Low-Level spoilers Ahoy!

“Leave room for coincidence,” is the advice of Casey Pollard’s father. He knew the dangers of apophenia, the tendency to find meaningful connections between unrelated things. Along with paranoia, it was a professional risk for Win Pollard, some kind of Us Government security expert who disappeared on the day of the most casual and horrific breach of Us security, 9/11. In passing, his wife suggests that, outraged and astonished, he simply ceased to be. Whatever the case, she now devotes her days to Electronic Voice Phenomenon, searching for messages from the dead. Casey is not convinced by any of it and her need for real closure over the mystery of her father is ever present. Casey too is big on Pattern Recognition. By trade she is what is known as a Cool Hunter – she observes and identifies new cultural trends, usually with origins in society and culture’s margins, reporting what’s ‘cool’ back to her high-end advertising and marketing employers, who then start the ball rolling on co-opting and commodifying.

In her spare time, between contracts, Casey is obsessed with The Footage – short clips of film, found in backwaters of the internet, released with no fanfare, that are startlingly beautiful yet remain uncredited. The closest comparison in terms of style and tone seems to be the work of Tarkovsky. she and her internet chums discuss the clips endlessly and hunt for their origin and message, seeking patterns of meaning that may or may not be there.

Then, on a trip to London, 2003, the charismatically odious head of Blue Ant advertising and marketing agency (the overly named Hubertus Bigend – no, really) takes an off-the-books interest in The Footage and hires Casey to track-down and locate The Maker. From here, the story becomes full-on fish-out-of-water thriller romp of switching locations and allegiances, dashing from London to Tokyo to Moscow and then, rather quietly, at the end, Paris.

Doesn’t sound much like a William Gibson novel, does it? Originator of Cyberpunk as a thing, identifier and coiner of the term ‘cyberspace’, and author of trail blazing Neuromancer, Gibson really pushed the effect of technology on society, culture, and humankind in his works. Works that seemed to be both prophetic and at the same time emanatory – strangely like they were actually conjuring his vision of the near future into being – potent rituals of low-life tech-gods. At first glance, Pattern Recognition seems a departure from this – for a start, it’s set in the present (well, it was when it was written!) and seems to be concerned with the past. But it’s all connected, you just have to see the pattern.

The book is definitely written in Gibson’s typical style though; the text veers from pull-you-up moments of intense beauty to eye-roll Noir cliché in a nanosecond. Largely urban set, he does a good job of making London, Tokyo and Moscow feel different while at the same time commenting on the ongoing converging of national identities; everywhere is now a local variation on the same theme. Casey calls London ‘Mirror World’ as it reflects New York in many ways and, like true reflections, things are the wrong way round (right-hand drive – left-hand drive). Also in true Gibson fashion, the book is littered with name-dropping, almost Product Placement, of brands and products. It’s borderline fetishist and most definitely annoying. Considering that Casey hates brands, thanks to her job, and spends time removing labels, Gibson always lets us know exactly what it says on the labels she is removing!

Throughout the book, Gibson appears to be suggesting that the future is now so uncertain, technology shifting the very structure of society and culture beneath our feet, that looking to the future with any certainty is pointless – it’s pretty much here with us now. What’s more, the history of the past that we know is pretty much a construct of the present, not the victor, as we were told at school. Meaning and events in the past get reinterpreted and recontextualized constantly from the perspective of today’s concerns. It’s all a fiction. History is ever fluid, the future dead. Both past and future are just reflections of now.  

similarly, Pattern Recognition puts forward a view that all art is now a reflection of something else, the creative process is now more than just the work of individuals, and commercialism is the monoculture that assimilates all individuality. Art is now free for anyone or highly monetised. Casey’s cool-hunting shows that society creates consumerism, not the other way around. That we create the thing that ultimately stifles us. Bigend’s ad agency, Blue Ant, shares its name with a kind of wasp that just looks like an ant but in fact hunts crickets which it paralyses prior to laying eggs on the hapless creature. The eggs hatch and the cricket becomes a living banquet for the wasp’s brood. If that isn’t a metaphor, I’m handing in my Metaphor Hunters Club card.

The one thing that lies outside this artifice, the monoculture, is The Footage. It’s the one pure, unsullied art expression. The ultimate unfettered cool. Or so everyone thinks. And that’s why people like Bigend want it found. I know some people have had ‘issues’ with the resolution of The Quest for the Footage, expecting, I don’t know what exactly but… maybe more of a Holy Grail type thing? I liked the resolution, the story of The Maker (possibly the last true artist?) and her protectors and their efforts to let the world share, but not abuse, the Art. And great for the story that they did it in such an obtuse way…

Elsewhere there are observations, both indirectly and in your face, on globalisation, on brand recognition, on the rise of the Attention Economy, on patterns within patterns within patterns.

But one striking thing, looking back on Pattern Recognition now, is that there are two or three instances of events and encounters without which the story would not have panned out the way it did, or in one case, would not have happened at all, had it not been for MAssIVE coincidences. Or should that be synchronicity…………

You should always leave room for coincidences.

In the Us, G.P. Putnam’s originally released Pattern Recognition in February 2003 and Berkley Books the paperback a year later.
In the Mirror World, Viking Press issued the hard-back in slightly different cover to Us one and Penguin issued the paperback in February 2005.