William Gibson’s Zero History

I mentioned that I completed William Gibson’s Zero History last week. The novel is the last part in the triology and marks Gibson’s latest attempt to partake in current fads. The book reads more like a brand label name dropping exercise as opposed to a story. The characters are flat and unremarkable and the dialog often times is just a confusing exchange of thoughts between two characters. Yet this is typical Gibson which is why we mostly read him.

The main plot of the book is an industrial espionage attempt that ends up getting foobar’d when one of the agents for the corporate leader goes awol. Quite honestly, it was really hard to figure out what was going on in trying to disseminate the swath of excessive brand decals that seemed unnecessarily interjected at every corner. In fact, for the most part you really don’t feel as though much “happens” in the story until the end and the car crash. The vast majority of action is just a massive investigation that unravels the links between characters amidst the bloat of brands and descriptions.

For a concluding book, there just was too many things that felt were left unturned. A good portion of the book was entirely focused on the idea of military ware and a certain brand. What happened to that part? By the last part it just disappeared. However, it was one of the few things that felt significant to the plot.

Then there was the bizarre drones. Again I had to ask myself why did Gibson inject them into the story? They talked about it acting as a new mechanism for spying and connected them to possible UFO sightings. While interesting, why make that such a passing note?

But that’s how this book plays out. It’s as if Gibson is inside a big toy store and sees all these cool gadgets. He tries to play with them all without really understanding how they work in detail. Yet like a child with attention deficit disorder, he sparingly puts enough detail on these elements, only showing what is possible but nothing more.

And when you come to characters….well, this is Gibson we’re talking about. Cardboard characters have more flavor and personality than these people. I feel little to no emotional attachment nor investment in any of his characters. The two protagonists seem more like zombies that behave as zombies rather than real characters. They lack wills (well one does due to recovering from a drug addiction) but more importantly voice. I honestly couldn’t tell at times who was speaking. In all honesty, it didn’t matter. For Gibson, as long as it sounds cool, it goes in.

The ending felt like a stitched up Hollywood ending. Good guys survive, get married, fuck. But what was the point of the entire series? I don’t feel like I grew as a person by reading it except for the occasional vocabulary word. It felt like Gibson attempting to remain relevant as he tried out some of the newer technology and read up on some conspiracy sites. Despite this I don’t know why he wrote this beyond trying to appear chic. What kind of social commentary did he want to make?

Again, I just felt frustrated by the end of the novel. There wasn’t any real conclusion. No great epic tale being told about America, just fragments of buzzword culture pieced together to sound contemporary. But I think Gibson has long lost his touch because the future that he was attempting to catch up to for so long not only has passed him up, it’s too much for him to comprehend into something logical.

To read Gibson for me is more about the love of his prose as opposed to plot, character development and social commentary. The one thing I appreciate about Gibson is his knack in creating a certain atmosphere through the type of prose he utilizes. The terse sentences with the heavy description or the cutting edge type of dialog. I find authors who have their own voice to be inspiring to my own sense of prose.

At any rate, next up Murakami….

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