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Recently finished William Gibson’s book Pattern Recognition.

There are no spoilers in the rest of this, but I do discuss locations that appear in the book (though they appear early and you would be missing little to know that they are in it).

Even having finished it, I both enjoyed and disliked the main character and the tone of the telling, for connected reasons.  Her viscerally negative reactions to brand imagery and obsessively blank-slate design sense put me off, I think, because they represent an amplified version of my own experience of branding and fashion, and I think the experience of a lot of people in this age.  But the amplification, combined with the tone of the place and product descriptions that fill the story, build a sense of overall quaintness.  I feel like someone who has read a New York Times peace about his own experience, only to see that the names are all misspelled and the core details of the story have been passed through a poorly recorded audio transcript.  The places are almost all places I have lived during the times he was writing, except with London, where I have only visited (both when he was writing and more recently).  In each case, as with the main character’s excessive version of my own aversions to western branding (and indeed also a strange lack of negative response to japanese branding), the real thing tastes and looks both more interesting and more bland, more “so what”? compared to his nutrasweet version.

Gibson in his non-fiction writing (In Wired for instance, writing on Japan) has made it clear that he is intimately familiar with the places he has chosen as backdrops.  What I am left wondering then is, is the fakeness intentional to seem more “hip” for an audience (like the rabid japan-obsessives on Boingboing) that consider everything foreign inherently special and amazing, without ever leaving home?  Or is it accidental, exaggeration that fares better when, with his earlier work, there is no real version to compare to his prose?