SPOOK COUNTRY
By William Gibson
Putnam, 371 pages, $32.50
In Spook Country, a container ship makes like the Flying Dutchman, and its mysterious cargo never quite makes port. Reconstruction money, a cool hundred million, goes missing en route to Baghdad. A "family" of Soviet-trained Cuban spies passes iPods packed with encrypted information to their patron, a retired U.S. intelligence official with an agenda of his own. Meanwhile, elements from a rogue security apparatus are watching, waiting.
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Into this stew of post-9/11 intrigue stumbles Hollis Henry, one-time member of an early-1990s cult band and struggling journalist. Offering the wry observation that there is life after rock, she accepts an assignment for Node, a start-up media magazine. Her task is to report on locative art, a way of attaching virtual installations to real-world sites using GPS and WiFi hot spots, or what one character calls "spatially tagged hypermedia."
Locative art, she is told, signals a shift in what we might think of as the interface. Instead of experiencing virtual reality through a screen - terminal reality - the locative heralds a new world, one where cyberspace has "everted," that is to say, turned itself inside out as it manifests in the world around us. "Once it everts, then there isn't any cyberspace, is there? There never was, if you want to look at it that way. It was a way we had of looking where we were headed, a direction. With the grid, we're here. This is the other side of the screen."
Intrigued by this "witheringly geeky art trend," Hollis tracks down the "producer" who makes it all possible, a tech guru named Bobby Chombo, who sees everything in terms of GPS gridlines - to the point that he divides his living space in a series of squares and refuses to sleep in the same one twice. By day Bobby designs military navigation systems; by night he uses his skills as a geohacker in the service of art and commerce. "The most interesting applications," he tells Hollis, "turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery."
The skills that make Bobby a hot commodity among locative artists also make him attractive to a much more dangerous clientele. He has been tasked with keeping tabs on an elusive shipping container. Some very shady war profiteers with uncertain ties to the current administration are keenly interested in the destination of its cargo: pallets of U.S. hundred-dollar bills - the "international currency of bad shit," favoured by drug traffickers and counterfeiters alike. At the same time, however, an equally mysterious figure has convinced Bobby to generate a phony set of logs detailing his ongoing failure to do just that - these cooked books are a vital part of a counterintelligence sting.
Spooked by Hollis's inquiries into the secretive activities underlying the avant-garde world of locative art, Bobby goes underground. In hot pursuit, Hollis finds herself on a trail leading to the Port of Vancouver, a cache of radiological material and the revelation that the U.S. government is in a state of undeclared civil war. Aghast at the breakdown in national security on 9/11, and sickened by the incompetence and cronyism evident in the conduct of the War on Terror, an older generation of intelligence professionals have arrayed themselves against the merchants of death guiding current policy.
William Gibson has been waiting for us to join him on the other side of the screen for some time now. Beginning with his astonishing debut Neuromancer - easily the most influential work of science fiction of the last quarter century - the Vancouver writer has served as our most reliable guide to the digital age. Credited with coining the term "cyberspace" in the same year the Apple Macintosh came out (1984), he is celebrated as the man who, just as much as Steve Jobs, is responsible for inventing the future that we live in today.
In Gibson's recent work, however, what was once categorized as science fiction now reads as straight-up realism as he trades in the near-future typical of cyberpunk for the very recent past. The fact that this doesn't require any major adjustments in his style suggests that his audience has finally caught up to him.
Today we live in the information-saturated environment that Gibson began describing more than 20 years ago. What's more, Gibson has proved himself to be one of the most astute and surefooted commentators on our security-obsessed world. Though any number of U.S. writers have weighed in on this Age of Terror - Don DeLillo, Jay McInerney and Ken Kalfus, to name a few - Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition was one of the first fictional responses to the razing of the World Trade Center and remains among the finest. In it, he describes the traumatic spectacle of 9/11 as akin to "watching one of [our] own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority."
Spook Country is the sequel to Pattern Recognition and, one presumes, the hinge of an as-yet unfinished trilogy (Gibson is very fond of writing trilogies). This presents some intriguing possibilities and minor disappointments. Pattern Recognition is Gibson's best book, which makes it a tough act to follow. Told solely from the perspective of its coolhunter protagonist Cayce Pollard, his most fully realized character, Pattern Recognition achieved a new level of focus and intensity for the author.
Previously, he tended to structure his novels as three loosely linked narrative perspectives converging on a single point. This approach creates suspense and keeps the plot moving along - Gibson is a master at this - but sacrifices depth and character development. Spook Country reverts to this formula, which makes for a great tale of intrigue, but fails to engage the reader with quite the same intensity as its precursor.
Of course, this is also due to the fact that the subject matter is much different. Pattern Recognition is set in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and in the guise of a corporate espionage thriller, it takes on the big themes of mourning, loss and the consolations of art. Spook Country is a less personal book, but then again, it is interested in mapping the impersonal circuits of finance and global money-laundering, so perhaps it all comes out in the wash.
Spook Country succeeds in advancing several of the storylines introduced in the previous novel in sometimes unexpected directions. Node turns out to be a pet project of the Belgian advertising magnate with a memorable walk-on role in Pattern Recognition. He commissions Hollis's piece on locative art to get a jump on the art world's next big thing by probing its top-secret origins. "Intelligence," he tells Hollis, "is advertising turned inside out."
Meanwhile, Gibson throws broad hints that the "old man" with such a keen interest in tracking the shipping container is a character who, at the outset of Pattern Recognition, was presumed dead in the smoking wreckage of the World Trade Center. His appearance here provides a tantalizing glimpse into the clandestine agendas and shifting borders of our world today - spook country - while setting the stage for the next chapter in Gibson's essential take on life during wartime.
Matt Kavanagh teaches English at Okanagan College. He applied for a job with Blackwater Security Consulting once, citing his dislike of "bad guys" and his PhD in English. He never got an interview.
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