Still Thinking About Spook Country

I finished William Gibson's Spook Country last week and I'm still thinking about it; that's unusual for me as I normally just move on when I've finished a novel and save the thinking for when I re-read it in a year or so. But Spook Country has been sticking with me and I think it's because I left the novel without any real sense of what had happened.

Strike that, I understood what had happened, I just wasn't sure why it had. I've been reading some reviews and interviews in an attempt to figure it out. I'm still not sure I've got it, but here's a few of the insights I gleaned:

First, I'm not alone. Most of the professional reviews I read expressed some degree of dissatisfaction with the plot, or, more specifically, with its resolution.

Also, Gibson was right when he guessed, in an interview with Amazon.com, that "I must have readers from 20 years ago who are just despairing of the absence of cyberstuff, or girls with bionic fingernails." A lot of the reader reviews I looked at did seem to be less concerned with the lack of clarity in the plot than the lack of mirror-shaded bionic fingernail girls. For what it's worth, I agree with his follow-up to that statement, "Nothing dates more quickly than an imaginary future. It's acquiring a patina of quaintness even before you've got it in the envelope to send to the publisher." Need proof? Watch Blade Runner (it's just been re-re-released on DVD) and look for the "futuristic" details that Ridley Scott and his production team got wrong or missed completely. (Unless, of course, public phone booths make a major comeback and we all get flying cars within the next ten years.)

Finally, I (and many others judging by the reviews) may have approached Spook Country with too many expectations of what makes a William Gibson novel. In a July 2007 column for scifi.com* John Clute (editor of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encylopedia, one of my favorite between-novel reads) makes a good argument that Spook Country is actually a comic novel. With that in mind, I can understand why many readers (myself included) felt a little let down by the distinct lack of danger and death (not to mention the aforementioned bionic fingernail girls.) It's one of the more unique takes on the book, and one I look forward to considering during the re-read.

One of the most interesting things I learned, though, actually has little to do with my issues with the book. In that Amazon interview, Gibson says that the social structure in Spook Country (and, by extension, our world today) is actually very close to that of his earliest novel, Neuromancer. Both books, he says, feature characters who are either incredibly wealthy and powerful or poor, powerless and often pushed into quasi-legal or outright criminal behavior by their circumstances.

The hero of Neuromancer has had his career as a "console cowboy" prematurely and surgically terminated by his former employers and takes an offer to commit crimes on behalf of a wealthy and mysterious employer in exchange for the chance to re-enter cyberspace. Hollis Henry, one of Spook Country's protagonists, was the lead singer for a popular indie rock band who lost big when her band broke up and the burst of the dot-com bubble took her savings. She finds herself freelancing for a magazine which may or may not exist, headed by a wealthy and mysterious employer who may be involved in questionable business practices.

Gibson said it best: "the thing about the world of Neuromancer is that there is no middle class. There are only very, very wealthy people and desperately poor, mostly criminal people. It's a very Victorian world, and when I was writing Spook Country I kept running up against that feeling that the world I'm actually trying to predict is becoming more Victorian, not less. Less middle class, more like Mexico, more like Mexico City. And I think that's probably not a good direction." I tend to agree, and upon reading that I immediately flashed back to Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, which takes that whole "very Victorian world" idea to its logical conclusion.

I guess I know which book to throw on the re-reading stack next.

*A warning to those who attempt reading John Clute's review: have a dictionary, thesaurus and, perhaps, a machete close at hand. Mr. Clute is without doubt an excellent critic and academician; unfortunately, he also writes like one. There were points where I wondered if I was reading a sci-fi review or somebody's term paper. Seriously, John, who uses the word circumambiate? I don't even think that's a real word, John. Google keeps asking me if I meant "circumambulate." Did you, John? Did you?