you have seen some of the most interesting of its kind in the modern era.
And if you’re a Big Ell Literature reader — why then, start with Pattern Recognition and work backwards. And when you reach Neuromancer, you can branch out and look into science fiction with new eyes, having discovered at last, at long last, that the castle of Literary Art is really a shabby tenement, a pathetic gated suburb, and the walls aren’t there to keep people like Gibson out: they exist in the hope that they’ll be able to keep you in.
Purchase Now – Help (Cool) Shite
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Ziiiiip! – Supanova Perth 2010 Special
War for Cybertron: Optimus Prime – Toy Review
The Lair of the White Worm – Podcast Review
Tomorrow When The War Began – Movie Review
Four Flies On Grey Velvet – Movie Review
The Kids Are All Right – Movie Review
TV News Roundup – August 2010 – Week 2
Film News Roundup – August 2010 – Week 2
Signs of the Apocalypse Roundup – July 2010 – Week 2
Comic News Roundup – July 2010 – Week 2
Somebody Save Me! – Your Updated Guide to Smallville
TV Ratings & You.
The Top and Bottom 5 films of 2009 – A (Cool) Shite Poll
Tomorrow When The War Began – Chris Pang Interview
Tomorrow When The War Began – Stuart Beattie Interview
Iron Sky – Exclusive Interview
The Beards – Live in Studio
Gamebook Adventures – Interview
Streetfighter Legacy – Fan Film
The Walking Dead – TV Trailer
Ultramarines – Movie Trailer
Judge Minty – Fan Film Trailer
The Clone Wars Season 3 – TV Trailer
