October novel-reading

[garran]

Stubbornly, there is some.

William Gibson, Spook Country
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
George R. R. Martin, Fevre Dream
Ellen Kushner, Swordspoint
Ellen Kushner, The Privilege of the Sword

This batch highlights what is perhaps an unavoidable flaw in my method with these posts, or at least it will if a particular regular commenter asks about the book that I expect them to, because I read that book way back at the beginning of the month, and now my impressions are much vaguer than they were at the time. I can probably find something to say, though.

Comments

#1

[garran.livejournal.com]

I thought that you were going to be Brendan! Now I have to come up with things to say about Spook Country that don't assume the other party has also read it.

(Oh, there he is. Well, you can all have one slightly disjointed review.)

Spook Country seems to be the second part of a series that began with Pattern Recognition. It is set in the same world, by which I mean both 'in the present day, plus a couple of months' more new articles on slashdot' (I wonder if people reading in twenty years will have trouble figuring out which fads Gibson invented?), and 'in a world where the events of Pattern Recognition have taken place'; at least, there are characters who appear in both. There is a shared concern with art forms that rely on new technology, essentially populist because that technology is so readily available, and another with tracking the weirder cultural consequences of the World Trade Center attacks. I wondered, when I started, whether this was going to displace Pattern Recognition as my favourite Gibson novel; it didn't, but I liked it a lot, both for what they're doing together and for what it accomplishes new.

I don't mean to play up the degree to which these books are a departure from his previous work, of course. They're different, but this one contains a weary protagonist in over her head in the employ of a mysterious corporation, and a junkie who spends pages rhapsodizing articulately about the precise sort of satisfaction he gets from his fix (his analogy makes me hungry!), and a general almost surreal vividness of description combined with a peculiar preoccupation with pop cultural ephemera; it is, in other words, a William Gibson novel. I do think, though, that the writing, on a prose level, is better and more assured now than in anything he did before.

It's 'spook' as in intelligence operative, but it might also be in the sense of being nervously frightened. This isn't really a 'spy thriller' in the conventional sense, but a book about living in the civilian world, and having only an anxious peripheral knowledge of a general cloud of terrorism, counterterrorism, espionage, war profiteering, vigilantism, and so on. Of the three POV characters, two of them are involved with one or the other of the pertinent sides in the particular minor conflict that drives the plot, but neither is in a position to really understand what's going on; by the end of the book, the general outlines of that conflict, and how it came out, are clear to the reader and at least some of the characters, but most of the larger context -- the identities of the major players, how the aftermath will play out for each of them -- remains obscure. This brief interlude with the spooks was not enough to earn their secrets. (I have more thoughts about the ending more generally, which would be thematically appropriate here, but shall forebear for spoilers' sake.)

The section which is an excerpt from a fictional wikipedia article doesn't read like a wikipedia article at all; it would make sense as a journalistic article, or maybe a press release, but the prose isn't flattened out and non-editorial enough. It might be an errant page that hasn't been fixed up yet, but if that were the case I would expect some acknowledgement in the text (a 'citation needed' would have been pretty awesome); I think it's more likely that Gibson is more familiar with wikipedia as a cultural phenomenon than he is with what it's like zoomed in. The section describing a meal at a Vietnamese restaurant in Vancouver, however, is pretty spot on.

I thought the way the plot utilized a particular character's moderate celebrity was very neat.


-Andy H.

Re: #1

[xorphus.livejournal.com]

And also "spook" as in "shade of a dead person, which is always 'there' in a sense, but can only be seen under special circumstances." And in a fourth way that I got really excited about when I thought of it, reading the book, but can't remember now.

Re: #1

[garran.livejournal.com]

Dude! That explains why that particular new-technology art form! As well, the overlaid VR, which is the 'country' of those particular spooks, functions pretty well as a metaphor for the espionage-world, which also takes up the same space as the world of the commonplace through which most people walk oblivious to the bodies at their feet.


-Andy H.

Reposted with extra rot13 because I noticed there was more spoilery stuff in there than I thought

[garran.livejournal.com]

...cyhf Obool Pubzob naq gur fuvccvat pbagnvare ner urnivyl vaibyirq jvgu obgu nygreangr pbhagevrf.

This isn't exactly an extra meaning, but aside from the ghostly celebrities there were some more traditionally unquiet dead, most especially Hollis' dead bandmate. There was almost something haunted-seeming, or at least indicative of some lingering personal residue, in the way that uvf zbarl sryg fb hapbzsbegnoyr va Ubyyvf' unaqf, naq whzcrq fuvc va n irel hayvxryl pbvapvqrapr sbe gur fgbel'f znva fgvyy rkgnag qlfshapgvbany whaxvr. (Gung qbrfa'g obqr jryy sbe Zvytevz, qbrf vg? Abg gung V purevfurq terng bcgvzvfz sbe uvz ng gur raq bs gur obbx naljnl. Nyfb, guvf frrzf yvxr nf tbbq n cynpr nf nal gb zragvba zl fhfcvpvba gung gung tragyrzna, jub ercrngrqyl engvbanyvmrf uvzfrys vagb fheeraqrevat uvf qrpvfvba-znxvat gb n ohyylvat, zbenyyl-fhfcrpg nhgubevgl svther, vf anzrq sbe gur Zvytenz rkcrevzragf.)

Apparently I remember more about this book than I thought.


-Andy H.

Re: Reposted with extra rot13 because I noticed there was more spoilery stuff in there than I though

[xorphus.livejournal.com]

Yes! That was the other meaning! I like your phrasing of the VR-espionage parallel.

I think you're right about the rot13 stuff, although I'd never heard of that before. What Wikipedia says about it is startling, particularly the fast-food-prank connection (several of which incidents took place right here in Kentucky).