Product Description

Tito and Alejandro's Aunt Jauna had all the skills that were needed in Cuba - a thousand tricks of the forger's art. But now the boys are in New York, and it's a new world. Soon they're dealing with a mysterious American who can speak Russian and who seems to be on the trail of something big, something political. Trouble is, as the Cubans find to their cost, he's competing with a few other parties, too.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #136049 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

Review
The SF innovator follows up his mainstream success (Pattern Recognition, 2003) with another novel set in the near-present, as three separate groups chase after a mysterious freight container.Hollis Henry, erstwhile singer for a disbanded rock group, the Curfew, is now a freelance journalist with a baffling assignment from Node, a startup magazine that is remarkably averse to publicity. She's researching "locative" art in Los Angeles, though her employer seems mostly to be interested in the GPS expertise of a guy who facilitates this high-tech virtual- reality genre. Tito belongs to a family of Chinese-Cuban immigrants involved in criminal enterprises in New York, aided by knowledge of Russian gained from a grandfather who worked with Soviet emissaries (and the CIA) in Havana. Milgrim is a drug addict who had the misfortune to be plucked from the streets by Brown, a creepy government operative who keeps him prisoner to take advantage of Milgrim's linguistic skills, needed to decode text messages in a Russian-based artificial language sent among Tito's family members. Gibson excels as usual in creating an off-kilter atmosphere of vague menace: Hollis's wealthy employer and the old man to whom Tito is passing iPods initially seem as sinister as Brown. And the narrative features the author's characteristically shrewd observations about everything from global piracy to conspiracy junkies to cultish rock fans. But the characters are vivid two-dimensional sketches rather than human beings, and the plot turns out to be a wish-fulfillment fantasy about getting back at the idiots and corporate crooks currently raking in the boodle in Iraq. There are some lovely metaphors and sharp insights as everyone converges on a Canadian port where Tito and his cohorts will do something to the container before Brown and his cohorts can get hold of it. But when the mists of mystification clear, what's revealed isn't very interesting.Readable and mildly engaging, but not the kind of cutting-edge work we expect from Gibson. (Kirkus Reviews)

About the Author
William Gibson is the award-winning author of Pattern Recognition, Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, The Difference Engine, Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.

Customer Reviews

Gosh, I wish I lived in this world. Oh! I do!
I've read all William Gibson's books. The Neuromancer trilogy was just wonderful. But then, slowly, his books changed; through Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties and then Pattern Recognition, he moved into a different time. Not really a different genre though. I mean, you could say that Pattern Recognition and Spook Country are thrillers, spy novels, but they're not. They're really not.

Whenever I read a Gibson novel, I find myself wishing that I lived in his world. But then I realise that, basically, I do. And that's what's so magical about them. It's Gibson's take on our existing world that makes you look at it in a new way, from a new perspective. Surely that must be one of the greatest things a novelist can do. His prose is so tight, so condensed and yet has so many echoes, so many extra-cultural references that it's like reading a novel, a map, a web-page, a history book all wrapped up together.

Look up Hubertus Bigend on Wikipedia. That's what one of his characters does. If you do, you'll find an entry referencing this book. This kind of reflexivity is central to this book. The merging of quite separate worlds - rock music, money laundering, marketing, geo-politics, voodoo religion - suggests a side of globalisation not explored anywhere else in this form. Referring to global brand names is simply one side of this - a Brabus Maybach for heaven's sake! (have a look at the Brabus web-site, with sound on) - just grounds this in something akin to a material fantasy.

In some ways, the characters represent these different worlds, or at least different aspects of them. Milgrim, addicted to Ativan (1987 Ativan advertisement. "In a world where certainties are few...no wonder Ativan® (lorazepam)C-IV is prescribed by so many caring clinicians.") seemingly captured by Brown (the secret agent?), finally just walks away, free to go back to his favourite book on the history of heresy. Brown, scary but fundamentally old school and out of his depth, violent in his ignorance, Tito, of indeterminate race and innocent esoteric skills, Hollis, ex obscure rock star, lost all her money in the dot com bubble, cynical, worldly-wise, and Bigend, manipulative but still somehow childlike, playing with ideas and technologies.

The story is good. The characters are good. The premise is good. The execution almost faultless. A gripping read. A fab book.

Another winner from Gibson
It took me a few chapters to really get into this but once I did I found it hard to put down. As usual with Gibson, he comes up with some cultural movements that I hadn't been aware of until I picked the book up: guerrilla marketing in Pattern Recognition and this time locative art. Technological trends aside, Gibson has a wonderful way with language. His sentences tend to be punchy like Raymond Chandler but far more poetic at the same time. I could really just read this book for his use of words- the plot is just extra icing on top. I can picture each scene with a cinema type clarity that few other authors achieve (for me at least) I love the little details he gives us. GSG-9 Adidas swat shoes? How cool. Only little quibble: covert ear pieces as used by the likes of Brown do not have wires attached to them. They work on induction loops like modern hearing aides and have done so for many years.

Intriguing, But Less Kinetic, Fictional Exploration Of Our Time From William Gibson
There's probably no one else I can think of who can write so vividly, and inquisitively, about our contemporary techno-psychological landscape than William Gibson. His 2003 novel "Pattern Recognition" remains among the best - if not the best (of which I am certain) - fictional depiction of American media-obsessed culture in the aftermath of 9/11. It was also his best novel in years, a riveting techno-thriller about "cool hunter" Cayce Pollard's search for the mysterious internet "The Footage" which had acquired a most bizarre cult-like status amongst Internet lurkers. "Spook Country", Gibson's latest novel, is a sequel of sorts, introducing us once more to the enigmatic Belgian advertising mogul Hubertus Bigend, owner of Big Ant advertising firm. This time he sends another young woman, Hollis Henry, an investigative journalist for Node - a magazine which doesn't exist yet - on a rather mundane quest to find one Bobby Chombo, a "producer", whose day job involves checking out military navigation gear. We encounter her, early one morning, in a Los Angeles hotel room, on assignment for Node, collecting information on the local underground artistic movement of virtual reality-based "locative art" for an article in the nascent magazine's debut issue. In classic William Gibson literary mode, there are two other subplots which represent other, still larger, pieces of the puzzle that Henry is seeking to solve, involving Tito, a young Cuban Chinese New Yorker whose family has had intelligence ties to both the CIA and KGB, and the Russian-speaking junkie Milgrim, addicted to expensive prescription high-anxiety drugs, who finds himself quite literally, "joined to the hip" with his pharmaceutical benefactor, the mysterious Brown, someone who has some hidden ties to a military, most likely Russia's.

Looming over this entire fictional landscape is of course Hubertus Bigend himself, who doesn't appear until the end of the first third of "Spook Country". Here, more so than "Pattern Recognition", he comes across as some omniscient "Intelligent Designer", orchestrating the events as they unfold, with the other principal characters - especially Hollis, herself - acting as puppets in some vast marionette theater of his own uniquely Byzantine design. We will learn that Bigend has chosen Henry for his mission since she's a former member of the rock band The Curfew, which, apparently, has had ties to Bobby Chombo. There's a memorable chase scene that plays out along the sidewalks - and one restaurant - of New York City's Union Square (New York City finally makes its literary debut in a Gibson novel, and to his credit, Gibson does a splendid job depicting its unique urban rhythms.). Eventually, the three plot lines converge and intersect, in an ornate, yet tidy, resolution in Gibson's hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia (The Canadian seaport, like New York City, also makes its literary debut in a Gibson novel.). There are references of course to contemporary events, such as the American occupation of Iraq, but Gibson presents them as if they were the literary equivalent of a GOOGLE search, allowing the reader to decide their relevant significance to the novel's unfolding events in a decidedly neutral manner.

"Spook Country" is definitely not one of William Gibson's best novels, but an inferior novel from him is still far more fascinating than many best novels I have read from other, lesser novelists who lack his uncanny ability to depict in hallucinatory, lyrical prose, our Internet-dominated culture (It's an artistic trait I'd expect from the same writer who coined the term "cyberspace" years ago, before the Internet was created as the central, unifying information repository of our time.). It is still one of the best literary achievements in fiction published this year, and one that is artistically, if not stylistically, similar to the themes explored by Rick Moody in his recently published novella collection "Right Livelihoods". Along with "Right Livelihoods", "Spook Country" is the most compelling piece of newly published fiction I have read this summer. Without question, it is still a memorable novel from someone whom I regard as the most important writer of our time.