Hello no one.
I finally got around to reading Pattern Recognition, and I thought I'd
share my thoughts on it with you, the mysterious semi-present population
of alt.cp.
[spoilers, imho, ymmv e.t.c. y'all know I'm a pomowhore and don't even
really believe books can be good\bad e.t.c.]
To be honest I didn't particularly enjoy it, but I didn't loathe it
either, and on both counts I think this is because the whole book is
just so damn neutral. The main character, who's particular mutant super
powers and endless open questions make her seem like an unlively joke
from *** in the city, just seems like such a dead end. Actually she
embodies nothing as sudden, dramatic or extreme as death. She is more
like a sleep end. Gibson insists on emphasizing 300 times per chapter
just how terribly, terribly tired she is and on top of that expends a
surprising amount of verbiage detailing her going to bed at every
possible op****tunity. This is certainly realistic, but its just not
that interesting and if you set her sitc-mutant power aside, it's the
second most remarkable thing about her. Which is a shame. I mean, a
simple "The next day Casey blah blah blah..." would have sufficed for
9/10 bed times.
While Gibson lavishes almost unbearable detail on her sleep and
sleepyness, disappointingly he also consistently manages to dodge
detailing anything more interesting. There don't seem to be any
interesting ideas in this book at all; rich marketing yuppies drinking
lattes in starbucks reading their hotmail on their ibooks and getting
hilariously mixed up in a big misunderstanding with the Russian mob over
some incredibly dubious plan to distribute some kind of dubious 'high
art' version of LonelyGirl, it just seemed very bland to me.
But its nicely written. WG has certainly worked on his prose, and its
slick and spare and economical and all that, but I think this is part of
the problem. I am pretty sure WG is the kind of author who researches
ideas for his novels, but once he filters this information through his
now very tightly focused Gibsonian 'lens-o-cool-detachedness' everything
get stripped down so much that all you get is a few vague (though I
expect he hopes profound or sublime) evocations, that he only seems
slightly interested in, and even then only in passing.
I know you don't read Gibson for the exposition, but in the absence of
exploration of interesting ideas, I'd really like the novel in question
to be something of a page-turner.
In this respect PR reminds me of the Da Vinci Code, though sadly more
like the film than the book, i.e. trivial yet dull, rather than
(allegedly) trivial yet compelling. Actually I didn't read the book,
but you've all heard about it so you get the idea. Why is PR so damn
slow, and why in all that slowness does nothing very much happen? I
think Gibson has become too cool to write anything exciting. Getting
excited is pretty much the very opposite of cool detached indifference.
Maybe.
Anyone else feel the same, or totally different, or hate me and the
(dead)horse I rode in on, or none of the above, or just plain wish
*they* were dead?
WG: Can you power up your eyemac and get someone to show you what
usenet is so that you can tell me when you are going to reprint a
version of Necromancer with no spelling mistakes in it??!?!??
[Ok, that was a cheapshot. Please disreguard.]
[end rant]
Zip,
--
Kevin Calder
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