Ask anybody who’s read William Gibson to describe him, and the perceptions pile up: Supercool literary prophet of cyberspace, new technology, murky conspiracy. His last book, Pattern Recognition, was full of cool surfaces, ruminations on the seductiveness of advertising, and the unease of living in the wake of 9/11.
And then you get a book like Spook Country, the paperback release of which is now sending Gibson to stops around the country, including an appearance in Lexington on June 13. Spook Country has the technology, of course — Gibson’s take on “locative art,” a sort of combo between virtual video reality and People magazine, makes you wonder if celebrity’s next horizon may be some sort of virtual-reality rendering that takes you inside the birthing chamber of the Jolie-Pitt clan, or along for a late-night careen with Britney — but it also assembles an unruly, oddly endearing cast of characters who would not be out of place in a Carl Hiaasen novel. Spook Country is what might happen if John le Carre decided to write a book with Jimmy Buffett after perusing the collected output of Wired magazine: rollicking tech-driven spycraft. A friend of Gibson’s told him that the book is his most comic novel. He’s right.
The driving force in all this is a character simply called “the old man,” described by Gibson as “a disgruntled old-school U.S. intelligence guy. He’s just not happy.” Also, Gibson notes, he’s probably crazy. He’s masterminding an operation to contaminate a fortune that’s probably being funneled from the United States into something godawful. He doesn’t want the money. He just wants to make sure it gets a touch of the old glow-in-the-dark before it wanders off to whatever nefarious purpose he’s pretty sure it will wind up servicing. The genius of Spook Country lies in its ability to convince you that this is not such a bad thing.
Also along for Spook Country is a broke has-been rock star who think she’s a journalist, but is really getting played by a stratospherically rich spy hobbyist; a dim but hateful spy who enslaves a drug-addled translator; and a young Cuban-Chinese tough who’s caught up in something that seems like the spy version of “the force” in “Star Wars.” (Cynics have noted that the wannabe journalist doesn’t write a single word over the course of the book. In her defense, it must be noted that the note-taking, interviews, writing and fact-checking process is often exactly as enthralling as changing a cat litter box 247 times in a row: It gets done, but do you really need to hear about how many quarts of Lysol are sacrificed in the process?)
It’s Milgrim, the druggy translator who’s hijacked into providing translation services for the dull side, who really steals the book. And, as Gibson notes, Milgrim is a character who simply wandered in. He was writing a chapter in which Brown, the humorless kidnapper, sets a bug in the apartment of Cuban-Chinese spy Tito. The action had to be observed by some nameless, faceless character: “By the time I’d written the chapter I had Milgrim. … He very quickly assumed his own peculiar dimensions in spite of me. That’s what I most enjoy about writing fiction, when that happens. … He sort of forced himself on me.”
Milgrim is, incidentally, not named after landmark psychology researcher Stanley Milgram, who showed the world how quickly people will wander into barbarous behavior when ordered to do so by an authority figure. Milgrim is, Gibson says, a common name in Virginia, where he grew up. As a character, Milgrim is a cypher, and yet the kind of endearing cipher who becomes attached to a crackpot religion book he finds in the pocket of a coat he stole and prefers a Toyota Corolla for purposes of crouching unseen.
There’s a lot of attention in Spook Country to how you might contaminate hundred-dollar bills — defined by Gibson as “the international currency of bad sh-t.” But there’s also speculation on what how the next frontier in art may be: self-guided tours of sites in which are erected digital “images” of, say, River Phoenix dying outside the Viper Room. There’s a magnetic levitating bed. There are pretentious hotels, big money and a rather detailed description of the distinctions between private planes. Should you ever happen unexpectedly upon a few ten million dollar piles, you’ll want to know these things.
Spook Country
: It’s the United States, and parts of Canada, but it’s also a broader territory. It’s where Jay Gatsby and Daisy may have wound up if they wandered into a starstruck Internet era: The boundaries aren’t clear, and you’re not really sure where anybody’s loyalties lie. Still, there’s plenty of money, and everybody’s charging around using the latest technology to be committed to something, and they’re all pretty sure they’re right.
William Gibson, author of Spook Country:
–On his previous books: “I don’t re-read my previous work unless for some reason I absolutely have to. … If I were a 12-year-old reading Neuromancer, my first novel, I’m sure I would get 20 pages into it and decide that the mystery is, where are all the cell phones? Or, why has the Soviet Union returned?
–On why it’s impossible to predict the future with “futuristic” novels: “Novels with imaginary futures are never about the future in any way. They’re always about the day in which they were written.”
–On his next book: “I always allow myself the luxury of having no idea what it might be until I have the blank screen in front of me.”
–What has Gibson recently read? He’s taken with two very different books: Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, “my absolute favorite of the past year or so,” and Halting State, by Charles Stross, which he calls “an amazing piece of science fiction.” Gibson says he only wants to read “science fiction that couldn’t have been written 10 years ago.”
–Does anything bother him about the Internet? Not really: “I’m more concerned with various corporate and governmental efforts to bring it under control than I am with what people are actually doing with it. … It’s an emergent technology, and social change is almost exclusively driven by emergent technologies. … either directly or indirectly. It’s emerging, and it’s changing what we do, and we change before we have a chance to decide whether to change.”
IF YOU GO:
William Gibson will discuss and sign Spook Country on June 13 at 7 p.m. at Lexington’s Joseph-Beth Booksellers.
no offense but the typeface is too small and thus i am not going to strain to read this which otherwise i would