Book report: Spook Country, by William Gibson

Book report: Spook Country, by William Gibson

[Although I’m publishing this on Halloween, the title has nothing to do with ghosts. More like clandestine activities, and the mood of the country, I think.]

I can’t read William Gibson’s books only once, and Spook Country is no exception. When I got to the end, I immediately started back at the beginning again. I just had to.

Gibson started out writing science fiction, “Neuromancer” being the most famous example. He helped create the genre of cyberpunk, and coined the word “cyberspace.” What he writes these days isn’t science fiction: there are no omniscient computers, surgically implanted telescopes, clones, or arcologies. But there is still the sense of the uncanny about his stories. In a Gibson world, everything is significant, everything connects, and everything reflects the whole of human civilization to that point. While I’m reading a Gibson book, I find myself narrating everything I see and do, but nowhere near as well as his characters can.

I’ve mentioned before how Gibson can use a few words to describe something, and yet leave you with the impression that you now understand something vast and significant. Here’s an example: one of the characters enters an upscale cafeteria at an art gallery, and then there’s this: “The people ahead of them looked as though they could each identify a dozen classic modern chairs by the designer’s name.” Isn’t that brilliant? Doesn’t that immediately give you a sense of these people and this place and the kind of circles they move in and the culture as a whole that has all this?

How about this one, a character recalling the windows of storefronts in his native Havana, Cuba: “There had been no glass in those windows. Behind each crudely articulated metal grating, at night, a single fluorescent tube had cast a submarine light. And nothing on offer, regardless of daytime function: only carefully swept floors and blotched plaster.”

Finally, this, where someone moving from their apartment in NYC deliberately leaves a vase behind, on a hidden shelf up on the roof of the building: “He stood the vase on a shelf, shifted a can aside, put the vase against the wall, then moved the can back, leaving the vase concealed between two cans. In the way of these rooftops, it might be found tomorrow, or remain untouched for years.” To me, that just captures something about New York, and about how people are.

I’m in awe of prose like this. For many writers, the description is the most boring part of the book. Not for Gibson. His description is an invitation to a world of special knowledge.

And, as a bonus, there are also characters and a plot in this novel!

Each of the three main characters is in service – perhaps willing, perhaps unwilling – to someone else. Hollis Henry is the thirtyish former lead singer of the 1990s rock group The Curfew, and she keeps running into former fans and other people who know her face from an iconic poster of the band. These days, she’s trying to make ends meet as a freelance journalist, which brings her into the service of millionaire advertising guru Hubertus Bigend, who recruits partially-willing strangers to carry out spy-like missions to satisfy his curiosity about mysteries he stumbles across/causes. (Bigend was also in Gibson’s previous book, “Pattern Recognition,” where he employed Cayce Pollard on a similar operation.)

Tito is a young Chinese Cuban man who was relocated to NYC as a child when his large extended family fled Cuba. He was raised doing spy tradecraft the way other kids are raised doing fingerpainting. He has formidable physical and observational skills, which his family has put in the service of “the old man”. He carries out assignments unquestioningly, knowing almost nothing about the vast machinations of which he is a single, but vital, cog.

Milgrim is a well-educated man who formerly held fairly important government positions where his skill as a Russian translator was put to good use, but now he’s a Valium addict, living only for his next dose. He is a veritable slave to an operative named Brown, who is following and watching Tito and “the old man,” and providing Milgrim with a steady supply of Ativan so that Milgrim can translate the family’s peculiar dialect of Russian text messages. Milgrim is a scavenger and a kleptomaniac, stealing whatever he can, either to resell for drugs, or to escape Brown’s blunt and monosyllabic domination. Brown is working for unknowns whose purposes run counter to the old man’s.

The old man is the one driving this plot. As we eventually learn, he is a former senior US intelligence official who has branched out on his own as a vigilante/prankster. He has his own agenda, which includes discommoding the wealthy who profit from America’s wars illegally and (almost) untouchably, and his plans are complex and ingenious. He’s having a fun retirement.

Hollis is a congenial companion as she uncovers various layers of Bigend’s latest mystery, which turns out to intersect with the old man’s current operation. She interacts with former bandmates Reg Inchmale and Laura “Heidi” Hyde in a way that makes us feel that we’re behind the scenes of some rock documentary. There is one scene between Hollis and Heidi that is simply priceless, a gem.

This is a fun book, a little light on plot, but full of good will, and Gibsonian excursions into esoterica like locative art, GPS tracking, and the peculiar world of shipping containers. The good guys win, the bad guys lose, and it leaves us wanting to know what happens next for all of them. That’s my definition of a good book.

Highly recommended