A good book, if not Gibson's best

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	• Spook Country William Gibson Berkley Trade, 2008 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 151 reviews view larger image
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it was just OK

I'm new to Mr. Gibson's book and writing styles. I felt this would be a good book to start off with to get back in the swing of things so to speak and it started off decent enough with the 3 different storylines and the various characters encompassing all of them. Hollis and her former bandmates among them bring a little something of themselves to the book. But even still it was just tought pushing myself through parts of Spook Country..a couple chapters would be decent and pick up the pace. Then another chapter comes along and just crashes altogether bringing the pace to standstill altogether. The ending left well sitting there do didnt do a whole lot for me to bring whatever conflict the different characters had to a close. It might just be his writing style in this one, but that's my impression overall.

I will probably check out something else by Mr. Gibson in the future..but for now Spook Country was just a little little dip in the pool instead splashing in making a big entrance like i was hoping for.

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A good book, if not Gibson's best

William Gibson has evolved considerably as a writer since his early days. He has gone from futuristic worlds to the near past with a great deal of aplomb. His last book, Pattern Recognition, about a cool-hunter who had an allergy to brands, was an interesting piece of postmodern fiction.

"Spook Country" is interesting, too, but in a different way. It's about Hollis Henry, a former musician turned journalist who is tasked with finding out about "locative art" (an art piece tied to a specific place on the GPS grid). However, the locative art story assignment turns out to be a red herring; the real story is about a mysterious shipping container that never reaches a destination and a young Cuban named Tito who is trained in being a ghost.

The story follows Gibson's standard fare of several very different plot lines which slowly come together, but the first half of the book is a little bit slow and the ending leaves something to be desired. Hubertus Bigend, Gibson's eccentric billionaire ad-man, who returns from "Pattern Recognition, serves here as Hollis Henry's boss and apparently has a dramatic interest in the mysterious shipping container, but seems to lose interest near the end.

The book is still a good read, but I couldn't say that it's an improvement over "Pattern Recognition". The elements are all there and the telling of the story is almost there, but I think it could have used a little more of that old Gibson fury that permeated his other books. It's almost hard to create a mediocre spy story, which is really what this book is, but I think Mr. Gibson's tendency towards the esoteric has pulled him a bit away from where his true talents lie.

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A Middle book, but a Good book.

Gibson tends to write books in threes. Characters will reappear and ripen, sometimes with useful memories of their lives in the earlier texts, sometimes not. He's also developed the converging-narratives structure to the point that it's just a bad habit he maybe ought to drop, if he can.

The first and third books of trilogies will tend to be the best ones. How many people ever read Dante's Purgatorio? And how many ever read it TWICE? Well. In Gibson's earlier trilogies the middle book was the weak one, relatively speaking. The carryover characters aren't fresh any more and haven't grown as much as you'd hope. They don't have much to say. That's pretty much how it works, here. Hubertus Bigend, carried over from _Pattern Recognition_, is not so much a character as the cipher that holds the place in the narrative where a character might otherwise be. There's a bit too much of that here for this book to satisfy.

The good news is, some of the new material is good, and Gibson's sense of the Favela culture that animates the edge of both the Information Age and the Intelligence Community is still in place and productive. As in his earlier second books, Vodoun makes an appearance, and if I could interview Gibson I'd ask him if that pattern has any particular meaning. There isn't much else to say, except this is a pretty darn good book, a nice book to read while waiting for the better book that is a betting certainty to follow.

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

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