Pattern Recognition

Grand fun. Felt like a John Carre novel, but then it felt like a foreshadowing of the whole QAnon thing. Plenty of twists and turns, but not too too contrived. OK, maybe the resolution was a bit too resolved. Still, wonderfully paced, excellent flavors of places and people.

Gibson evokes the eerie liminal state of the world Post 9-11, which at the time seemed so monumental and strange and epochal and which now seems impossibly distant and remote. Case Pollard with her allergy to brands and sensitivity to corporate logos that allows her to perceive whether they will succeed or not is hired by a marketing magnate to track down the maker of a series of strangely compelling film fragments appearing online. There follows a strange trek through Camden markets and Tokyo dives and run-down caravans on an abandoned military base, all the while dogged by break-ins and surveillance and a creepy bit of curated psychological warfare. Case, haunted by the disappearance of her father on 9-11, pursues the maker of the show more film, of which she is an obsessive fan despite misgivings about her employer, not in the hope of anything as un-post 9-11ish as catharsis or closure, but seeking some sort of connection and understanding. show less

I've followed the progression of Gibson's books ever since I got Neuromancer for Xmas in 1984, and have enjoyed each one immensely. I can especially appreciate his "less is more" approach in the way he's able to pack more slick punch into one or two run-on sentences than someone else would struggle to in the same number of paragraphs.Pattern Recognition is probably Gibson's most contemporary story, set just a year after 9/11. but everything he is good at showing is still there. Cities laid out like neon labyrinths, the internet depicted as both a community and isolation chamber, and artists liberated from the stigmata of obsequiousness. He even self-references Neuromancer by naming his protagonist "Cayce."What I don't remember from show more previous books(or perhaps I'm just more sensitive to it now) is the near-omnipresence of brand names peppered all throughout the book, even integrating themselves into the storyline and Cayce's backstory. Hilfiger, Prada, Sony, British Airways, Hummer, and Apple are all equally represented, especially the latter, from which one can only assume that Gibson is a Mac freak. With this much virtual advertising in a single book, does its mere presence compromise the integrity of the writer, or can the reader simply accept it as the merging of vocabularies. Some writers use slang, others dialects and alien tongues, and Gibson(and his contemporaries) use branding.Excellent throughout, nevertheless. So good, that when I finished it, I wanted to start all over again. show less

One of the best examples of Gibson's ability to assimilate the sum total of modern life into a work of alleged science fiction. I say alleged because with every passing year, the premise of his books seem more plausible.

Pattern Recognition weaves post 9-11paranoia, fashion, post Soviet Union economics, independent film, and Otaku lust into a page turning delight. The author's ability to dive deep into social observation and report the findings back in a fistful of simple, salient words is remarkable. It almost makes me think social ficition, or psyche-fiction would be a more apt term for these kind of books. Like some kind of carnival mirror that shows us a slightly skewed version of our lives.

To be honest, it's more of an ideas, or show more concept book than a sci-fi adventure. More of a chess game than a football game, if you can stomach a sports metaphor. show less

Very impressive. It still feels like a Gibson novel, but he’s evolved as a writer, and it’s a fascinating rethinking of his themes and concerns, and how he goes about telling a story. Initially, the constant brand talk reminded me of American Psycho, but obviously his goals for doing that are completely different. It also reminds me of compatriot writer Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net, but this is more interested in culture and art than that novel. The final thing it reminds me a bit of is Lem’s Chain of Chance, in how it deals with coincidence and how we can miss it when evaluating events, and instead search for non existent connections and conspiracies.
I was going to go for another Gibson novel right away, but I don’t show more want to spoil the vibe. The novel might have satisfied my Gibson needs for the moment. Highly recommended. show less

And so, finally, the real world catches up with William Gibson. In 'Pattern recognition', he was written a typical Bill Gibson novel, but in this case it is unrecognisable as science fiction because his imagination now depicts the world we are living in.

His principal character, Cayce Pollard, makes a living from her acute sensitivity to logos, coupled with a semiotic equivalent to perfect pitch - she can instantly tell whether a logo or house style will work, will 'click' with its intended market and the zeitgeist. If there are no such people at large in the world today, if there is no real-life Cayce Pollard, then there ought to be, because design is so embedded in our modern market-oriented world that it needs to be got right for the show more benefit of companies and the sanity of the rest of us. There have been enough tales of marketing disasters for any acute company to understand the need for such a talent (the one example which comes close to this is the late Woolworth company marketing a range of bedroom furniture for young girls under the name "Lolita"); and such a person with such a talent would probably find other, more ordinary, jobs either unfulfilling or even physically impossible.

The MacGuffin of the novel (though it is essential to the plot) is some found video footage that keeps emerging on the Internet; Pollard is a fan of the footage and contributes to ongoing Internet forums on its origin, background and meaning. Gibson weaves this plot strand into a corporate thriller that spans the globe.

Throughout, Gibson displays a great sensitivity of place. The sections set in North London had the bite of authenticity for me; I accurately predicted where he had stayed and who had put him up, based on those parts of the novel! On that basis, he is probably familiar with the other places in the book.

The plot would have been total science fiction if the book had been written no more than ten years before; the world has changed in that time so fundamentally that a modern reader could never visualise it as such. Looking back to the writing of the book in 2002 from the perspective of nearly ten years later, it hasn't dated, just become more relevant. Indeed, about the one item that might have seemed vaguely science fictional - "a project to build a new kind of visually-based search engine" (p.273 in my edition) - has come to pass. Also: this is the first Gibson novel that I've read that has a lot of humour in it, including a running joke about a major character's name...

In short, the Zeitgeisty novel of our times. show less

Normally I read the kind of literary fiction where pages go by without anyone so much as thinking of doing something, let alone actually leaving the house. I'm not allergic to action, but there has to be something in there to engage the brain as well as the adrenal glands. I'm glad to say I was totally taken in by this novel. The plot was perfectly paced for my tastes, it asks interesting questions and the protagonist is totally engaging from very early on. I wanted CayceP to succeed, although it wasn't always clear what that might entail. Most of the other characters were well drawn, although Dorotea, and Hubertus Bigend (!), were a bit overdone. Because Cayce is so interesting I actually wanted to look up the cultural and design show more references I wasn't familiar with, whereas I normally consider that stuff just to be authorial posturing and skim over it. What's more, I found those references did help to flesh out her character, since her aesthetic is such an important part of who she is.

The prose is perfectly judged as well; it's not a genre that is likely to be bogged down by lyricism, but there is wit, precise action and moments of beauty beautifully described. I'll probably return to my usual world of literary fiction for a while, but next time I want a rollicking good story I'll probably turn again to William Gibson. show less