‘Spook’ takes on 9/11 woes
“Spook Country”
by William Gibson (Putnam, 384 pages, $25.95)
William Gibson inspects the present, and it is just as weird and wired as you suspect.
He sees into the future, and it looks somewhat like the present, except the technology and the paranoia are cranked up even higher.
“Spook Country,” like Gibson’s 2005 novel, “Pattern Recognition,” takes on our Sept. 11 attitudes and woes.
You have to pay attention when reading Gibson, and if you do, you will find “Spook Country” an up-to-the-second thriller that also encompasses a fine joke about our unrelenting fear of the rest of the world, when what we should most fear is ourselves.
Hollis Henry, a former rock star with the Curfew, is trying to make a living as a freelance journalist. She has been invited to write about virtual artwork for Node, a magazine that does not yet exist.
Alberto, the first artist she interviews, depicts the famous and dead, visible only in virtual reality: River Phoenix in front of the Viper Room, Helmut Newton in the driveway of the Chateau Marmont.
Hollis has been chosen for this task by Hubertus Bigend, a very, very, very rich man who appeared as a marketing guru in “Pattern Recognition.” Hubertus reveals the actual task is pursuing Bobby Chombo, an oddball who assists the virtual artists.
Bobby once worked on GPS technology and now uses his high-level skills to assist artists, but also to track a container with something in it – likely headed America’s way.
Gibson jerks readers around initially, as short chapters dart to among Hollis and other mysterious characters: Tito, an athletic genius who delivers to someone known only as the old man; uptight Brown, who is trying to catch Tito in a delivery; Milgram, hooked on anti-anxiety drugs and kidnapped by Brown to translate Tito’s somewhat-Russian secret code; the elusive old man, who is very quick and very sly; and Inchmale, also from the Curfew and still Hollis’ good friend.
Along the way Gibson, as always, astutely sums up our state of affairs.
Milgram lectures Brown that a terrorist “uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society,” the tactic based on “the same glitch in human psychology that allows people to believe they can win the lottery. … Statistically, terrorist attacks almost never happen.”
Inchmale tells Hollis that “America had developed Stockholm syndrome toward its own government, post 9/11.” (Stockholm syndrome describes the identification, even fondness, a captive develops toward the captor.)
It takes quite awhile for the characters to begin converging in a meaningful way; it takes the entire book to answer those basic questions or explain the title, which, like all that Gibson does, operates on multiple levels.
Born in South Carolina, Gibson grew up in the South and at an Arizona boys’ school, but has spent much of his adult life in Canada, interpreting what in this book he refers to as the “secret history.”
It might all make more sense – what’s known, and the suspicion of secrets – if you sit down with a Gibson book or two.