Pattern Recognition - William Gibson (2003)

 

Rating: Admirable

Around the turn of the twenty first century William Gibson stated that any possible future that he could imagine would not be as weird as what was happening in the present. Accordingly, Pattern Recognition was the first of his novels to be set in the (then) present, so weirdly it is now set in the past. It has been a long time since I’ve read a Gibson novel, longer than the life of this blog. Pattern Recognition attracted me due to its fantastic premise, involving a female protagonist, Cayce Pollard, who displays allergic reactions to logos. Cayce makes a living as a marketing consultant, the worst her reaction is, the better the logo. Cayce is employed by the marketing company, Blue Ant, owned by the toothy Tom Cruise-like Hubertus Bigend (one of the best character names ever). In London to meet with the Blue Ant marketers, Cayce starts to experience a sequence of unsettling events, including being bullied by Blue Ant hard bitch, Dorotea Benedetti. In addition, Cayce, along with a world-wide coterie, is obsessed with very short arty film clips (referred to as ‘the footage’) that appear intermittently via the internet, and are created by an anonymous source, a source that Bigend wants to uncover, seeing it as a brilliant marketing art-form. Bigend, all toothy and hirsute, uses his persuasive powers, basically oozing cinematic charm, to hire a reluctant and paranoid Cacye to track down the creator.

Gibson, feeling weird in the (then) present

Pattern Recognition reveals a Gibson different to the one who produced significant novels such as Neuromancer (1984) and All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999). I always felt that although Gibson’s ideas were brilliant, technically his prose was slightly clunky. Not so with Pattern Recognition, in fact after only fifty pages I was comparing his prose style with that of DeLillo and Ballard, and I started to see the world differently while under the novel’s influence, something that happens rarely (but does with Ballard and DeLillo). Typically, Gibson displays a fine degree of cultural insight, tapping into the opaque signs and signifiers that lurk in our oversaturated media dominated world (as it already was back in 2003). Curiously, however, there are some quaint uses of technology; to watch segments of the ‘footage’ Bigend uses a potable DVD player! The novel was published six years before Smartphones became sophisticated and cheap enough to completely change our interactions with media, therefore DVD technology seems completely out of date as a portable medium now. Gibson produces some brilliant lines, and the novel is replete with visually expressive writing. The overall feel is very noirish, especially when Cayce ends up in Tokyo, perhaps the most natural environment for a Gibson novel. Despite an excellent start the novel begins to taper off about two thirds of the way through, particularly after several mysteries are cleared up. The novel’s denouement is melancholic (a good descriptor for the overall tone of the novel) and subdued, which was disappointing after such an intriguing beginning. Recently I read that short stories tend to be all middle, which is an appropriate descriptor for Pattern Recognition, as it doesn’t quite ignite. Overall, the novel is full of promise that doesn’t completely deliver, but I haven’t been put off and will read the second and third books in the trilogy, Spook Country (2007) and Zero History (2010).  

Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro (2021)

 

Rating: Admirable

I'm in two minds about Klara and the Sun. Ishiguro has produced a fine novel, his first since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017, and the breadth of his ambition is to be admired, with some intriguing themes dealt with in a subtle and intelligent manner, however I did not actually enjoy the novel particularly. Klara and the Sun is another stab at 'literary science fiction', in a similar vein to Never Let Me Go (2005), as has been noted by some critics, which is a reasonable summation, although to be fair to Ishiguro there are some fairly significant differences. The eponymous protagonist is an AF (artificial friend), an AI humanoid android, who is purchased by the mother of fourteen year old Josie to keep her from being lonely while she spends her days isolated, learning online and being afflicted by a mysterious illness. The illness, once you come to understand its nature, is not so mysterious and is one of the more morally ambiguous themes explored in the novel. Klara is a very capable AF, both intelligent and benign, but also surprisingly naive. Although as the novel progresses you learn just how society has been negatively transformed by humanoid AI androids, Klara herself is shown to be nothing but kind to those around her, in fact she is much more caring than the stressed out and fickle humans. The human characters are mostly average people living in what appears to be a radically altered culture, although the reader is never privy to the mechanisms behind these changes, they are only hinted at. The majority of the human characters are merely the end users of these radical technologies, trying to cope with the moral and practical challenges they present. 

Although Klara is a fascinating protagonist, the fact that the story is related from her point of view means that the novel has an almost flat one dimensional tone that does not easily allow narrative tension to build. Klara's narrative voice is predominately observational in nature, so that often the novel is weighed down by excessive descriptions of what the characters are doing, how they are relating to each other and why they are doing the things they are doing. A trip in the car becomes a tedious affair due to the fact that Klara relates every single thing about it. I often found myself speed reading or skipping ahead to more significant portions of the narrative, which is always an unfortunate outcome for the reader. The novel is also imbued with a melancholic tone and a feeling of quiet desperation on the part of the human characters. Sometimes there is an ominous, bordering on disturbing aspect to some of the more curious parts of the novel, however it occurred to me that Klara and the Sun is like a 'light' version of a J G Ballard novel, relatively unsettling, but ultimately not unsettling enough, which is a shame really, as there are important themes at play that could have made a greater impact if the narrative had been more dynamic.

As a postscript yesterday I facilitated the last of three library book club session to discuss this novel and the groups were roughly split into thirds, with one third loving the novel, another third opining that it is a failure and the final third being somewhere in-between, which is where I stood. It's certainly a divisive novel, which, as is often the case, led to in depth discussions and quite a few people coming away with a greater appreciation of the novel's finer points. I came away from these discussions thinking that, despite its flaws, Klara and the Sun is a subtle and thematically sophisticated novel. It makes me wonder how the novel will be regarded in, say, ten years time. As an important novel? Or as an underrated cult classic? Given Ishiguro's status it will probably not fade away and perhaps it will glow more brightly in its afterlife. Part of me kind of hopes so...