Pattern Recognition
William Gibson invented cyberpunk with his early work: "Burning Chrome" and "Neuromancer." Dark, fevered, rich in milieu, these works defined the concept of cyberspace and certainly inspired and enthalled many of today's geeks, nerds, and software wizards. His more recent works, though, haven't been as compelling for me. I've stopped worrying about what's cool. It simply couldn't buy into the worlds he was creating.
"Pattern Recognition" is about OUR world, the happening world as John Brunner called it in "Stand on Zanzibar". It's protagonist is Cayce Pollard, a talent in the design world with a gift for knowing what logos work and which ones will fail. It's a talent bought at a price - she has aversions to some corporate logos so strong that she needs a mantra to hold her visceral response at bay.
Cayce arrives in London to vet a new logo for an athletic shoe business - a big time and risky proposition for any company and any agency. She stays at a friend's flat and on the very first page Gibson begins one of the motifs that will echo through the novel:
"She know, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hunderds 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."
There is no ice here, no plugged in cyber-deck. Just a woman jet lagged now, and later, we find, culture lagged as her life, transected by 9/11 in a way she can hardly recognize, is also lagging behind her straining to catch up.
Cayce has a passion. She has been caught up by segments of what appears to be a film delivered to the net in anonymous places, perhaps structured perhaps not. Groups of people come together to pool their knowledge about these at such places as the Fetish:Footage:Forum, hosted by a Korean girl. These segments, known only by the sequence number in which they are discovered, are incredibly polished, profoundly well constructed. Who makes them? What do they mean? Are they in order? All of these are mysteries, hotly debated.
Cayce is fiercely independent. Her father was a CIA spook who retired and then vanished in Manhattan the morning of 9/11. Her mother attempts to hear his words as messages from beyond recorded on blank magnetic tape and Cayce finds him wandering through her dreams.
"Pattern Recognition" ultimately succeeds for me because Gibson uses language so well. He seems to like language and he has an eye for detail and metaphor. He takes time to build his characters before launching them - long enough that you may not be sure that he's going to go somewhere at all. And then it takes off, accelerating, developing a pace and a logic all its own.
I found myself liking, or at least very interested in, many of the characters Gibson has created even though, at the start, I felt they were cold and alien. Ultimately I found myself caring very much.
I'm trying to decide what kind of novel this really is: character? milieu? puzzel? Surely it's a mystery of sorts, but it's not the mystery that is so compelling. Milieu? Perhaps since Cayce finds herself in possession of a credit card "that would buy a car but not an aircraft" and with some wonderfully competent corporate resources that allow her to travel into a world and a luxury that certainly is beyond anything I am ever likely to enjoy.
Ultimately, however, it is a novel of character, some seen, some unseen. Like knowing someone on the web so they are constructions of words, yet strangely intimate words, Cayce and her fellows become alive, growing in complexity and finally yielding a subtle emotional payoff that is far more complex than anything in "Neuromancer" or "Count Zero."
Because, I think, this is an adult work, one where the "Gee whiz" has been pared away.
I have one warning. Do NOT read this novel on a long flight - it can induce a jet-lag of its own, simply with its language. Adding it to even a moderate flight and you might as well have crossed the Pacific.
And your soul will take a while to catch up.
8:41:27 PM 
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