Spook Country is on deck now and its not fairing well in comparison. I like Gibson’s tech heavy multi-culti aesthetic and his wasabi mashed potato comfort plots but I think his characters are getting a bit aggressively something. Like everyone has too many /’s in their descriptions – afro-chinese-cuban/midget/ninja/hacker/conceptual artist. Anyway, I’ll report back when I’m finished.
Spook Country got better but not that much better. When Gibson wrote about the mysterious footage in Pattern Recognition and Cayce Pollard’s obsessive search for its creator, it felt truly genuine – you got a heroine working on resolving much more than just the central mystery and a web phenomena that I could easily picture myself becoming involved with. This one never got there. The plot was limp and the most interesting characters were sorta peripheral.
Random other observations: to my great relief, the most obvious moralizing re: the Iraq war was delivered in a semi-oracular style by a stoned benzodiazepine addict.
Is “the old man” Winn Pollard? Other than mutual comparison to William Burroughs, I don’t think the text supports it – thank god.
Why are the recent heroines of Gibson’s work so prone to getting expensive haircuts on Blue Ant’s dime?
Here’s hoping the last book of this series turns Spook Country into a pleasant pause in the real action.
He’s always had a thing with haircuts. In Count Zero, practically the first thing Andrea (Andrea? No, Carly? Crap.) does after getting the payoff from brain-in-a-jar guy to find the boxmaker is to go get her hair cut, with some sort of laser pen that’s on the cutting edge of expensive haircuts, IIRC. Then she buys a leather jacket and a shirt for her friend, who might actually be the one named Andrea. I guess he wants his heroines to have nice hair.
I stopped reading Gibson after Mona Lisa Overdrive.
Her name was Angie and it was in Mona Lisa Overdrive that she got the laser pen haircut. That was after she got sober and was starting to work for Sense/Net again. In Count Zero she’s just a little girl. But yeah, he does have a thing for haircuts.
There’s something specific going on in PR and SC with the haircut (and in PR, a wardrobe update) because it’s on Blue Ant’s dime. I think it’s his way of getting his characters into the coolest clothing and hair w/o having them be rich and out of touch. With Angie, she was rich but we’d already seen her rise from the street.
I highly recommend Pattern Recognition, btw.