William Gibson is a Cunt (but not in the way you think)

That's it.  I've had enough.

I can always tell when I'm bored with a book because it takes me a week to crawl through 100 pages and I start buying other books as a displacement activity.  I've been reading William Gibson's Spook Country for the last three weeks and I find myself at page 240... and I'm giving up.  In the last week I have purchased the new Stross, the new Pratchett and Dumas' Three Musketeers on audiobook.

In a way, the book put me in a similar position to Scott Lynch's Red Seas Under Red Skies as what was driving me through the book was not the story or the characters or the pleasure of engaging with the ideas but rather the desire to have finished the book and therefore be able to write at length about how awful I thought it was.  However, as in my youth when I was ordered to read books that didn't interest me, I have discovered that most famous of dodges... I'm going to watch the movie.  I found it on Youtube.

I was lying of course.  That's not footage from a Spook Country film, it's footage from Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker's disappointing sitcom Nathan Barley.  Nathan Barley, for those not in the know was based upon a running joke from Brooker's much missed fake TV listings website TVGoHome.  The original fictional programme was entitled "Cunt" and Brooker described it in these terms :

 

"Nathan Barley reads an edition of Sleazenation magazine from cover to cover while smoking a joint in a Tokyo hotel room"

and :

"Wearing Trousers apparently cut from charcoal-grey crepe paper, Nathan Barley crosses a busy street clutching a mango smoothie and a punnet of takeaway sushi, simultaneously listening to a speed garage compilation on his minidisc walkman, contemplating the purchase of a Nokia WAP phone, and mentally picturing himself sliding all the way up to the nutbag in a passing teenage girl in a tissue-thin summer dress"

The world of William Gibson and the world of Charlie Brooker are astonishingly similar.  The difference is that Brooker is wise enough to see this world for the hateful pantomime and idiot festival it is.  Gibson, on the other hand, seems to think it important and interesting.  Meanwhile, Gibson's fans think it glamourous.

Spook Country, its title a reference to the fact that this it is supposed to be a spy novel, is set in the same world as Gibson's previous novel Pattern Recognition and, much like that book, is centered upon a female character with a first name that could equally be a surname and a brief to investigate something from an advertising mogul.  A former musician turned journalist for a non-existent magazine entitled Node (intended to be a European version of Wired), Hollis Henry is hired to write a piece about people making VR art installations but before long she is hired to discover the contents of a shipping container that the US government wants to keep hidden.  Indeed, in another of the book's thread a descendent of Cuban emigres is hired to transport an iPod that contains encrypted data while an American agent and his comical medicated interpreter (the protagonists from the book's third thread) try and track the iPod down while a hacker and VR art producer (as opposed to artist) tries to stay one step ahead of them all.

 

The book has three notable features and these are not the plot or the characterisation, which are both feeble and unengaging. 

The first is Gibson's famous fashion photographer's eye.  Gibson's characters are seldom more than a procession of shop window dummies who are entirely devoid of anything approaching a normal human psychology.  Instead, their identities are entirely defined by Gibson's artful draping of designer brands, hairstyles, tastes in music and sub-cultural positioning.  It doesn't matter who characters really are, all that matters is how they look.

Indeed, Graham Sleight, in his Strange Horizons review of the book, stated that Gibson "places his camera, as it were, exceptionally close to his protagonists".  an astute observation this nicely captures the imagery of Gibson as a fussy fashion photographer, his lens inches away from a model's face, occasionally stopping to imperceptibly adjust a strand of hair.  However, while the narrowness of the angle allows Gibson the photographer to focus on small details, it also means that Gibson loses sight of the bigger picture.

The second characteristic of Spook Country is that it is a book largely uninterested in the world at large.  This is a tendency that was also present in Pattern Recognition and it perhaps best defines the difference between Gibson the mainstream novelist and Gibson the younger genre novelist.  Neuromancer, was a novel that put across a clear vision of the future of society.  Neuromancer had a vision of the relationship between corporations and nations as well as a vision of a society with immense disparities in levels of wealth creating an upper class (the bosses) and an effective underclass (the people who did the work).  Spook Country does not have a vision of the future as it is not, ultimately a book about the future but what is shocking is that it has no real grasp of the presence either as aside from a couple of tokenistic references to the Department of Homeland Security and a completely out of character argument about the political ramifications of the War on Terror, Gibson shows little interest in the real world.  Instead, all of Gibson's characters exist within a strange social class that never seems to work but nonetheless have "careeers".  Node pointedly does not exist as a magazine and yet it hires people who never actually write articles.  The book's magus Hubertus Bigend is said to be an advertising executive but he never seems to work either... he just turns up in hotel lobbies and pays fortunes for people to investigate his private theories.  Spook Country's world is in no way a real one.

The third characteristic of the novel is that it is, to all intents and purposes, a secular mystical parable.  The best examples of the kind of stories I'm talking about are those of John of the Cross, who wrote Dark Night of the Soul and Ascent of Mount Carmel.  These types of stories generally revolve around a soul going on a journey in search of unity with God.  Obviously, in these secular times, the literary form has hung around but the frame of reference has changed from a mystical Christian one into those more fitting our times and our tastes.  A good example of a modern-ish story of this type is Conrad's Heart of Darkness wherein a soul goes on a quest for meaning and finds only "The Horror!  The Horror!" of an utterly meaningless and Godless universe.  Spook Country is a similar quest, as was Pattern Recognition, but compared to Conrad's the frame of reference has further shrunk and we are no longer moving towards religious or philosophical truth but the truth pursued by one particular sub-cultural clique.  In Pattern Recognition, this truth was the identity of the director of the film fragments and in Spook Country that truth is the contents of the shipping container pursued by a motley crew of former intelligence agents, rich people and the tragically hip.  Spies and hackers inhabit a similar archetypal realm to the wizards and priests of days gone by, they have access to truths that most of us don't and they exist with one foot in another realm.  for John of the Cross that realm was spiritual in nature, for Plato it was the purely intellectual realm of The Forms and for William Gibson it is simply called "spook country".

What is most interesting about the different takes these authors have upon the same story is that the "goals" of these journeys have become increasingly relativised over time.  Gibson's cognoscenti do not guard access to information of global import, in fact, they guard information that's largely irrelevant and uninteresting to most people's lives.  In a very definite sense, it does not matter who made the film fragments in Pattern Recognition.  Nor does it really matter what is in the shipping container.  These truths are valued only relatively... they have no impact upon most people's lives.  Objective becomes subjective.  Universal truth becomes internet viral.

What is interesting about Nathan Barley is that, aside from being largely unfunny, it was also a parody and a critique of a world that simply did not exist in 2005 when the series first aired.  The original Cunt columns were intended as a satire upon a very specific British phenomenon, namely the rich young urbanite who does not work but nonetheless has a "career in the media" frequently involving bubble-era internet media portals.  When expanded to a sitcom, Brooker and Morris attempted to expand this phenomenon to an entire sub-culture but said subculture did not exist and, as a result, the series seemed satirically toothless.  However, I would argue that this places Nathan Barley in a similar realm to that frequented by Spook Country.

Spook Country features a world where people are "working on projects" full time, frequently involving involving the internet, but none of them seem to actually make any money from what they do or work for a living on the side.  Indeed, Hollis and Bigend are arguably the American equivalent of the British media toff... people whose careers do not actually support them.  Nathan Barley's subcultures are also, much like Gibson's, astonishingly narrow; effectively valuing things that are completely worthless and uninteresting to anyone outside that subculture.  for example, in the clip I posted above, the SugarApe staff think that 15Peter20 is a genius despite his art clearly being stupid and empty.  Similarly, Node considers the VR art comprised of shrines to dead celebrities be worthy of mention despite the fact that it sounds absolutely horrible and just as intellectually empty as pictures of people urinating.  Indeed, I'm hard pressed to find a difference between Gibson's Hubertus Bigend and Brooker and Morris' Jonatton Yeah? and Doug Rockett.  All three finance their incomprehensible interests at great expense with money that they clearly don't earn from any of those projects.  Furthermore, it's difficult to not see in Nathan Barley's WASP T12 Speechtool a reference to the technology porn fostered by the original cyberpunk novels.

So we can see that Spook Country and Nathan Barley portray similar worlds, but there is an obvious difference between the two visions; that of tone.

It's no accident that Spook Country references Wired almost immediately as Wired, as a lifestyle magazine, is specifically tailored not to the people who live the lifestyle depicted in Spook country (there aren't enough of them to support a magazine, even one as full of adverts as Wired) but rather the people who wish they lived that lifestyle.  Wired's pages are full of adverts for high-end technology that you "need" from TVs to games consoles to business hotels with free WiFi and films on demand.  Spook Country's world is as aspitational as that of Wired.  Conversely, Nathan Barley is satirical of this world and its values as the product of "The Rise of the Idiots", as protagonist Dan Ashcroft puts it :

"Once the idiots were just the fools gawping in through the windows. Now they've entered the building. You can hear them everywhere. They use the word 'cool'. It is their favourite word. The idiot dosn't think about what it is saying. Thinking is rubbish, and rubbish isn't cool. Stuff and shit is cool.The idiots are self-regarding consumer slaves, oblivious to the paradox of their uniform individuality. They sculpt their hair to casual perfection. They wear their waistbands below their balls. They babble into handheld twit machines about that cool e-mail of the woman being bummed by a wolf. Their cool friend made it. He's an idiot too.

Welcome to the age of stupidity."

This difference in perspective on what is, essentially, the same phenomenon is also present in the way Americans and British people view politics.  America's greatest mainstream treatise on politics is arguably The West Wing, a story not about the real world or their real president, but about the president a lot of Americans wish they had.  It is, much like most other things in American culture at the moment, aspirational.  Meanwhile, the best British fictional take on contemporary politics is arguably The Thick of It.  Like Nathan Barley, The Thick of It is a situation comedy set in a world that is like our but worse.  Whereas The West Wing dwells on what is best in politics, The Thick of It dwells upon what is worse.

This difference in tone is what made me so luke-warm about the West Wing and it is what made me give up on Spook Country.  I found the protagonists to be hateful, the plot uninteresting and the obsessions of the writer to be as short-sighted as they are witless.  Spook Country is a deeply stupid book that thinks it is clever, it is full of deeply stupid characters who think they are clever and it will be adored by legions of fans who are deeply stupid but who think they are clever.  Spook Country is Dallas for geeks.

Comments

[A.R.Yngve]

Hey, what've you got against Dallas?
;-)

[James]

Fantastic comparison, and a very good review. I would add though, that the world of Nathan Barley did and possibly still does exist in a small section of London, in a few blocks around Shoreditch and now Hackney.

I was at a party among such types - while NB was on the telly - when Julian Barret ('Dan Ashcroft') actually walked in, completely weirding me and my friends out, and forcing us to quickly leg it, to prevent some kind of split in the fiction/Barley continuum.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Damn... you could have knifed him and thereby snuffed out The Mighty Boosh. You selfish bastard.

I know that Shoreditch is trendy (or was) but I don't think it was ever the kind of trendy that NB was portraying. Isn't it just a place people go to hang out, drink coffee and browse record shops? I didn't think it was full of internet startups and magazines.

[Kevin Murphy]

This is the most stingingly accurate review of Spook Country I've read. Truly excellent work.

[Paul]

Oh thank God. Finally a review that exposes Gibson for the hack he's become.

[Ilya Popov]

Jonas, there's a paragraph in the text, early in, when Bigend and Hollis meet in a hotel. They've drinking alcohol, and Hollis mentions that she'd heard something about the mystery clips. Bigend says he used those clips to sell sneakers. Which is just one of the many things Bigend does to make money. PR and SC both allude to him having his claws in many other projects, some legal, some...possibly not. Meanwhile, Hollis still has some money left over from her days with The Curfew (remember: she also gets 5K returned to her that she frivolously lent out to a bandmate).

As someone who also found the book disappointing (but for entirely other reasons), there are a few things that we do agree upon. However, it's unfair to Gibson to ask him to repeat himself, as you inherently suggest by stating that SC is not like Neuromancer in form, approach, thematics, etc. Certainly, it does seem the case that Young Gibson had an easier time with plots than Current Gibson, but hey - artists change, find new interests, follow new things.

SC works best if you read it as a comedy, a kind of statement on the ironic hipster period that began in the middle of the 90's and continues to exist even in our present period. The book is less about the plot than about trying to capture a kind of picture of the kind of world that Gibson seems to think we're living in; a zeitgeist polaroid, if you will. That's his take on reality, in so much as it's a presentation of his seemingly slightly bemused, cynical and concerned take on things. If it doesn't agree with your notion of what is or is not reality, well then, it doesn't agree with you, and then SC just isn't a book for you.

Incidentally, Gibson didn't even *know* what was in the cargo himself until he was nearing on finishing the book. The mystic Macguffin isn't really relevant; the structure of the book isn't contingent on What is in the box, but rather, on the dynamics of the people who Want, and Why they want it, and what that says about Them. That famous adage about the journey and not the destination? Welcome to Spook Country.

[Martin]

I almost had to stab my eyes out when I went to the Shoreditch Festival this summer. It's possibly not full of self-facilitating media nodes but Shoreditch Twat and Nathan Barley started for a reason. I think Vice is the missing reference here and there was definitely a dot com cunt bloom. (Although actually in TV Go Home didn't Barley start off in Ladbroke Grove, another twat ground zero?)

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Ilya --

I think PR was better in terms of the "these people don't actually work!" problem. Cayce was a proper brand consultant... a job that really does exist and it made sense for an advertising executive to want to track down the maker of a hugely popular viral. That's why the bulk of my criticisms are leveled more at SC than PR. If, as you say, SC refers back to PR then that makes sense to me but I think it's an indication of how much more clearly thought out PR was that Gibson refers back to it rather than coming up with new ways for Bigend to make money.

I'm not being categorical about these observations. The people in Nathan Barley occasionally do stuff "for money" but there are also people who exist in a world without money. The same goes with SC but I think that whereas Barley is critical of such people, SC isn't.

I think you're being incredibly charitable in your attempts to see SC as a comedy. For starters, it is an incredibly earnest book with the notable exception of Brown and Milgram. It also fails as a comedy for the same reason Barley did... these kinds of people don't really exist. You can't satirise something that you've made up yourself. However, I do agree that it's a cultural mood piece and therefore not really about plot and characters. That's why I didn't really say much about the plot or the characterisation except when they seemed to constitute a world-view and Gibson's principles of characterisation kind of do.

I'm not demanding that Gibson move backwards. To be honest, aside from Neuromancer Pattern Recognition is my favourite Gibson novel and a lot of the original cyberpunk novels he wrote leave me cold. I wasn't expressing regret that he had changed, simply that the changes he has made seem to have involved cutting stuff out without replacing it with anything new. The cyberpunk novels did all the stuff that his modern novels do but they also did stories and they also did ideas about the world. I wouldn't mind if Gibson really had moved on from his roots in genre, but I don't think he has.

Hmmm... if you're right about him not knowing what was in the box then I think that devalues the book even further in my eyes. I saw it as a heart of darkness type thing... a journey into what underpins a certain sub-culture but those types of stories generally only work if there's a clear idea of what the person is traveling towards, be it grace, a state beyond morality or some kind of truth. Remove that predestination and you're left with a completely unconvincing Macguffin hunt.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Martin --

You're right. Barley was originally set in Ladbrooke Grove and he was much more tightly focused as an idle rich boy playing at being in the media. Nathan Barley modified it slightly by making him a rich boy playing at being a media type but succeeding... the problem being that he was an irritating and unpleasant idiot who was popular and successful.

Christ... what a hateful website that is. You could be right that these people did exist. I know that Shoreditch is full of posing tossers and the style stuff of Nathan Barley always struck me as quite correct (the asymmetrical hairdo in particular) as did the speech patterns (the ubiquitous "well random") but I wasn't aware that there actually was an "dot com cunt bloom" as you so elegantly put it.

[mark c]

Hoxditch is now full of city boys letting their hair down. Its original trendiness came from the confluence of artists working there and a few clubs (which have all now shut down or changed hands). There were some dot com start ups but I think the increasing rents have pushed them out now.

I thought Pattern Recognition was pretty terrible - so much that the only way I will be reading Spook Country is when it is available for £3 from amazon marketplace. (I don't think it helped that the film fragments everyone was wanking on about sounded like perfume adds (prob starring Scarlett Johanssen))

[Liam]

I have to say I loved Nathan Barley. It was not that funny. I am not sure that was its point. To me it was just an excuse to rant against cunts like Barley and was a vicarious spleen vent for me.

My girlfriend's cousin works for a DJ magazine somewhere in the Clerkenwell/Shoreditch/Brick Lane environs; he is Barley remade in flesh. His wife makes documentaries and they both talk and act like... actually I do not have words to describe them other than that they are - depsite all their apparent knowingness - like Primo Levi's inert elements: almost pointless entities. The fact they talk like "niggaz" is beyond comprehension and very troubling.

The other day I saw this 40 year old on a bmx and adorned with Barley-esque accoutrements; I could not resist shouting "Nathan" at him. So thanks for the reminder.

[Dan]

ah, I used to love the TV listings for Cunt each week, and you are quite spot on with the likeness to Spook Country. I gave the book a (milder) kicking of my own over the summer (http://www.bugpowderdust.co.uk/blog/?p=42, if you're really interested). One thing I didn't put in that review is my feeling that, without wanting to sound churlish, success appears to have ruined Gibson. The early stuff was all "the street finds its own use for things", and now his books read like an issue of Wallpaper* (if you've never read Wallpaper*, don't. The asterisk in the name tells you all you need to know). Can you imagine Hollis in SC finding her own use for anything that didn't have a driver and an expense account?

[Jonathan McCalmont]

One of the things that has amused me over this is the fact that some people have pointed to Gibson's contract for two books as a cause for the soullessness of SC. Evidently he had enough ideas for one book but when it came time to writing the second book all he could do was come up with some bollocks about iPods and recycle a load of characters.

Either way, clearly something in his creative decision-making process has gone wrong. Either he's decided to rest on his laurels and pump out bilge for uncritical fans or he no longer knows how to produce good fiction.

I actually stand by Pattern Recognition as a really good book but that was a good deal closer to the street and a lot further away from Wallpaper* and Wired. I think the difference is that when PR was being written, the internet hadn't acquired quite so much media profile and so many rich bastards with expense accounts... it still had a wild west feel and it was quite possible to come across a series of beautiful film vignettes and have it be a secret. Now that shit would be on youtube and boingboing earning ad revenue for people.

I think what has changed is the technophile classes. At the time of Neuromancer they were considered to be trolls who lived in basements. By the time PR came about they had some money but were still on the magins of society. Now the internet is the mainstream and that means that the balance of power has shifted with time... we've gone from writing about how cool a knowledgeable cultural underclass are to writing about the likes of Jason Calacanis and his squillions of dollars.

It's one thing to write flattering stuff about people on the fringes of society but once you're saying those things to the people who dominate our society then you've gone from punk to servile lifestyle journalism.

That's what is so utterly hateful about Spook Country... it's as punk as the Tatler magazine.

[paul atreidies]

I haven't read Spook County, and from this review I probably won't, but I was a fan of the Sprawl trilogy.

I remember reading in an interview that Gibson, who is Canadian, noticed that Americans "didn't get the hum(o)ur, but British people did," about all the excessive brand-name-dropping and pop-culture references in his novels. I'm British, and I didn't find them particularly funny. Nathan Barley IS funny, since it is deadly accurate about (as Liam mentions above) the 40-year old BMX-riding halfwits with trendy haircuts. Bubble 2.0 seems to be keeping them alive, and I can't wait for it to pop.

[John Styles]

The thing that Spook Country most reminded me of was an X-Files episode (maybe an extended one).
Hollis is Sculley, Bigend is the deus-ex-machina boss, Hollis's fellow band member (can't remember the name) is an off screen Mulder from an episode where Duchovny was literally phoning in his performance... Typical X-Files chase converging (literally) on an action scene climax, the ambiguous 'is there supernatural stuff or is that how the guy internalises his spy tradecraft?'.

On a 2nd read it struck me that it is clearly poking fun at the arty geek types e.g.
- when we find out Chombo isn't the guy's real name (Chombo is a real bit of software and the description of it is accurate, BTW) and that it's his 'art' name Hollis says she wishes she had had a 'rock musician' name
- where someone with a french accent says 'cyberspace is everting' and Hollis interprets it as saying everything with a strong accent
- the fact that we find out that the footage from PR was used for something really banal by Bigend
It is quite gentle and good natured, but one gets the impression that on his travels Gibson gets to meet a lot of these people.

Undeniably Gibson's weakest novel, though, and it did strike me that both PR and SC don't mention Y2K, the .COM boom / bust at all, it is all rather in a bubble - but then again Cryptonomicon is partly set in what must be 98/99 and there is no mention of Y2K (but anyway, there is an earthquake in San Francisco that doesn't occur in our world).

Is is true that he only had a contract for two, I assumed it would be a three book trilogy.