On William Gibson's Pattern Recognition

A Bad Review

A couple of hundred.

That’s probably how many books I’ve reviewed — if I’m counting the clutches of four or five volumes of poetry I used to do for Poetry London Newsletter.

But I only ever think back to one of them.

Because I think it’s the only one I regret.

In March 2003, I reviewed William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition for the Guardian.

Gibson had moved beyond his epoch-making Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) and was writing about a much nearer, clearer future — a future that seemed more obviously to overlap with the early post-millennium.

Gibson should be given credit for getting so much right about the tech and texture of the present. Some things he got a bit wrong —betting the farm on Japan rather than China, and not having the Net as an ambient presence in the minds of his characters, rather than a separate all-or-nothing place they have to jack in to visit. But if you think of how awesome his take on corporate power and weirdness was, and the void of politics except as corruption, and the ecological game over — he deserves all the respect available.

I regret the review because Pattern Recognition has since become one of my four or five comfort novels. Books that I re-read for pure enjoyment.

What seemed strainingly fashionable at the time has aged — in my view — really well. The novel seems better made, less frantic.

Since I wrote the review, I haven’t looked back at what I said. But I think it wasn’t anywhere appreciative enough.

I was aware of Gibson’s influence on my first short stories, and even more so on the never republished online serial novel I wrote for the Guardian’s first internet magazine, Shift Control. He set the tone.

Perhaps I was trying too hard to kill my literary father.

I’m going to read the review back now, and review it myself, as a kind of apology to Gibson.

Let’s see if it’s as bad as I remember.

In the end, William Gibson’s novels are all about sadness – a very distinctive and particular sadness: the melancholy of technology.

I think this is true, and fair.

On the opening page of Pattern Recognition we are introduced to one of its central ideas, a ‘theory of jet lag’. Gibson’s heroine, Cayce (pronounced Casey) Pollard, has just flown New York to London, and feels that ‘her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here… Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.’ Whatever he has written, Gibson has never abandoned the idea of a ‘mortal soul’, a human essence, which the speed of our world, or of his imagined futures, causes us to lose — if only temporarily.

Here it comes —

In this, he is basically a conservative author; he doesn’t really want to engage with the possibilities of the post-human. His chosen form, the novel, doesn’t allow him to do this. Many science fiction authors have written about human-absent worlds, about robots battling robots, but in order to make these novels seem worthwhile to humans (and robots aren’t a particularly large market, at the moment) they always have to invest at least one of the robots with human qualities. The soul is necessary in novels for without the soul there would be no melancholy, and without the melancholy the novels wouldn’t be worth reading.

Hmm. I suppose this is right, though snarkily put.

At this time, I was aggressively against the idea of fiction that depended on ideas of The Soul. I disliked those people who would say, ‘Of course, the Russian novel is all about The Russian Soul…’ and think this meant they didn’t have to say any more.

Since then, I’ve read more Russian novels, and more theology, and have become much more friendly to soul-possessed characters. (I even wrote a whole lecture on how such a basis might make fiction basically better.)

Pattern Recognition very much wants to be a novel of ideas. And the ideas it is concerned with are those of what Gibson sees as our po-mo Logo/No Logo world. The familiar idea of simulacra is put forward by marketing mastermind Hubertus Bigend (some sci-fi habits, the overnaming of characters, die hard), ‘Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else.’ At one point Cayce Pollard sees ‘a pub of such quintessential pubness that she assumes it is only a few weeks old…’ Bigend also says, ‘Far more creativity, today, goes in to the marketing of products than into the products themselves.’ What is interesting, today, is that Gibson doesn’t seem to have the intellectual energy to think the novel beyond this.

Oh dear.

I’m sorry. This is what has haunted me for twenty years.

Cayce Pollard is ‘a legend in the world of advertising’ — she has the incredibly valuable quality (both to corporations and to the novelist-of-ideas) of being allergic to branding. This first revealed itself, aged six, in her horrified reaction to Bibendum, aka the Michelin Man. At the beginning of the novel, she has been flown over from New York to say Yes or No to a sneaker-manufacturer’s massively invested-in new logo. Only to say Yes or No, nothing else. And if Cayce says No, the logo is scrapped.

Isn’t that a great idea for a scene? I’d want to read it, wouldn’t you?

Yes, there’s a heavy presence of Naomi Klein’s 1999 No Logo. But Gibson is dramatizing her worldview, and having fun with cool stuff.

I seem to remember I soon have something to say about his cool stuff.

The central idea of the novel is plainly stated, ‘Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition… Both a gift and a trap.’ Cayce makes her living from pattern recognition, from ‘finding whatever the next thing might be’. She is a cool-hunter.

She is also one of a large number people hunting for brief clips from a nameless film that have been posted, in incredibly obscure sites, around the internet. This film may or may not have a plot, it may or may not be complete; what all who see it agree is that is has an incredible, melancholy power. The clip-hunters, or footageheads, congregate in newsgroups to speculate as to who is creating the footage, and why.

As I think I soon say, this is a re-do of the central quest of Count Zero — which I’ve just reread, with pleasure and admiration.

Over the decades, Gibson’s melancholy gets stronger and stronger as the more optimistic parts of his vision seem to dim away from us.

Of course, when Bigend Hubertus hears of this, the greatest piece of viral marketing since The Blair Witch Project, he wants in. Cayce is encouraged to turn her hobby into her job, and off around the world, in pursuit of ‘the maker’, she goes. This is a good opportunity for Gibson to do what he does best, the spaced-out travelogue. Cayce’s quest takes her first to Tokyo, capitalist epitome, and then Moscow, capitalist wannabe. Gibson’s eye for detail and his way with a phrase remain exquisite: ‘In the sunlit street, all is still; nothing moves save the cinnamon blur of a cat, just there, and gone.’

Wonderful sentence.

Devoted readers of William Gibson will, by this point, be experiencing some pattern recognition of their own. In Pattern Recognition, Gibson’s resourceful heroine, Cayce Pollard, is given huge resources by an untrustworthy corporate spiv, Hubertus Bigend, to find the maker of mysterious and melancholy footage. In his earlier novel Count Zero, Gibson’s resourceful heroine, Marly Krushkhova, is given huge resources by an untrustworthy megacorporate spiv, Herr Virek, to find the maker of mysterious and melancholy boxes. Both novels are a quest after the artist, the person capable of investing mere light, mere matter, with soul. Without giving the end away, the revelation of Count Zero is the more radical.

More radical because a little more science fictional. The maker in Count Zero (spoiler) is a many-armed AI, lodged in a vast orbiting satellite full of defunct memory banks, programmed by a kind of techno Miss Havisham to reconstitute a dynastic family from the detritus of a century of their childhoods and addictions.

Within the limits of Cayce’s world, Gibson couldn’t go that far. Maybe that was a mistake, but it’s where he’d relocated his fictional intelligence. I wouldn’t have wanted him to stay forever in The Sprawl — much as I adored it.

Pattern recognition, as a human phenomenon, becomes something else when it goes too far; it becomes ‘apophenia… the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things’. One of the disappointments of the novel is that it doesn’t push this far enough, as a potential plot device. If there were an insane number of interconnections by the end, as is sometimes the case in thrillers, then the reader would feel more fulfilled. Judged just as a thriller, Pattern Recognition takes too long to kickstart, gives its big secrets away before it should and never puts the heroine in believable peril.

But it’s not just a thriller. You’ve said it was a novel of ideas. I suppose I was annoyed here because I’d put a lot of effort into making Corpsing both. Maybe I hoped readers of the review would make that connection.

The pivotal moment in Pattern Recognition comes when Cayce is granted access to the huge resources of Bigend’s company. Pamela Mainwaring, one of Bigend’s glamorous employees, presents Cayce with a credit card. ‘“Sign this, please.”… Case takes it. CASE POLLARD EXP. Platinum Visa customized with the hieratic Blue Ant… Pamela Mainwaring hands her an expensive German rollerpoint. Cayce puts the card facedown on the trestle table and signs its virgin back. Something seems to clunk heavily, at the rear of her ethical universe.’

Yes, this moment recurs throughout Gibson’s works. He is obsessed with the moment someone gains access to unspendable weath.

For the rest of the novel, Cayce is on expenses. Gibson loves this, loves high-end luxury: ‘We have an iBook for you, loaded, cellular modem. And a phone. It’s good here, anywhere in Europe, Japan, and the States… The Tokyo office is at your complete disposal. The best translators, drivers, anything you feel you need. Literally anything.’ (I started to wonder if Gibson’s publicity handlers are coached to talk to him in this James-Bond-visits-M tone.)

Now, I very much hope they did play along in this way.

‘The Edinburgh International Book Festival welcomes you, Mr G. Your suite has an en suite modem and outstanding wireless-fidelity.’

Expenses, of course, can only be topped by one thing: cash. At the end of the novel, for services rendered, Cayce is presented with a ‘Louis Vuitton slim-line attaché, its gold-plated clasps gleaming’ which contains ‘in tightly packed rows, white-banded sheaves of crisps new bills’.

One could hardly find a more Eighties image, and Gibson’s entire aesthetic is still definitely stuck in that decade. He loves shiny things, matt black things, things which open with a whirr and a click, things which sense human presence and react.

I confess, I have this too.

I’ve just had my DD Quartz Walkman fixed, so I can listen back to tapes from the days when a Quartz Locked Disc Drive seemed futuristic, and Chromium Dioxide was a promise of extremely high sound quality — with a bit of buzz.

The conclusion of Pattern Recognition reenacts the ultimate fantasy ending of Eighties movies – the heroine has lucked out without selling out, has keep her integrity but still ended up filthy rich. As a gesture towards the changed mood of the new millennium, Gibson has Cayce guiltily give the money away. Her gesture doesn’t convince; Gibson’s soul, sadly, isn’t in it.

Smart final line, but not more than smart.

A gentler review might have said less.

Having re-read the whole thing, I feel I’m right to regret having written it this way.

Please accept my apologies, Mr Gibson.