Great fun to read, but as ephemeral as a video game

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	• Pattern Recognition William Gibson Berkley Trade, 2004 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 270 reviews view larger image
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Great fun to read, but as ephemeral as a video game

With this un-punk cyber-thriller, William Gibson makes a formidable entry into Robert Ludlamland. His unlikely heroine, Cayce Pollard, finds herself over her head in a shadowy international underworld of post-Cold War spies, Russian oil baron-mobsters, Japanese hackers, American web-geeks, Italian thugs, and cutthroat European marketing executives.

Her mission, and she reluctantly chooses to accept it, is to find the mysterious source of the "footage": segments of a film--perhaps already completed, perhaps in process--that has generated a lot of Internet buzz, the type of hype that makes advertising directors unsheathe their Exacto blades. Armed with little more than an iBook and a Hotmail account, she floats from one Starbucks to another, dipping into a dangerous whirlpool of global intrigue and slowly realizing that there may be good reasons why the source of the footage is behind a wall of impenetrable security. Cayce's search is hindered by disreputable colleagues she knows she can't trust and by her visceral psychological allergies to toxic trademarks and noxious corporate identities.

At its page-turning best, "Pattern Recognition" is a tightly spun mystery with a sympathetic (if wholly improbable) lead character and some admirably sharp, cynical descriptions of the transnational global culture. Gibson describes a world nearly bereft of boundaries, whose observable dissonances are no longer a function of culture but rather a temporary result of jet lag.

Some readers have compared "Pattern Recognition" to a scaled-down, up-to-the-minute version of Pynchon's "Crying of Lot 49," but often as not it reminded me, with far less favorable results, of Bret Easton Ellis's "Glamorama" (albeit, mercifully, without Ellis's notoriously insecure put-downs of the pretty-people set). Gibson wants us to believe that his finger is on the pulse of the cultural Zeitgeist, but his pop-art references both "high" (Rodeo Drive, Louis Vuitton, and countless mentions of Prada) and "low" (The Gap, Tommy Hilfiger) have all the staleness of an old issue of Marie Claire found in a dentist's office. Only the gratuitous appropriation of the September 11 tragedy (which Gibson fails to weave convincingly into the plot) and the circa-2002 computerese place the reader firmly in the new millennium.

As ephemeral as a well-designed video game, "Pattern Recognition" is less interesting for its satirical and metaphysical underpinnings than for its bumper-car joyride and impressively executed wordplay. I greatly enjoyed it, couldn't put it down, and found it acerbically amusing at times, but, as a work of literature, it will surely resemble a musty time capsule within a couple of decades.

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Good read.

I had only read Gibson's Neuromancer before and picked this up with no anticipation of it being Cyberpunk. Loved it! Closed the book with a smile on my face. Story was slow in the beginning but payed off. Was definately different, but that's what I liked about it. Might appeal more to the tech heads.

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Almost a thriller

Cacye has a near-supernatural sensitivity to trends - what clicks in the social mass mind, what doesn't, and what's coming next. What's coming now, though, is an incredible video, or set of videos. Brief segments appear on the net, in no visible order, but clearly related. They develop a cult following, Cayce included.

Then she follows them, trying to find their enigmatic source. And someone follows her, maybe many someones, way too closely for comfort.

It's a good thriller, with side trips into the strange marketplace of antique computing equipment and the cryptographic world of steganography. The technical details may be debatable with respect to real world steg, but that doesn't get in the way of a good story.

//wiredweird

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, page 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18

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