Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. When award time comes around next year, should Pattern Recognition be up for a Hugo or Nebula award, be prepared for an acrimonious argument about whether it qualifies. It's hard to find anything in this that a purist would readily identify as SF, though it has an SF sort of "feel" to it.
But it's a wonderfully written book-- Gibson may have drifted out of genre waters with this one, but the man has lost none of his flair for imagery:
Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.
It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now.
[...]
She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: 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, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.
Gibson has a flair for description and an eye for small details that frequently leaves me saying "Yes! That's it exactly!" His depiction of Usenet-type collections of obsessives is dead-on, his fashion commentary beggars the The Poor Man ("There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul."), and his description of the view from a Tokyo hotel room ("a remarkably virtual-looking skyline, a floating jumble of electric Lego, studded with odd shapes you somehow wouldn't see elsewhere, as if you'd need special Tokyo add-ons to build this at home") was vivid enough to evoke memories of a surreal dinner at the top of a department store in Shinjuku.
This talent for description, rarely matched in or out of the SF genre, is put in the service of a plot that's decidedly odd for Gibson. For one thing, it's an oddly specific book-- most of his other works take place at some poorly specified time in the future, but this book is set not long after September 11, 2001. The main character's father vanished on that day somewhere in Manhattan, and frequent references are made to the terrorist attacks. These references are somewhat jarring, as most of the rest of the book has the same sort of otherworldly feel as the rest of his books.
More importantly, though, this is the first Gibson novel I can think of where the protagonist isn't a loser. Gibson's other books are characterized by what Bruce Sterling referred to as "low life and high tech"-- his protagonists in the past have been drug-addicted petty criminals just scraping by, who find themselves caught up in events beyond their comprehension. Cayce Pollard, on the other hand, is definitely upper-middle-class-- she has a comfortable life, hob-nobs with corporate heads and noted film directors, and is a fairly experienced world traveler. It's an odd departure for Gibson, as if he decided to write a novel using Bruce Sterling characters for variety. Or maybe Neal Stephenson characters, as Cayce's violent allergy to corporate branding is a very Snow Crash sort of touch.
In another sense, though, it's familiar territory-- the plot concerns the search for the maker of mysterious, haunting snippets of some sort of movie (called "footage" by the enthusiasts who collect the scraps and debate their origin). Cayce, a "footagehead" herself, is hired to find the maker by an advertising magnate, who wants it for his own, possibly nefarious, purposes. The whole business is strongly reminiscent of the Cornell boxes in Count Zero. The nationality of the mafiosi involved in the plot has changed from Japanese to Russian, and the resolution is considerably different, but the similarities are hard to ignore.
(Parts of the book are also oddly reminiscent of Iain Banks's The Business. I'm not sure what this means, other than that I read too much, and am prone to free-associating...)
Ultimately, the book is more successful in atmospheric terms than more conventional matters of plot. Gibson's world has a wonderful feel to it, and the writing really sucked me in, but in the end, I'm not convinced the plot really hangs together. But oh, what a wonderful job he does with the atmosphere...
(Originally posted on The Library of Babel.)
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