Pattern recognition
by Ian Simmons
[ bookreviews ]
William Gibson has always maintained that his novels, while seemingly science fiction, are actually about the time in which they are written, and that fictional time and real time have been on a collision course pretty much since the beginning. While his Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive) took place just beyond the lifetimes of its readers, his subsequent books (Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties) were situated about 20 years hence, and Pattern Recognition is set now, or, in fact, in the recent past, late 2002. Not, however, that you'd actually notice. Had Pattern Recognition come out in 1984 instead of Neuromancer, it would have been most decidedly science fiction, and could just as easily have been set in 2060. Viral marketing, mobile phones, laptops, the Internet, the Russian Mafia, avant garde advertising techniques, these are all things we are entirely comfortable with, but which would have been entirely alien back then. Gibson no longer needs to write about the future because the future is now now. Pattern Recognition's central character, Cayce Pollard, has a grounding mantra: "He took a duck in the face at 250 knots"; Gibson's writing serves to remind us that these days we are taking the future in the face at 250 knots.
Even more strangely, the now Gibson currently writes about has been shaped by the future he once wrote about. The action kicks off in Camden, where Pollard observes the flow of weekend market-goers surging out of the tube. Today's Camden Markets affect a knowing cyberpunk attitude which would not have existed without Gibson, and many's the time I've sat in the Lock food court over a bowl of noodles and reflected that the whole place is Gibson's short story The Winter Market come to life. Think too hard like this and you get vertigo. Cayce Pollard is there because she is consulting for an advertising agency; she is a "coolhunter", someone able to stay ahead of the curve and spot next year's big thing now. She is also hypersensitive to logos and has a supernatural sense of a new one's "rightness" for the market. Her personal passion, though, is "The Footage", a tantalising series of exquisite video clips released online and avidly collected and debated by footageheads worldwide. How are they made? They seem computer generated. Are they part of a larger work? Do they have a sequence? Maybe, maybe not. Who makes them? A "Garage Kubrick" or a known director incognito? Is the Russian Mafia involved? Is it an elaborate marketing scam? Against her will, Cayce gets coerced into finding the answer, which turns out to be far stranger and more dangerous than she imagined. With deft use of EVP (Electromagnetic Voice Phenomena - basically radio messages from the dead) and a well-placed connection to September 11, this is easily Gibson's best work for some time, possibly ever. His elegant voice has matured exceedingly successfully, resulting in a calm, measured prose which brings to mind the brushed aluminium finish of expensive tech. His references to cult objects - Rickson MA 1 jackets, Muji, vintage computers - are well researched and ring true, his characters economically drawn but well-rounded.
I'm sure quite a few people will try to read significance into the central character's name, Cayce, pronounced "Case", which was the name of the hero in Neuromancer, but I suspect this is a red herring and probably completely coincidental. The true linkage is with Count Zero. The plot of Pattern Recognition is more or less a rewrite of one of Count Zero's sub-plots. There, art gallery girl gets hired by mysterious big-shot to track down the creator of nouveau Cornell boxes, gets more than she bargained for and uncovers a far stranger creator than she imagined. Here, ad industry girl gets hired by mysterious big-shot to track down the creator of mysterious film clips, gets more than she bargained for and uncovers a far stranger creator than she imagined. But, to be honest, this hardly matters. With Gibson, the devil is in the details, and the details here are so beautifully crafted. In finally arriving in the modern world, William Gibson reveals himself to be the world-class novelist he has always been. This is a classy piece of work by any standards.
