Science fiction has long been William Gibson's electric guitar - the instrument he uses to gain perspective, to transform life's ditties into anthems of transcendent strangeness. In Pattern Recognition (Putnam, $26), he goes acoustic, unplugging the overt sci-fi tropes that have marked his work and producing a mainstream product. He succeeds because our real world has such gnarly tech (Web surfing on a laptop with a Wi-Fi connection is functionally the same as jacking your brain into a cyberspace deck) and because his riffs make such a good read.
What Gibson gives us is an international spy thriller comparable to the slightly skewed tales of Jonathan Franzen or David Foster Wallace. His story's central McGuffin is a fragmentary, workstation-rendered romance movie known simply as The Footage. It consists of 100-odd supernally beautiful snippets of video that someone has anonymously posted on the Web. A rabid online cult has grown around the flick, and a Belgian advertising exec (with the improbable name of Hubertus Bigend) hires Cayce Pollard to find the maker. Bigend's goal: Tap into The Footage's primo street cred strategy for profit. The gig isn't unusual for a professional "cool hunter" like Pollard. Her job is to walk around cities, spot new trends, and advise advertising agencies and marketeers how best to commodify them. Indeed, she's so good at her job that she's literally allergic (read: fainting spells and sneezing fits) to overexposed trademarks. She can be reduced to jelly by a drawing of the Michelin Man. She clips the labels off all her clothes, even going so far as to grind down the Levi's logo on the metal buttons of her 501s. Mickey Mouse is just this side of tolerable.
Cool hunting, advertising, and marketing pervade Pattern Recognition - the book's acronym is PR, after all. Pollard "knows too much about the processes responsible for the way product is positioned in the world, and sometimes finds herself doubting that there is much else going on." But The Footage is there to prove her wrong. The Web makes it possible for an independent artist to gain a global following for no commercial purpose whatsoever. Gibson exploits the inherent tension between the monoculture and the emergence of novelty. On one hand, the monoculture lives by assimilating originality. On the other, new art has nothing but the monoculture to launch itself from. It's one of the happy paradoxes of modern life.
Gibson pulls you in with big ideas that make solid material for word-of-mouth proselytizing. But Pattern Recognition's essential quality is the sensual pleasure of its language. Gibson has a knack for choosing - or coining - the right phrase. With a poet's touch, he tiles words into wonderful mosaics. An expressway is "Blade Runnered by half a century of use and pollution." The Tokyo skyline is "a floating jumble of electric Lego, studded with odd shapes you somehow wouldn't see elsewhere, as if you'd need special Tokyo add-ons to build this at home." Who needs sci-fi when you've got Japan? Gibson deftly taps the eccentricities of modern civilization to make our world look like an alien planet.
This ultracool sensibility lets Gibson tell us something new about the events of 9/11. In a flashback, we see the attack through Pollard's eyes: "It will be like watching one of her own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority. An experience outside of culture." The blending of our interior and our exterior is an idea Gibson returns to again and again. Pattern recognition itself can morph into the disorder apophenia, "the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things." Which means that even when Pollard discovers The Footage's maker, it's an ambiguous - and potentially apophenic - resolution. Are the subtlest patterns we see really there? To Gibson, the most satisfying moments of our reality are possibly just reflections of our needs and dreams.
PLAY
Bastard Pop
What's on your iPod?
Come In, Iceland!
Techno Bloom
Heroine Addictions
The Cheat Stops Here
Jurassic Wi-Fi
18-Second Fotomat
Logomancer
reviews
fetish
Say It With Pictures
Traction in Action
Shopping Cart
