William Gibson, best known for the sci-fi thriller Necromancer, in Pattern Recognition spins a post-9/11 tale of espionage and mystery set in the world of high-finance advertising.
Casey Pollard, the heroine of Gibson’s most recent work, is the daughter of an ex-CIA spook once deployed in the former USSR, who goes missing the morning of September 11th, 2001, (a bit of useless information curiously dropped and dangled, but by book’s end never resolved). The younger Pollard, a presumably highly paid contingent worker in the advertising industry has a remarkable nose for sniffing out whether corporate logos and advertising ploys will work and hires herself out to the highest bidder. She is employed by a transnational based in Britain to uncover the source of mysterious film footage that appears on the Internet, creating a worldwide stir. Ad execs are duly impressed by the finesse of not only the footage, but also the methods utilized by the distributors and seek to learn the maker’s identity.
Pollard’s quest to uncover the source of the frenzy leads her to London, Tokyo and Moscow, where she is pursued by a motley crew of corporate spies, Italian and Russian mafiosos. As events unfold, Gibson provides a sharp critique of corporate culture and the devices and ploys of marketing. The story, however, while fast-moving, is clumsily wrought and the writing at times is awkward in its effort to appear “cool.” While searing in its display of the barrenness of corporate culture, Pattern Recognition reserves its sharpest barbs for gratuitous attacks on the former Soviet Union and socialism.
Here the reader is treated to the usual clichés about the gray drabness of Soviet life and the clumsiness of its efforts at art and architecture. The socialist experiment, a decade after its collapse and in the middle of the ravages of Russian gangster capitalism, is treated as an aberration and affront. In one telling phrase, Lenin is said to have told the absolute truth about capitalism and an absolute lie about Communism.
Thus, unfortunately one sees in Pattern Recognition’s crude, stereotypical and unnuanced portrayals of socialist life and in its plague-on-both-your-houses condemnations, the same old bourgeois pattern.
Pattern Recognition
By William Gibson
New York, Putnam Publishing, 2003.
