Books 2007 #9 Spook Country by William Gibson

Spook Country I’ve been trying to decide whether or not to be disappointed by this book. It wasn’t as good as I’d hoped. That’s for certain. I guess the question is- can a book that is merely good be a disappointment? After chewing on it for a couple of days, I think the answer is yes.

This is a good book. The thing is, for my money at least, most of Gibson’s output has been better than good. The first book in the Bridge Trilogy, Virtual Light, and this, his latest, are probably the only exceptions. That this book followed (and is set in the same universe as) Pattern Recognition, certainly doesn’t help matters. Pattern Recognition is one of my favorite books of the decade so I had really high hopes for this one. While Spook Country has its moments, it really can’t hold a candle to Pattern Recognition by any measure you care to apply to it. The characters are pretty cool, but no one stands out like Cayce Pollard, and the mystery is pretty interesting, but is nowhere near as engrossing as the story of “the footage.” Even ignoring the (probably unfair) comparisons to Pattern Recognition, there’s the plain fact that this book never really grabbed me by the balls. Gibson’s book generally do that. This one? It took me maybe a week to read it. I think I read Neuromancer in 24 hours.

Hopefully, this, like Virtual Light before it will improve with time as other books fill in the spaces around it. Once I’d read though the Bridge Trilogy once and then later revisited the books, I found that my appreciation of Virtual Light grew. It still wasn’t great, but it was better and maybe that’s what we’ll see happen with this one.