Spook Country [Kindle Edition]

I picked this book up from a second-hand stall to take on a trip to New York (which is the location for much of its action). I've enjoyed a fair number of Gibson's science fiction books - most recently his excellent Burning Chrome collection - but this time I've read one of his novels which has a contemporary setting.

That setting is hard to discern at first, as Gibson writes about the present in the same way he writes about the future - as a uneasy, unfamiliar world of hidden meanings and secrets underpinned by a technology which has been put to new and unexpected uses. It's a world where practitioners of locative art create installations in public places that can only be seen by wearers of VR headsets, where iPods are used as mules to smuggle mysterious data to Cuba and back again, and where a container is tracked from ship to ship at sea over a period of many years. A persistent - but quietly stated - underlying theme of the story is post-9/11 espionage, although much of the writing is timeless: for example, there are some memorable bon-mots (e.g. "secrets are the the very root of cool") and noteworthy and insightful technological asides such as this one (p120):

"Organized religion, he saw [...], had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal."

The story unfolds at a leisurely pace as it follows journalist Hollis Henry on the trail of locative artist Bobby Chombo in LA, a young Cuban called Tito and a shadowy old man in New York, and Brown the secret agent who's forcing a drug addict called Milgrim to do his Russian translation for him. The climax brings all parties together in a more-or-less satisfactory conclusion, but the real value of the story lies in the journey up to that point.

Finally, it should be mentioned that this is the second part of Gibson's so-called Blue Ant trilogy, in which it's sandwiched between - and shares some characters with - Pattern Recognition and Zero History, but I wasn't conscious of missing anything owing to not having (yet) read those other two books.

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.

Spook Country is a science fiction spy thriller set in our times; 2006, to be exact. Hollis Henry is a former rock star, now a journalist, set to write a piece on locative art based on the use of GPS systems and other locative technology. This leads her to Bobby Chombo, a strange guy who knows the ins and outs of military navigation systems. Tito is a member of Chinese-Cuban crime family trained in Russian military martial arts and espionage ways, asked to deliver iPods to a certain old man. Milgrim, a drug addict fluent in Russian and able to translate Volapuk encoding, is being held captive by Brown, some sort of operator, perhaps with the government, perhaps not.

It's an interesting mess that sorts out itself eventually. Gibson mixes all sorts of cool concepts and crazy ideas and curious details together to form a rather gripping book. Old spies come out of the woodwork for one last round - the big idea they're working to achieve, that's something quite different and unusual. Gibson's writing is clear and beautiful; I really enjoy his style. With Neal Stephenson he's one of those writers who will tell you a great story and pepper it with all kinds of unnecessary details that'll get your brain tingling and curiosity running.

If you liked Pattern Recognition, his previous novel, you'll enjoy this (and you'll even meet few old friends, too!). Like Pattern Recognition, Spook Country is full enough of contemporary cultural references and trademarks to tie it firmly to our time and make it age in a rather charmful manner. While these trademarks serve less purpose than they did in Pattern Recognition, I believe this book is written to readers who care if the laptop used by the protagonist is a PowerBook or not.

Excellent book, one of the best I've read in a long while.