Week of October 3, 2007, Issue #624
ARTS
We’re in Spook Country
JAY SMITH / jay@vueweekly.com
Throughout William Gibson’s latest novel, Spook Country, there’s a running joke about Hollis Henry, who is researching a magazine story on high-tech installation art. Years earlier, she was a member of the cult band The Curfew. Well-ensconced in her second career, meandering around North America doing research for this article, she is, nonetheless, recognized for her for her former, and entirely minor, fame everywhere she goes.It’s a quirky comment on how the popular imagination latches onto what is memorable: a punky band that was largely underground but oh-so briefly brought into mainstream consciousness. It approaches something of slapstick’s comedy simply by virtue of its repetition, the omnipresence of her minor fame in the minds of everyone she meets.
For Gibson, who admits to writing unabashedly unpremediatated books, the issue of identification, of pattern recognition, of branding, oddly permeates both his work practice and his work.
With Spook Country, as with his other books, Gibson didn’t begin with theme or characters, but an image of the area of Manhattan with which he’s especially familiar, an image cast in a wintery gloom. Very slowly, characters started to emerge and, eventually, a plot. Compare this to many other writers’ top-down approach: a theme, a plot, then characters and locale, then specific scenes.
That’s not the only thing that will appear familiar to Gibson’s readers: like 2004’s Pattern Recognition, Spook Country is full of branding. So, though the object at the centre of the novel’s intertwining narratives is a relatively nondescript shipping crate, every automobile, cell phone, laptop, running shoe, airplane, technological gizmo, is identified by its brand name. This creates a peculiar tension: the quotidian is glossy with advertising, whereas the plot’s preoccupation is, well, just a box.
Gibson denies that his use of brand names is striving for “glossy,” however: it is only 21st century “naturalism.”
“I wouldn’t believe a novel set in 21st-century North America that didn’t include branding. Not when our lives are absolutely drenched in branding.”
Nevertheless, he took delight in “piggybacking on the poetry of cool” of the ipods that feature extensively in the novel. “I could have used something else, but I found the white iPods, the poetry of iPods, too appealing.”
In a related twist, though Gibson has been known for years as a science fiction writer, Spook Country bears no “Sci-Fi” label on its cover.
“I hadn’t noticed that,” Gibson admits. “I guess that’s what all writers aspire to, being a genre unto themselves. Like Elmore Leonard—he wrote westerns, thrillers, just about everything. Readers would seek out his writing for an Elmore Leonard experience. Maybe that’s what’s happening—like Leonard, I’m becoming a brand.”
Evolving as brand name “Gibson” in the grey zone in between genre writing and literary fiction seems liberating. Freed from the stylistic strictures of both genres ensures a wide swathe for Gibson’s stylistic quirkiness.
Whereas there are plenty of tamer writers who claim Joycean influences, Gibson (who has not) seems sometimes as if his project is actually to update modernist literary strategies for a 21st-century audience. Sometimes phrases just grate in the ear. The reader finds herself frantically paging backwards to reread. Chapters begin with ambiguous pronoun references. The joy of reading starts to resemble the Protestant work ethic.
Like the best of modernists, Gibson defends his sometimes challenging style. “I’m not just doing it to be difficult. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think that there was something to be gained from it.”
Believing that the essence of any book resides not in the realm of authorial intention, but squarely in the reader’s own mind, Gibson says that he always ensures a path for the committed reader to appreciate his writing.
“I just think that somehow it makes for a better experience.” One that is certainly unique to Gibson’s writing. V
Wed, Oct 10 (7 pm)
William Gibson
TELUS World of Science, $12