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the most verbose IKEA catalogue i've ever read...


A book review why not?

Have been reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. No particular reason why this and now other than curiosity really. The name casts a large shadow in the sci-fi genre of course. Neuromancer, cyberpunk, skies the colour and texture of white noise, the kind of good stuff that shapes genres and other writers long after its publication. So what is Pattern Recognition?

It's bleeding edge human trend detectors. It's the niche within a niche subcultures of the web. It's also copious amounts of interior design lovingly described throughout. Also 9/11. This is an early noughties book and those horrific events loomed large over everything. Truly it has it all! More truly, for me at least it was a sprawling, at times quite interesting but often quite tiresome tale told with variable levels of success.

It does a decent job of bringing the multiple threads of intrigue together but it never quite gels by the time it finishes. The search for mysterious content on the web, questions of authorship and the dissemination of meaning quickly follow in its wake. There's lots to think about to be sure and some potentially interesting ideas alluded to throughout but it never connected with me beyond that.

It feels like quite a sterile piece of storytelling at times. Everything is listed, itemised, described in a functional manner that feels lifted from a showroom catalogue. Perhaps it's the point that it's all empty signifiers only as meaningful as we make them but its never really examined as the plot unfolds onwards.

As for the plot, it probably read better at the time it was published in the early noughties where there was a lot more novelty to certain items of technology that are now fundamentally part of the fabric of everyday life. Much like its protagonist, the author is hunting cool but is rather less convincing at it. It reads like a dad trying a little too hard to be down with the kids, teetering on the edge and often falling over it.

A note about the language, now the following isn't applicable to the entire book, at times it is quite eloquent and evocative in fact. There are some odd attacks of verbiage here however. There are some choice examples of this throughout, somewhere early on I read of 'horizonless horse latitudes' and realised I wasn't going to be bridging the gap of meaning with the author at all points of this story. It's doesn't stymie the storytelling but it is a distraction from it.

Overall it's a mixed recommendation from me. A tale with a lot of interesting setup that never quite pays off beyond the surface level of things. Clearly there's a fascination here with the concept of cool, branding and online culture as one might read about it in essays on the subject but it never connects far beyond the superficial. Give it a go but bear in mind that 2003 was a long time ago now, in internet time it's way longer.

(Disclaimer: this post is very much an expanded and revised edition of some initial and more immediate thoughts posted on Goodreads and Amazon a short time ago. A deliberate counterpoint, a benefit of hindsight edition that tests the method in the madness of immediate impressions.)

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