by Wuyizidi on Sun Jun 15, 2008 10:18 am
Just finished reading Spook Country by William Gibson.
If you liked his previous work Pattern Recognition, you would have liked this one, but a bit less, because of diminishing returns. This book reuses extensively the structure and characters from Pattern Recognition. You feel like you're reading the same book.
In Ming Dynasty China, there was a very dominant calligrapher named Dong QiChang. He was heavily influenced by Daoist philosophies. So his brushwork has this light, clear, airy quality. He deliberately goes out and find the lightest ink possible. This is what reading William Gibson's current work feels like. As it is the usual problem with sci-fi, character development is really weak. None of them feels jumps-off-the-page vivid. There is actually not that much plot. The prose style is very sparse but elegant. Lots of thoughtful observation and analysis about culture. Again these are very brief, unlike Michael Crichton, who just drop entire lectures in middle of action.
And unlike say Tom Clancy or Anne Rice (two other extremely popular and enjoyable writers who have no technique), Gibson's language is very beautiful. But the one major attraction of these two books is that he brings you to this new world - this cosmopolitan, trans-national scene where unapologetically smart people are exploring the possibilities and of latest technology, and their implications for our everyday lives, whether it's something as shallow as our patterns of consumption, or as serious as war on terror.
Again, he does all of this in an effortless way - Chinese call it sheng ru qian chu (goes in deeply, exits at shallow angle). Meaning he can talk about very deep, complex subjects in a very accessible way that does not oversimplify things. Better still, you don't feel like you are cramming for quantum electrodynamics.
I finished reading the book (~260 pages) in a weekend. The next time I will try to do it over much longer period. You really do have to read it very carefully, lest you miss something minute but important. I know a week from now I won't remember half of the book. It will be like three hours after eating a Vietnamese meal - it was nutritious, tasty, beautiful, but very light. He makes you hunger for more. It feels like he's only telling you 5% of what he thinks about a subject, he's asking you to go the rest 95% on your own. Here's an example: "in this country, the government has done such a successful job of propagandize the 'war on terror', it makes the average person feel as if terrorism, like winning lottery, happens very often, and can happen to them. But statistically, virtually no one wins the lottery. The same is true for incidents of terrorism in this country...."
Wuyizidi
Last edited by
Wuyizidi on Sun Jun 15, 2008 10:28 am, edited 5 times in total.