Pattern Recognition

Rating:
Summary: Speculative Present
Review: William Gibson's latest might be classified as speculative present--a look at today's world with the excitement and verve of a science fiction writer's pen.

Logo-allergic protagonist Cayce Pollard's journey makes you appreciate anew the strangeness of our current reality by questioning the way modern companies manage memes and fretting over the dissolution of difference across borders.

Gibson's words, as always, capture details as if the volume on all his senses has been turned way up. You'll feel the ubercloned texture of a nylon flight jacket, hear the distortion in voices beyond the grave, see each byte of the movie fragments at the heart of the story.

And as with all great writers, Gibson throws in little truths that somehow capture the gestalt of an entire generation.

"I think it's all actually about money for him...Ultimately I find that that was the whole problem, with most of the dot-com people."

I nod sadly from personal experience.

One of the most striking things about Pattern Recognition can be found at the front of the book--before the story begins. Consider how Library of Congress coding attempts to classify the book: "1. Women private investigators.... 2. Business Intelligence.... 3. London (England)"

Given a story that includes Russian Mafia, Discussion Board Divas, Macabre Documentarians, Maverick Marketing Science, and Tokyo Otaku, it looks like the book's characters aren't the only ones currently struggling with pattern recognition in today's society.

Rating:
Summary: The Writing Is Better Than The Story
Review: To begin: Gibson is an amazing writer. So much so that in reading this book I found that I enjoyed the author's word craft more than the story. Gibson employs some of the most intelligent and hip dialogue I've read, though at times the clipped chat room-style narrative can be very annoying. Trying too hard to be hip. Still, and despite a somewhat weak finish, this is a decent read and a must for cool-hunters and steganographers (Google that!) everywhere.

Rating:
Summary: Too Cool
Review: I hate to be the first less than glowing review here, but I was let down by Gibson's latest work. The social anomie and alienation here is more tangible than the text, plot or characters. With the plot moving as slow as molasses, circling around images on the internet, and halting to explore strange looking calculators, I felt this work was held together by tone alone. Granted the language is beautiful but the work tried to explore advertising and globalization (according to the bookjacket) yet I feel I've seen these dim glances before. I feel the My Year of Meats (Ruth Ozeki) much more powerfully did what Pattern Recognition thought it was trying. The book is worth reading simply because it's Gibson looking at the present.

Rating:
Summary: Captivated by Cayce Pollard
Review: I fell in love this book's plucky protagonist and decided she should be played by Chloe Sevigny in the inevitable movie. I seldom read genre novels - science fiction or espionage thrillers - but I was hooked on this incredibly witty look at the popular culture through the eyes of a globe-trotting "cool hunter."

Yes, the plot turns out to be your standard thriller blueprint, with some mysterious Internet footage serving as the McGuffin instead of a Maltese falcon. Yes, five years (or five minutes) from now, nobody will get the brand references like Duffer of St. George. Yes, the denouement could have been way better. And yes, the tragedy of 9/11 seems grafted on to this plot give it a bit of gravitas. But this page-turner brought back some of the pleasure I remember from reading the James Bond series as it emerged, and Gibson has an astounding grasp of the pop zeitgeist.

Great fun.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: While reading this wonderful book, I thought "how did he have the courage?" He ditched SF, he ditched most of his style, including multiple main characters (This one only has one).

As it turns out from the postscript, it *did* take an extraordinary amount of courage to do so, his friends pushed him through it.

This is one of the most original and subtle books I have read.

And possibly the most clinically cliche-free books ever written. When have you ever read a book where the heroine leaves a Russian hotel, and remembers that she has forgotten her passport... and returns later to retrieve the passport safely, and no problem ever came from it!?? Wonderful.

Rating:
Summary: A real treat
Review: Market researcher Cayce Pollard is considered a guru when it comes to selecting potential products and advertising campaigns that will make it. Recently hired by advertising giant Hubertus Bigend to evaluate a new logo, Cayce travels to London to meet with her client. She pulls no punches when she informs him that she thinks it will fail.

Impressed by her fortitude and insight, Hubertus hires Cayce to look into a series of Internet film clips attracting a large world-wide cult following. Hubertus believes the pixel filmmaker is an advertising genius. Cayce's preliminary work leads to someone breaking into the London flat she is temporarily staying at and hacking into her computer. Soon the investigation sends Cayce global as she quickly links her inquiries to that of her spook father presumed dead in the World Trade Center disaster

Unlike his usual futuristic global paranoia caused by Big Brother surveillance, PATTERN RECOGNITION is a present day thriller focusing on the same themes but through real world elements and patterns. The story line is more cerebral than action loaded as William Gibson paints a "cyber" tale that allegorically tears into the soulless patterns of modern society including email. Cayce is a heroine representing the hope that the dismal patterns of the present will not lead to an even bleaker future as the trends seem to imply. Mr. Gibson provides a taut thought provoking tale, but not for action fans.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: patterns
Review: Pattern Recognition was not much fun to read. I found myself having to back up several times just to figure out where I was, who I was with, and what we were doing. Gibson introduced some neat ideas, like "coolhunting," but they went mostly undeveloped. When I look back now, 15 minutes after finishing the book, I see darkness, some half-grasped plot points whirling around like street trash in the wind...and I'm a good reader. I wanted to like Cayce, but there wasn't enough of her to like, or the other characters either. The whole novel seemed to pick up and discard elements of modern life--modern wealthy life, that is--with abandon. I thought the ending was less than satisfying. Yay, happy ending. I was more relieved than anything else. Having committed my time and money to the book, I couldn't just not finish.

Rating:
Summary: A Complete Disappointment
Review: This is a dangerous and ultimately disappointing book for the writer.

By setting Pattern Recognition in the present, Mr. Gibson aims to lend his cynical, "cyber-punk" eye to the (presumably oppressive) uniculture that America is exporting. The problem isn't that it's a lazy device, though it is. Or that it lends itself to the kind of armchair, pedantic observation that you're supposed to grow out of after college. It's that Mr. Gibson succumbs to the tyranny he tries to observe.

This is less a novel than a numbing series of lists. Where there should be plot, he gives us vaguely connected riffs about the emptiness of Tommy Hilfiger and plasma TV. But the real heartbreaker is that the man who wrote perhaps the best opening sentence of all time -- "The sky...was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel" -- is hacking here.

Pray he rediscovers his chops, because you won't recognize them in Pattern Recognition.

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant guy who is not writing brilliant books
Review: I want William Gibson's books to be good. I want William Gibson's books to be wonderful. I want Wiliiam Gibson to write another Neuromancer - only completely different - but that good that interesting and complicated and with that exquiste edge in the language and the action. I want to help him write a book that good because I want to read a book like that. But this book isn't very good. There are glimpses of that Neromancer talent, the genuis. And, the brilliance with language and description is there in places.

What has happened to Gibson? With all that talent why isn't he writing better books? Maybe he should settle in and read some Frank Herbert especially the Dosadi Experiment and Whipping Star and then read some of Tony Hillerman and John D. MacDonald and watch Bladerunner and re-read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and I don't know - because the potential is there, it is, but I don't know why these books just don't really work that well. I wish fans could help - but I don't know what we can do.

Rating:
Summary: a little of this goes a long way
Review: Sorry, didn't like it a whole lot. It was gimicky and "trendy" to a fault, and I couldn't identify with the characters. I tend to prefer books that have depth and lasting impact, and that have a message or several messages that make the time invested worthwhile. This one will be dated in about five years, and left me with nothing to grasp on to - about the equivalent literary impact as a comic book. It probably would make a decent movie though, so I'll give it 3 stars. A movie would require a much shorter investment of time, and while a movie is an escape for me, I prefer a book to be an engaging contemplative experience. This one wasn't.