“Mirror world. The plugs on appliances are huge, triple pronged, for a species of current that only powers electric chairs, in America. Cars are reversed, left to right, inside; telephone handsets have a different weight, a different balance; the covers of paperbacks look like Australian money.”

It’s so simple – Gibson is describing London but just that phrase, “mirror world” conjures up visions of the brave and strange new worlds of the sci-fi era. This phrase repeats itself throughout to maintain that slightly skewed effect. He also establishes a sense of globalization right off, using descriptions like,“nothing at all in the German fridge”, “the switch on Damien’s Italian floor lamp”, “bag of some imported California tea substitute,” and, well, you get the idea. This attention to detail and description is a hallmark of Gibson’s work and as usual, he establishes his world from the first page while introducing his main character, Cayce Pollard, at the same time.

Cayce Pollard, in Gibsonspeak, is what’s known as a ‘coolhunter’ – someone with an uncanny talent for spotting styles and trends in their infancy, long before they come to the attention of the mainstream. She’s employed by various advertisers and designers to do just this, at which point, the marketers or ‘commodifiers’ take over. In a brilliant Gibson twist, one reason Cayce is able to do this so well is that she suffers both psychologically and physically from allergy to brands, logos, and icons, most notably to Tommy Hilfiger and the Michelin Man. Her reactions range from mild dizziness to near collapse. Because of this state, she is theoretically not affected by the conscious or subliminal manipulation of advertising, leaving her pure and free to intuit the next hip thing.

Cayce is in London to give her much trusted input on a new logo for an athletic footwear manufacturer and is to meet with reps from the ad agency and the design firm that’s presenting the logo. She is also suffering disorientation from jetlag, which Gibson describes on more than one occasion quite poetically:

“She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jetlag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghastly 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.”

This feels like a reasonable explanation and further contributes to the vague sense of otherworld. Cayce also is heavily involved on the internet, on a film footage forum, that is, of late, examining clips of film fragments that are possibly from a bigger piece by an unknown auteur. This seems to be a side plot at first, something that Cayce is spending time on when not dealing with her advertising assignment. Gradually though, this thread becomes more and more important as new clips turn up on the forum and the more hardcore of the ‘footageheads’start scrambling to investigate who’s behind the mysterious film, Cayce among them.

In Gibson fashion, things get progressively more and more strange and unsettling – the friend’s flat where she’s staying is broken into, nothing taken but the computer has been used, she observes people in the street following her, and a woman from the design firm eyes her with evil intent. In a twinkling, the film footage is the story. Blue Ant, the ad firm that she’s working for reassigns her to look for the entity behind the film, giving her access to unlimited resources. She jets out, her search taking her to Japan, Russia and back to London while wondering all the while if this is really happening, is she paranoid, or simply jetlagged beyond belief. Paranoia is one of Gibson’s tools – in the words of Cayce’s father, Win Pollard, who had connections to the CIA and went missing on 9/11:

“Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer. But he was also fond of saying, at other times, that even paranoid schizophrenics have enemies.”

What makes Gibson’s plots riveting are that they are entirely believable and what he had predicted in his earlier work, information as commodity (Neuromancer and Count zero) and recurring data patterns and virtual celebrity (Idoru) have all really come to pass. There is also an extremely droll sense of humour to be found in all his previous writing. In ‘Pattern Recognition,’ he outdoes himself as he examines the globalized commercial world of today and in an almost Swiftian way, raves out about it through a manifestation of one of Cayce’s allergic reactions when she is blindsided by a Tommy Hilfiger display in a London department store:

"Tommy Hilfiger does it every time, though she’d thought she was safe now. They’d said he’d peaked, in New York. Like Benetton, the name would be around, but the real poison, for her, would’ve been drawn. It’s something to do with context, here, with not expecting it in London. When it starts, it’s pure reaction, like biting down hard on a piece of foil. A glance to the right and the avalanche lets go. A mountainside of Tommy coming down on her head. My God, don’t they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready-to-wear with liberal lashings of polo kit and regimental stripes. But Tommy is surely the null point, the black hole. 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. Or so she hopes, and doesn’t know, but suspects in her heart that this in fact is what accounts for his long ubiquity.”

Well said! Can’t imagine anyone putting it better.

Marc Goldin currently lives in Chicago, with three cats, each one more long-haired than the last. Interests have ranged from medieval monasticism to discontinued stations on the London Underground – literary likes too diverse (some would say schizo) to list here although the last several years have been witness to an intimacy with Scottish and Irish literature. American Southern and Beat era lit also account for some of the ‘missing years’. Music tastes run the gamut from Cuban Danzon to Ska (all three waves but having a specific attachment to the second, two-tone period) to the Tuvan throat singers. Has written book reviews for a now defunct Irish literature site and has several short stories in various stages of development. Mad for black and white photography and aspires to someday have a complete collection of photos documenting every close in the Grassmarket area of Edinburgh. Works in the IT dept. of a French company in the current political climate. In football, supports Chelsea, Hibs, and for the sake of employment security, Marseille. To read Marc’s story, ‘Plastic Paddy’ on the showcase section of this site, click here or to read more reviews by Marc, click the New Review index above.

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.