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Spook Country | 
 enlarge | Author: William Gibson
Publisher: Penguin
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy New: £3.60
You Save: £4.39 (55%)
New (25) Used (7) from £2.49
Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 2125
Media: Paperback
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 1
ISBN: 014101671X
EAN: 9780141016719
ASIN: 014101671X
Publication Date: July 31, 2008
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 meandering with bright points but short on ideas November 10, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book meanders about. Majority of the book is 3 separate stories that link at the end - but the stories are mixed up so a challenge to track whats actually going on. If you take a couple of weeks to get through, then this bouncing between plots is confusing & irritating.
As to the rather shallow plot (or plots), we all know that this book is REALLY about techy what-if cyberspace stuff - the plot is just a platform for Gibson to exhibit & expound his concepts & imagination. I cant help feeling that the author was a bit tired & short on ideas when he wrote this one.
The dark atmosphere is well created. Namedropping of designer brands is tiresome & begins to grate. I do actually know about Stark furniture so can appreciate these touches - but the continual reference to brands of phone / shoe / hotel / coat / sunglasses etc really alienates me!
If you are a loyal follower of Gibson (as most reviewers seem to be) you wont be dissapointed. It still is a good read - and certainly improves when the plots come together in the last chapter, but its not his best.
 Give it up Bill September 22, 2008
5 out of 13 found this review helpful
The grand old man of that dead genre: Cyberpunk (which was neither punk nor spectacularly technologically savvy, unlike say, Neal Stephenson) is back to bore us rigid. A shaggy dog story which goes absolutely nowhere. While Gibson's old narrative trick (and let's face it, he only has one) - to take three narrative threads and alternate them by chapter until in some hopeless contrivance they all join together at the end - works quite nicely, the tedious techno porn (everything has a matte black or grey surface) and the barely beleivable characters (pesky things in Gibson's sad world) just drag the whole thing down.
The ending is basically a total let-down. Since Mona Lisa Overdrive this guy's stuff has got more and more derivative and lame.
It's modern life as viewed by someone who's too rich, too lazy and too self-regarding to really have any literary merit whatsoever.
Avoid.
Go back to the future, William Gibson! September 10, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is William Gibson's first novel set explicitly in the proper present, so it lacks that sense of exploring the near future which so haunts all his other books. For me this meant that instead of letting myself get swept away into the story, I kept comparing Spook Country's events with what I know to be the case about the times in which I live.
Gibson has done the art world before - Neuromancer I think features a search for artworks by the real-life eccentric Joseph Cornell. This book switches uneasily between art and more serious intrigue... sometimes even uncomfortably.
But for me there was too much real life! I enjoyed all the stuff about the ex-rock band singer Hollis Henry, but every time there was a mention of Philip Starck hotels or Pete Townshend's nose or ... anything real, I just slightly cringed. I just wanted to go back to the world Gibson usually sites his books in, where everything is made up, and enjoying that fictionality and that level of imagination is one of the pleasures of reading.
There were even some things which I thought were mistakes. One tiny example that doesn't spoil the plot: there is a supposed Wikipedia entry on one of the characters, which Hollis reads. Seriously, NO wikipedia entry is that well-written. Really. Even the ones people write for themselves.
Having made my criticisms, what I will say about William Gibson is that he has the most amazing imagination, and writes completely beautifully, in this dark, twisted way. The book has a good plot line, although slightly spy story-ish.. I'm glad I finally got round to reading it. He will always be one of my favourite writers. But from now on, I just want him to leave the present alone. Give me back my William Gibson, rainy California, quantumteleporting, cyberspace future!
 Gibson still at the top of his game August 25, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
It took me a few chapters to really get into this but once I did I found it hard to put down. As usual with Gibson, he comes up with some cultural movements that I hadn't been aware of until I picked the book up: guerrilla marketing in Pattern Recognition and this time locative art. Technological trends aside, Gibson has a wonderful way with language. His sentences tend to be punchy like Raymond Chandler but far more poetic at the same time. I could really just read this book for his use of words- the plot is just extra icing on top. I can picture each scene with a cinema type clarity that few other authors achieve (for me at least) I love the little details he gives us. GSG-9 Adidas swat shoes? How cool. Only little quibble: covert ear pieces as used by the likes of Brown do not have wires attached to them. They work on induction loops like modern hearing aides and have done so for many years.
Intriguing, But Less Kinetic, Fictional Exploration Of Our Time From William Gibson August 8, 2008
10 out of 12 found this review helpful
There's probably no one else I can think of who can write so vividly, and inquisitively, about our contemporary techno-psychological landscape than William Gibson. His 2003 novel "Pattern Recognition" remains among the best - if not the best (of which I am certain) - fictional depiction of American media-obsessed culture in the aftermath of 9/11. It was also his best novel in years, a riveting techno-thriller about "cool hunter" Cayce Pollard's search for the mysterious internet "The Footage" which had acquired a most bizarre cult-like status amongst Internet lurkers. "Spook Country", Gibson's latest novel, is a sequel of sorts, introducing us once more to the enigmatic Belgian advertising mogul Hubertus Bigend, owner of Big Ant advertising firm. This time he sends another young woman, Hollis Henry, an investigative journalist for Node - a magazine which doesn't exist yet - on a rather mundane quest to find one Bobby Chombo, a "producer", whose day job involves checking out military navigation gear. We encounter her, early one morning, in a Los Angeles hotel room, on assignment for Node, collecting information on the local underground artistic movement of virtual reality-based "locative art" for an article in the nascent magazine's debut issue. In classic William Gibson literary mode, there are two other subplots which represent other, still larger, pieces of the puzzle that Henry is seeking to solve, involving Tito, a young Cuban Chinese New Yorker whose family has had intelligence ties to both the CIA and KGB, and the Russian-speaking junkie Milgrim, addicted to expensive prescription high-anxiety drugs, who finds himself quite literally, "joined to the hip" with his pharmaceutical benefactor, the mysterious Brown, someone who has some hidden ties to a military, most likely Russia's.
Looming over this entire fictional landscape is of course Hubertus Bigend himself, who doesn't appear until the end of the first third of "Spook Country". Here, more so than "Pattern Recognition", he comes across as some omniscient "Intelligent Designer", orchestrating the events as they unfold, with the other principal characters - especially Hollis, herself - acting as puppets in some vast marionette theater of his own uniquely Byzantine design. We will learn that Bigend has chosen Henry for his mission since she's a former member of the rock band The Curfew, which, apparently, has had ties to Bobby Chombo. There's a memorable chase scene that plays out along the sidewalks - and one restaurant - of New York City's Union Square (New York City finally makes its literary debut in a Gibson novel, and to his credit, Gibson does a splendid job depicting its unique urban rhythms.). Eventually, the three plot lines converge and intersect, in an ornate, yet tidy, resolution in Gibson's hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia (The Canadian seaport, like New York City, also makes its literary debut in a Gibson novel.). There are references of course to contemporary events, such as the American occupation of Iraq, but Gibson presents them as if they were the literary equivalent of a GOOGLE search, allowing the reader to decide their relevant significance to the novel's unfolding events in a decidedly neutral manner.
"Spook Country" is definitely not one of William Gibson's best novels, but an inferior novel from him is still far more fascinating than many best novels I have read from other, lesser novelists who lack his uncanny ability to depict in hallucinatory, lyrical prose, our Internet-dominated culture (It's an artistic trait I'd expect from the same writer who coined the term "cyberspace" years ago, before the Internet was created as the central, unifying information repository of our time.). It is still one of the best literary achievements in fiction published this year, and one that is artistically, if not stylistically, similar to the themes explored by Rick Moody in his recently published novella collection "Right Livelihoods". Along with "Right Livelihoods", "Spook Country" is the most compelling piece of newly published fiction I have read this summer. Without question, it is still a memorable novel from someone whom I regard as the most important writer of our time.
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