Spook Country by William Gibson
William Gibson’s Spook Country is set in the same universe as Pattern Recognition, but Hubertus Bigend aside, there is little here that recalls its predecessor. Spook Country is perhaps the weakest entry in Gibson’s Bigend trilogy… Spook Country is not a novel that will reward readers looking for a clear and thrilling plot. While Cayce Pollard of Pattern Recognition made for a fascinating protagonist, none of her three successors is fit to fill her “Cayce Pollard Unit” shoes. Readers should instead focus on the subtly paranoid atmosphere that Gibson crafts in the background. And sentence-to-sentence, Gibson’s writing is as sharp as ever. In the world that Gibson has created in the Bigend series, the citizenry is hopelessly uninformed — and incapable of changing their lot. As such, the most exciting things in Spook Country are restricted, and we only barely glimpse them. It can be frustrating, which is why Spook Country is ultimately a novel for the already converted. Read the rest.
