Pattern Recognition
by William Gibson
368pp, Viking, £16.99
In the end, William Gibson's novels are all about sadness - a very distinctive and particular sadness: the melancholy of technology. On the opening page of Pattern Recognition we are introduced to one of its central ideas, a "theory of jet lag". Gibson's heroine, Cayce (pronounced Casey) Pollard, has just flown from New York to London, and feels that "her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here... Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage." Whatever he has written, Gibson has never abandoned the idea of a "mortal soul", a human essence, which the speed of our world, or of his imagined futures, causes us to lose - if only temporarily.
In this, he is basically a conservative author; he doesn't really want to engage with the possibilities of the post-human. His chosen form, the novel, doesn't allow him to do this. Many science fiction authors have written about human-absent worlds, about robots battling robots, but in order to make these novels seem worthwhile to humans (and robots aren't a particularly large market at the moment), they always have to invest at least one of the robots with human qualities. The soul is necessary in novels, for without the soul there would be no melancholy, and without the melancholy the novels wouldn't be worth reading.
Pattern Recognition very much wants to be a novel of ideas. And the ideas it is concerned with are those of what Gibson sees as our po-mo Logo/ No Logo world. The familiar idea of simulacra is put forward by marketing mastermind Hubertus Bigend (some SF habits, like the overnaming of characters, die hard). "Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else." At one point Cayce Pollard sees "a pub of such quintessential pubness that she assumes it is only a few weeks old".
Bigend also says, "Far more creativity, today, goes in to the marketing of products than into the products themselves." What is interesting, today, is that Gibson doesn't seem to have the intellectual energy to think the novel beyond this.
Cayce Pollard is "a legend in the world of advertising" - she has the incredibly valuable quality (both to corporations and to the novelist-of-ideas) of being allergic to branding. This first revealed itself when she was six, in her horrified reaction to Bibendum, aka the Michelin Man. At the beginning of the novel, she has been flown over from New York to say Yes or No to a sneaker-manufacturer's new logo, into which it has poured massive investment. Only to say Yes or No, nothing else. And if Cayce says No, the logo is scrapped.
The central idea of the novel is plainly stated. "Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition... Both a gift and a trap." Cayce makes her living from pattern recognition, from "finding whatever the next thing might be": she is a cool-hunter. She is also one of a large number of people hunting for brief clips from a nameless film that have been posted, on incredibly obscure sites, around the internet.
This film may or may not have a plot, it may or may not be complete; what all who see it agree is that is has an awesome, melancholy power. The clip-hunters, or footageheads, congregate in newsgroups to speculate as to who is creating the footage, and why.
Of course, when Bigend hears of this, the greatest piece of viral marketing since The Blair Witch Project, he wants in. Cayce is encouraged to turn her hobby into her job, and off around the world, in pursuit of "the maker", she goes. This is a good opportunity for Gibson to do what he does best, the spaced-out travelogue. Cayce's quest takes her first to Tokyo, capitalist epitome, and then Moscow, capitalist wannabe. Gibson's eye for detail and his way with a phrase remain exquisite: "In the sunlit street, all is still; nothing moves save the cinnamon blur of a cat, just there, and gone."
Devoted readers of Gibson will, by this point, be experiencing some pattern recognition of their own. In Pattern Recognition , Gibson's resourceful heroine, Cayce Pollard, is given huge resources by an untrustworthy corporate spiv, Hubertus Bigend, to find the maker of mysterious and melancholy footage. In his earlier novel Count Zero, Gibson's resourceful heroine, Marly Krushkhova, is given huge resources by an untrustworthy megacorporate spiv, Herr Virek, to find the maker of mysterious and melancholy boxes. Both novels are a quest after the artist, the person capable of investing mere light, mere matter, with soul. Without giving the end away, the revelation of Count Zero is the more radical.
Pattern recognition, as a human phenomenon, becomes something else when it goes too far; it becomes "apophenia... the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things". One of the disappointments of the novel is that it doesn't push this far enough as a potential plot device. If there were an insane number of interconnections by the end, as is sometimes the case in thrillers, then the reader would feel more fulfilled. Judged just as a thriller, Pattern Recognition takes too long to kickstart, gives its big secrets away before it should and never puts the heroine in believable peril.
The pivotal moment comes when Cayce is granted access to the huge resources of Bigend's company. Pamela Mainwaring, one of Bigend's glamorous employees, presents Cayce with a credit card. "'Sign this, please'... Case takes it. CASE POLLARD EXP. Platinum Visa customised with the hieratic Blue Ant... Pamela Mainwaring hands her an expensive German rollerpoint. Cayce puts the card face down on the trestle table and signs its virgin back. Something seems to clunk heavily, at the rear of her ethical universe."
For the rest of the novel, Cayce is on expenses. Gibson loves high-end luxury: "We have an iBook for you, loaded, cellular modem. And a phone. It's good here, anywhere in Europe, Japan, and the States... The Tokyo office is at your complete disposal. The best translators, drivers, anything you feel you need. Literally anything." (I started to wonder if Gibson's publicity handlers are coached to talk to him in this James-Bond-visits-M tone.)
Expenses, of course, can only be topped by one thing: cash. At the end of the novel, for services rendered, Cayce is presented with a "Louis Vuitton slim-line attaché, its gold-plated clasps gleaming", which contains "in tightly packed rows, white-banded sheaves of crisp new bills".
One could hardly find a more 1980s image, and Gibson's entire aesthetic is still definitely stuck in that decade. He loves shiny things, matt black things, things that open with a whirr and a click, things that sense human presence and react. The conclusion of Pattern Recognition reenacts the ultimate fantasy ending of 1980s movies - the heroine has lucked out without selling out, has kept her integrity but still ended up filthy rich. As a gesture towards the changed mood of the new millennium, Gibson has Cayce guiltily give the money away. Her gesture doesn't convince; Gibson's soul, sadly, isn't in it.
· Toby Litt's new novel, Finding Myself , will be published in June. To order Pattern Recognition for £14.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979.
