I’m only part way through William Gibson‘s new book Pattern Recognition, but I already think it is the best thing Gibson has ever written, better even than Neuromancer…
Pattern Recognition is, simply, a novel that describes, with dead-on accuracy, what it means to live in our global culture of simulacra, corporate logos and brand names, and electronic networks. The prose is cool and yet precise–it reads as if everything were underwater, sounds and all experience somehow muffled, and yet at the same time all the details are preternaturally, hallucinatorily clear.
And now and again, there’s a sentence that just stops me dead in my tracks, and sends shivers down my spine, it is so right:
- Describing a high-concept advertising agency: “Relatively tiny in terms of permanent staff, globally distributed, more post-geographic than multinational…” (6)
- On history: “The past changes, Our version of the past will interest the future to about the extent we’re interested in whatever past the Victorians believed in. It simply won’t seem very relevant.” (57)
- On advertising: “Far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves, athletic shoes or feature films.” (67)
- On the protagonist’s memories of being in New York on 9/11: “It will be like watching one of her own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority. An experience outside of culture.” (137)
More when I have finished the book…