Pattern Recognition

Over the years, I keep trying to enjoy William Gibson's writing. So many people cite him as an influence, he's relatively prolific and he has so many cool ideas, I just keep hoping I'll enjoy his work. I think, “Maybe I've matured enough,” or “perhaps I will ‘get' him now”; but it turns out, I just don't dig his writing enough to enjoy his books much.

Pattern Recognition has one central idea that is really cool–the main character, Cayce, can intuit whether or not a logo will be successful or not, in part because she has visceral reactions to such patterns (seeing the Michelin man makes her physically ill). This is a fantastic idea. There's also the sci-fi-that's-not-futuristic aspect of this book, which is kind of fun. It's interesting to see how dated this book is, which I'd guess was purposeful on Gibson's part (everybody uses hotmail; and a character “pulls out his Palm” at one point).

...and, that's about it, as far as I can tell. Yeah, there's a soooper-dooper-mysterious set of film clips being released, and Italians trying to kill her, or something. But I've no emotional investment in Cayce, or anyone else in the book, because the minimal character development doesn't give me any reason to. And the mystery-clip plot just didn't draw me in.

The start of another of Gibson's loose trilogy's, this one is set more or less in the present day, rather than some dystopian future, and follows Cayce Pollard as she tries to track down the maker or makers of film footage that is being released piecemeal onto the internet. Cayce has a special sensitivity to brands and is used by pan-global advertising agency Blue Ant to determine whether new brands will work or not. Blue Ant is run by Hubertus Bigend (no, really) who then hires Cayce to track down the footage. Thus begins a journey across several continents as Gibson explores the nature of information and our relationships to it, our desire to detect patterns in everything around us. Written at the start of the Noughties, the novel is eerily prescient about viral advertising and our increasing reliance on all things web. I'm not sure if this is a thoroughly satisfying thriller, or even if it's as good as Gibson's previous work, but it is a dazzling piece of fiction and I'll certainly be reading the two books that follow this, Spook Country and Zero History.

I...didn't get it. Honestly, that might be all there is to say. There were a lot of moving parts and a lot of evocative language, but ultimately, it didn't go anywhere to me. I felt like the pacing was so odd, there were topics that Gibson really perseverated on, like: someone broke into Damien's apartment! The apartment was broken into! Was the apartment broken into? We think someone broke into Damien's apartment! All of a sudden, it just occurred to me that the apartment might have been broke into and I need to process it because we've never discussed it before!
The pacing with characters was even stranger: Bigend's ex-girlfriend - who was never introduced on-screen, but was supposedly Cayce's best friend, who would spontaneously send e-mails and I had to remind myself who she was every single time. A lot of characters (like Magda and her brother, Ngemi and Hobbs) appeared from nowhere but somehow were implicitly trustworthy and part of the party?

Also, pilates. So much pilates. And yes, I really side-eye books where the male author spends a lot of time discussion the female protagonist's clothes and workout habits. Also, seriously, what is the obsession of male authors with destroying female character's clothing? This seems to be a trope of male action authors and it's dumb. How does Cayce manage to destroy two priceless jackets, one of which she's had for years in the course of a couple of weeks?

But my biggest problem is that it never went anywhere: the footage, Cayce's surreal logo allergy, her father-the-spy's mysterious disappearance: all of these gorgeous starting pieces didn't grew thematically, didn't grow together and ultimately never felt satisfying on a plot level, metaphysical level or thematic level.