Here, there, and everywhere: a sci-fi travelogue

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	• Pattern Recognition William Gibson Berkley Trade, 2004 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 277 reviews view larger image
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Merely good

Mr. Gibson is an excellent observer of culture and paints a fascinating future. Plotting and characterization are very good, and he can turn a phrase. However, the novel ends on a whimper, without much of a payoff.

One of my favorite Gibson Novels

I'm a big fan of Gibson, especially his future-world "Cyberpunk" novels, so I wasn't sure what to expect when I read the liner notes to find out that this novel takes place in the here and now. Would a Gibson novel be any good without the invented techno-jargon of worlds yet to exist? YES.

There are two brilliant ideas in this book around which the plot unfolds. First is the peculiar allergy of Cayce Pollard (note that her name is pronounced "Case", just like the protagonist in Neuromancer). She is "allergic" to logos and trademarks, even to the extent that she must remove all such symbols from her clothes. This is a brilliant way to turn our attention to incessant creep of visual advertising. Cayce uses her peculiar gift to work as a consultant for, you guessed it, logo design. The second aspect of this book I find fascinating are the anonymous movie clips that Cayce is hired to investigate. These clips gain attention because they are truly anonymous in a branded world. The actors seen in the clips wear clothing that cannot be pinpointed in time. The setting cannot be identified as any particular city. They are silent, preventing cultural identification. Are the clips part of a whole or random selections? Gibson does a good job at juxtaposing the mystery associated with the movie clips and the everpresent attempts to be noticed in the corporate and advertising worlds. It is this contradiction that propells the novel and makes it one of Gibson most enjoyable.

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A wonderful book

William Gibson's Pattern Recognition is probably the most well crafted exposee on the less admirable side of contemporary business culture since Bonfire of the Vanities. Although this isn't really what the novel is "about" per se, anyone with a disdain for consumer culture will enjoy Gibson's treatment of free market entrepeneurship, and the cutthroat competitiveness of career professionals. The 9/11 references resonate well without being too overbearing. Gibson seems to remind the reader of how he or she felt at that point in time, without making a statement that is too personal too identify with. His depiction of internet culture, and specifically how it interacts with the "real world" is equally well executed. All in all, a good book with themes that are familiar to most of us in our day to day lives, but have never really been touched upon by a novelist of Gibson's talent. Definitely deserving of its praise as the first great novel of the 21st century.

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Here, there, and everywhere: a sci-fi travelogue

I picked up Pattern Recognition almost entirely due to the recommendation of David, who read the book last year and insisted that the main character, Cayce, reminded him of me. It's the kind of ego-stroking endorsement no girl can resist. I am the heroine of a William Gibson novel. How could I resist that?

One of the first things that struck me about the book was just how difficult it was to get into. I'm not exactly the kind of girl who digs third-person prose, a small hurdle compounded by the present-tense writing style Gibson employed to give a sense of urgency and momentum to the story. It works well as a device for setting the pace of a story, but on the other hand, when you're more of a Chuck Palahniuk/David Sedaris/first person sort of girl, it's not the most comfortable reading you can do.

The story itself is intriguing, though frustrating in the length of time it takes for Gibson to set up the novel itself. Cayce is a "cool hunter", someone who goes around in clubs, bars, cafes, etc. checking out what the kids are wearing, finding the trends that are going to go mainstream in six months and reporting this to various design agencies. She has a particular talent for this, compounded by a peculiar allergy to logos, that makes her invaluable to any designer trying to jumpstart The Next Big Thing.

It's this job, evaluating the coolness potential of a designer's new logo, that introduces Cayce to Bigend, an over-blown cowboy in London's urban jungle who talks big, dreams big, and just can't be explained, let alone trusted. After work, away from cool hunting and design evaluation, Cayce is a "footage-head", an obsessive fan of an unknown Creator of small clips of a film leaked onto the Internet and debated fanatically at a message board called F:F:F. It is on meeting Bigend that work and leisure combine, worlds collide, and Cayce finds herself working for a strange man she doesn't trust to get the means to find the Creator of the Footage.

All in all, Pattern Recognition is an interesting book, at times strange and unsettling for the prominence September 11, 2001 plays in the story, which was quite unexpected. I haven't read any of the Post 9/11 literature, and the ways the story interacts with the history is both intriguing and off-putting, especially at first when it seems that the story of Cayce's moments on that day are simply red herrings.

But there are no red herrings in Pattern Recognition, though there are unanswered questions and unresolved issues to boot. Still, unlike other novels I've read recently, the small threads left dangling are not damaging to the over-all story of the book, to one's enjoyment of the story, and to the author's world at large. While historic events have a place within the story, the many cities Cayce floats into - London, Paris, Tokyo, Moscow - are as fanciful as they are foreign, and though the story drags in places, the set up gives it enough momentum to keep the story going until the final page.

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reviews: 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, page 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20

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