Excessive Candour
Casper Country

After sticking its nose out of doors into spook country, which is 2007 made visible, William Gibson's new novel does a runner, goes to ground where most of his tales go to ground: in a safe house, out of time, sacred for the nonce. But before he can deliver his cast into safety, they need to be harrowed.

Just like Pattern Recognition, to which it is a sequel of sorts, Spook Country spends most of its inch subjecting its protagonists to the felt chaos of the world Gibson has so consistently augured over the years, and which now fills the inside of our skins: an encrypted world, a world whose joins gape at the beck of codings we cannot trace, a world as intrinsicate with the grammars of command as some great graphic novel tattooed into the mind's eye. So Spook Country moves us.

I say "us," because Gibson has always had an uncanny ability to make his readers feel as vulnerable as the characters he creates to utter human fates in the noise. Inside the world of a Gibson novel, under the terrible Symmes sun that brands from within the skins we used to wear, readers and utterands tend to express a kind of meat-puppet digitalis, like marathon dancers unable to stop until the music kills them. In a Gibson novel, feeling sick unto death is waking up. So it is almost always a relief when he forgives our exposure to the real world and closes his books in some house-sized haven, enclave, tax-free zone, somewhere that is not an iteration—somewhere that is not a case—of Diktat World.

But I'm afraid the experience of relief in Spook Country is rather less poignant than before. The reason for this may be fairly simple. Spook Country is a bridge book, the second volume of a trilogy. There are various ways to describe the effect of second volumes of trilogy written by authors of merit: simple let-down; a sense of attenuation; a feeling that one is having to plod through the rituals of an Established Church before the new Messiah comes in volume three to bring Armageddon; an eerie recognition that history is being replayed as farce.

Walking among too many survivors

It is this last sensation that, I think, governs Spook Country, because it is, literally, a comic novel, maybe Gibson's first. This is not to argue that Gibson's sensorium has been muted out of hearing, or that his deeply bleak sense of the geopolitics of the early 21st century has somehow been temporized: though in a sense that is exactly what has happened here. The real world of Pattern Recognition circumambiates the new novel, but somehow Spook Country takes place during time-out. It is a friendly match. It takes place in haven country.

The most obvious signal of this, beyond the comical circus-act exorbitance of every action sequence, is that there are too many survivors. Nobody important dies in the book, there is no shocked pause of prot death to give aghast and breathing room. As a matter of fact, Spook Country is so protective of the rules of haven that—as far as it is possible to calculate as regards a complicated three-plot narrative whose protagonists have cousins and ancient patrons wise as godlings and ex-lovers and fans by the dozen, none of whom stay around for long—nobody dies at all. This is Hiroshima Just Kidding country. It's Casey-at-the-Bat. All of this, one must emphasize, is clearly deliberate. Spook Country is a comedy. It is exempt from the world it knows.

The three storylines all focus sooner or later on a quest to learn about, or to abscond with, or to subvert the mysterious contents of a 40-foot container which has been—"Flying-Dutchman"-like—heisted from freighter to freighter on the high seas across the entire globe for months or years, and which somehow seems barred from ever reaching port. In Spook Country, it is finally brought to dock, in the haven of Vancouver, where the last action-filled stages of an elaborate sting operation are vividly unfolded on the page, though the actual comeuppance, when the container is opened—rather cheerily evoking the climax of the Robert Aldrich film of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me, Deadly—must be imagined: as nothing is scheduled to happen until after the book ends.

And even then, when we imagine the comically jiggered contents of the container being opened, we are not intended to imagine anything like Terminus. In the end, the object all sublime that governs the complicated bait-and-switch sting operation that governs Spook Country is not a Boojum at all, but a very nearly perfect and in fact rather hilarious MacGuffin.

Waiting for the world to come

The implications of the title of the book are, of course, various. It evokes intelligence and counter-intelligence operations; it evokes dreams (they occur often) which evoke realities to come; it evokes a media-irradiated inside-outside world haunted by its own footage, and makes the barely SF suggestion that we will soon be able to navigate preset private worlds intricately nested within the actual, as though we were pacing secret labyrinths, or eruvs, that define our own sacred, temporally immune worlds. It also evokes a world which frightens one half to death, though not here: outside the eruv, outside the Sabbath space Spook Country inhabits.

And of course each of the storylines spooks the others.

There is no need to delve into any of them here. They are expertly deployed—the female freelance journalist and ex-rock star who finds herself working for Hubertus Bigend (who dominates Pattern Recognition but whose main function here is to gossip and to provide unlimited funding for the plot to progress) on a story about "locative art," which is the art of implanting on the original scene veridical representations (what one might call spooks) of some past event, like the death of River Phoenix, replacing "the untagged, unscripted world" with a score, a code, a tattoo; the tiny mafia family who seem to do nothing but good and whose main utterand has an almost supernatural closeness to the undergods who twin the grotesque Christian pantheon and who also twin from within (spookily) our visible 2007; and the comic-turn ex-government team of agents trying to recover something mysterious that got contaminatingly stolen from those who raped post-invasion Iraq to gain it. Accompanying these dances of quest, whose climax is MacGuffin, are moments when the eruv gives us peepholes into the lost domains of Now. "Intelligence," Gibson has one of his preternaturally savvy cast utter as though repeating a truism, "is advertising turned inside out." And we shiver.

We shiver, because we know that the Vancouver we have all landed up in for the duration of this holiday tale is no more a free lunch than the place we are sitting right now while we turn the pages of Spook Country. Because we know that haven is not what we're going to get next time. I think Spook Country makes us shiver because we are waiting for the world to tell us volume three.