( 72 reviews )
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Posted: Jul 27 2009
I admit I had trouble getting into Spook Country at first. But once I got to about page 40, I was swept up in the story. I loved the parallel stories and how Gibson wove all the threads of the characters' stories together. The audio version is excellent (Milgrim especially is just spot on in tone). This is a worthy follow-up to Pattern Recognition.
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Posted: Jul 26 2009
I've read all of Gibson's novels, and the earliest--Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive--are still the most memorable. They were so memorable, in fact, and so outlandishly inventive, that I've been hoping for another fix ever since. Gibson remains an excellent technician. He writes so lucidly and knowingly that everything is entertaining on some level. Yet even at his best his novels tend to revolve around a handful of fascinating concepts or images or characters--the idoru, the prescient virtual reality videogames, Molly with her razor fingernails--and plot or deeply drawn characters aren't his forte. So when he writes a novel without such attention-grabbing devices, their absence is nagging. Spook Country is like that. Finely-drawn vignettes, to no particular effect. The hype about Spook Country is that it's about the "post-9/11 world." Nonsense. It could just as easily have been written any time since World War II. The few references to events of the past decade are of no real consequence, and offer no insights. References to "pirates" or other seemingly interesting or at least timely cultural phenomena are literally limited to a casual sentence. The structure is identical to All Tomorrow's Parties, which was similarly mediocre. Several characters or groups of them converge at the end of the novel, their fates intertwined. Along the way, we follow each of them separately, in alternating chapters, as Gibson weaves their trajectories together, heading for the big payoff at the end that the reader anticipates almost from the outset. And just as in All Tomorrow's Parties, none of the characters are particularly interesting; their significance is only the role they will play in the jigsaw puzzle Gibson has carefully constructed. And as in All Tomorrow's Parties, the big payoff turns out to be what we used to call a fizzler--a firecracker that spurts a little spark but doesn't explode. The ending of Spook County, in fact, is so flaccid that I couldn't believe he'd carried us along all that way for such a weak purported climax. I'll probably pick up the next Gibson from the remainder bin as well, again hoping for a few of those mind-bending nuggets, but by now I'm resigned to just another well-written but pointless story.
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Posted: Jul 13 2009
This is just OK at best. The other 2-3 star reviews cover it, but I am going to explain why it REALLY isn't a good book. WARNING - SPOILER - STOP NOW - DON'T READ > > > > > > The ENTIRE book and all the characters are chasing a shipping container that has $100,000,000.00 in stolen Iraq reconstruction money. Given current events, 100 million dollars seems like chump change, not something various groups would devote years, dollars, and manpower to hiding or chasing. When I found out what the whole thing was about it just wrecked the whole book. Your average white collar criminal on Wall Street steals that much before lunch!
