William Gibson, Spook Country

What a relief to read Spook Country. I've had a bit of a bad run lately book-wise and this was much needed. It's a quietly fun, intelligent book with what I think of as calm writing and a lack of pretension. It was entertaining, certainly, in the Michael Chabon sense of the word.

There are three centers to the story: Hollis Henry, writing a piece on locative art and more for the mysterious Node magazine; Tito, part of a family of spies originally from Cuba, trained from birth and working for their grandfather's benefactor; and Brown and Millgrim, a spook of some sort and his Volapuk-speaking, Rize-addicted hostage. The plot is driven by the search for a mysterious container and its contents.

Gibson assumes his readers aren't idiots and doesn't feel the need to show his research as far too many writers are wont to do. For example, he introduces Santeria, a Cuban religion, and gives us enough information to give depth to Tito, but does not spend pages telling us how much he has learned about it. It is as if he trusts us to read about it ourselves if we would like to know more. (It's interesting. I might.) As a result, the book is more graceful and light than it would have been with a less-confident author who needed to show his work.

After reading this, I was taken with the possibilities of how the story could have been told. The basic, stripped down plot could have been used by a spy writer for a post Cold War novel. Or perhaps, varying a point or two, someone could have written a novel along the lines of PopCo by Scarlett Thomas (which I liked, pretty much). I like this version; the writing is insightful and clever but without being weighty or too worthy.

There are certainly more novels to be had from the characters in the book, something along the lines of "The Adventures of Hollis and Reg" or follow a member of Tito's extended family. I would love to catch up with them in a few years' time.