At least that’s what Pattern Recognition seems to imply. William Gibson’s latest isn’t your typical sci-fi novel as much as it is a vogue’s eye view on the here and now. Precariously tipped on the edge of 2002, this novel risks being dated (in fact it is – the Mac cube figures where the G5 tower ought to be). But you will forgive Gibson for his attempts at being minutely precise – his prescient parallel-worldliness is still very much in evidence. It matters not that he details the goings-on of post-everything society, in such culturally implosive locations as London, Moscow and of course Tokyo, his staple future city – but that he gets the flow of what’s really going on, what’s happening undercurrent. He recognizes the holographic patterns and connections that mere media junkies take for granted as the latest ephemeral fad.
I was fond of Gibson because of Neuromancer, which though while written in the ‘80s, fired multiple synapses in many of the ‘90s techno-mindsets that somehow swallowed too-eagerly the red (or was it blue?) pill of consensual hallucination. Now in this age where the "future" matters less than the immediate and imminent, Gibson’s latest book appears retrospective in light of his supposed cyberpunk SFness. It is set in the present and identifies not future imaginings through darkly-glassed visions, but lowly current trends in ways that music videos and magazines do, but novels hardly ever. And yet, I don’t think this will preempt the book from reaching somewhat of a cult status within its genre. Names, brands and the labels we place on phenomenon may vary and differ, but the driving force behind them, the patterns, if you will, are largely always the same. Under different guises, yes, but like the limbic reptilian part of our brain that always seeks out visceral immediacy, the stuff around us that make up society in all its fluctuating forms – advertising, consumption, love, war – will always be derived from that one basic source, desire.
Gibson himself has liberally brand-spanked his own turns of phrase – a film is "Zaprudered into surreal dimensions," an expressway has been "Blade Runnered by half a century of use and pollution." But rather than discuss literary style or spoil you with the plot, that of a mystery film footage hunt involving gruesome Russian Mafia, greedy marketing execs and geeky Japanese otaku, I’d like to pluck out a few references in the book that initially seemed too banal for anyone to be writing about, the author particularly (where’s the sexy cyborgry? The downloadable data-drugs?), but eventually contributed to the weird charm of the book – a kind of nostalgia for the present. Things that serve as temporal bookmarks of our oh-so-early ‘00s, yet complete the book’s aura of being more socially real than fictitiosly scientific. Stuff that may very well spawn franchises among fervent fans. His work is endlessly hypertextual this way, but I think he overloads on the name-dropping as a comment on society while ironically knowing what kind of cyclical response it can produce.
Technology will always be a welcome intruder, furthering itself according to our subconscious libidos, but sometimes we don’t know what the hell we’re supposed to do with the things we make, though we try. We end up finding the randomest inventions in back alley markets –like in the story, the Curta calculator that’s sold out of a car trunk in Camden, an expensive piece of obsolete hardware that ends up being part of a poncy art exhibit. This only says much about how we end up using a product and not how it was particularly necessary in that point and time. Marketing, it brings us back to, and this is the beauty of Cayce Pollard, the protagonist, a 32 year old something freelance consultant and mutated symptom of a genetic world gone brand-mad.
While the average person might be attracted to an LV monogram or two, Cayce (an unsubtle homage to Case of Neuromancer) is severely allergic to mass marketed forms of branding, and yet her ability to intuitively sniff out a good or bad logo design makes her the perfect marketing tool. She was first in on the skatewear fad and "discovered" the guy who originally shoved a backwards baseball cap over his head. She sells cool to big companies who commodify her findings. Think of her as a pre-cog(nitive) in the wheels of capitalism.
There is a brilliant moment in a Harvey Nichols department store where she configures a "Tommy Hilfiger event horizon." Tommy atrocities are splayed everywhere and Cayce’s nervous system goes on protest strike. It doesn’t take a particularly precious sensibility to gauge that Tommy is blatantly crap manufactured for those who don’t know any better. "A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready-to wear with liberal lashings of polo knit and regimental stripes." Now who would have known Gibson was actually fashion cognoscenti?
Aside, what’s also interesting was the amount of buzz created with a mere mention, a product placement of a certain thing. Gibson’s world is increasingly self-referential – while still mirroring our own – but his has every right to be so. He deals with technology and its nuances, and his fans are those on the bleeding edge of online, ready to annotate, locate and replicate everything that may have extra-contextual meaning, that may form an interesting flow or lead to a new trend. Discovery and dissection of another meme. Miss a blink in the volatile present and the future will pass you by. Or rather: We have no more future.
Cayce Pollard, the so anti-hip that she’s hip coolhunter, styles herself with:
A Pilates reformer – a "very long, very low, vaguely ominous and Weimar-looking piece of spring-loaded furniture." Probably the first heroine I’ve encountered in non-chick lit fict that religiously adheres to the tenets of Joseph Pilates wherever she goes, whether London, Tokyo or Moscow. Pilates, she thinks, isn’t meditative like yoga. "You have to keep your eyes open, and pay attention."
A Buzz Rickson jacket – a Japanese replica of a WW2 flight jacket. The only luxury she indulges in because it is less of a brand than a museum item, a festishitic, non-stylized homage to utilitarian military gear, albeit in non-surplus prices. After the book came out there was an upsurge of gaijin (foreigners) who went and bought the very same jacket in obscure Shibuya stores, and the company itself started producing it in black (which it wasn’t available in before) in honor of the book.
Old-school Casio G-Shock – or at least a Korean clone of one, carefully sanded free of logos.
CPUS – or Cayce Pollard Units, which she calls her outfits. "Either black, white or gray, and ideally seem to have come to this world without human intervention." This means generic Fruit of the Loom tees, anonymous skirts and leggings, an East German laminate envelope bought on Ebay and used as a purse, and Levi 501s whose buttons are meticulously ground off their trademarks.
In London, Cayce stays in her friend Damien’s apartment, a music video/documentary director who, without it needing to be said, is so obviously the music video director Chris Cunningham in real life. He’s got the milky white robot chicks propped up against his room, and any Bjork fan will recognize them as the lesbian Bjork-bots in her All Is Full of Love video. Chris Cunningham was long slated to direct the film version of Neuromancer, but somehow it never materialized. Perhaps he really did hie off to Russia to excavate WW2 relics.
This Damien/Chris character, quite the cool dude, has a bedspread and jacket made of a very specific mode of camouflage which Cayce can’t quite seem to place. "She knows the most beautiful is South African, smoky-mauve-toned Expressionist streaks suggesting a sunset landscape of great and alien beauty." Later, it comes: "Flecktarn. That’s what it’s called. Like chocolate chips sprinkled on confetti the color of last autumn’s leaves." Sounds gorgeous enough to make you want to go and sign your life away to the army just for the clothes.
But there’s more to culture than just being cool. And perhaps they themselves have missed the point, those entire websites dedicated to the nitpicking of this novel. Not because of any literary genius, but because the Gibsonian medium lends itself particularly well to online oddity, especially with that at the center of the novel lies the found fragmented footage only true net geeks and film aficionados would conspire to form a worldwide cult around. Is it a clever marketing ploy ala The Blair Witch Project, or the work of a deranged garage genius? The actual resolution is more personal and non-conspiratorially dystopic than expected from a SF novelist. But William Gibson’s most of-the-moment mirror-world was completed during the incomprehensible aftermath of 9/11. And in the light of that shadow, the only futures we now deign to imagine for ourselves are faceted through the complexity of recognizing the patterns embedded in our ever-shifting present. Sometimes screamingly obvious, but mostly liminally unseen, like the leaf-strewn ground camouflaged beneath flaming trees.