Smooth as Ceramic, Thin as a Microchip

TITLE: Spook Country
AUTHOR: William Gibson
PUBLISHER: Putnam

RATING
5/5 "Pussy Galore"; 4/5 "Honey Ryder"; 3/5 "Plenty O'Toole"; 2/5 "Kissy Suzuki"; 1/5 "Xenia Onatopp"
SCORE: 4/5

A slick casing of ultra-modern style hold a wafer-thin plot in William Gibson's "Spook Country". Mr Gibson returns to the augmented-reality world of 2003's "Pattern Recognition" and uploads us into the minds of Hollis Henry, a freelance journalist working for a magazine that may not even exist, Tito, a Russian-trained Chinese-Cuban smuggler delivering iPods to a mysterious client, and Milgrim, a benzo-addicted Russian translator kidnapped by a pseudo-military team shadowing Tito.

Mr Gibson's writing is ceramic-smooth minimalism, slick and stylish as an iPod, and easily its match in self-conscious hipness. Sentences are subject, verb, object, although two of these may be optional. "She'd Google him later" sums up the style--five words or less, including brand name. There is much guff talk about "preubiquitous media" and cyberspace "everting", but the prose is rescued from pretentious silliness by eye-catching imagery, like calling a sidewalk an "abstract in blackened chewing gum". It shouldn't work, but it so often does. It's a powerfully immediate and electrifying style. Sadly, there are some distractions. Mr Gibson outfits his text with more name brands than a Tokyo teenager, and sometimes the triple-lacquer layer of coolness is as numbing as it is hypnotic, like watching computer-generated fractals on endless loop.

The real letdown is the plot. There's some silliness involving superman criminals using Russian martial arts and voodoo to outwit Blackwell government types, and the subtext of the novel reads like an unsubtle small-l liberal bible, name-checking such cause celebre as disaffection with the war in Iraq and anguish over the growing divide between haves and have-nots. What's worse, the patently silly denouement in Mr Gibson's hometown of Vancouver robs the story of any gravitas it may have had.

It's a pity. Such silken skill with words should be put to use with a more engaging story. That said, Mr Gibson's invigorating Hunter S Thompson-does-sociology approach remains one of the most interesting, original voices in fiction. Let's hope he downloads something meatier for his next oeuvre.