Pattern Recognition

The start of another of Gibson's loose trilogy's, this one is set more or less in the present day, rather than some dystopian future, and follows Cayce Pollard as she tries to track down the maker or makers of film footage that is being released piecemeal onto the internet. Cayce has a special sensitivity to brands and is used by pan-global advertising agency Blue Ant to determine whether new brands will work or not. Blue Ant is run by Hubertus Bigend (no, really) who then hires Cayce to track down the footage. Thus begins a journey across several continents as Gibson explores the nature of information and our relationships to it, our desire to detect patterns in everything around us. Written at the start of the Noughties, the novel is eerily prescient about viral advertising and our increasing reliance on all things web. I'm not sure if this is a thoroughly satisfying thriller, or even if it's as good as Gibson's previous work, but it is a dazzling piece of fiction and I'll certainly be reading the two books that follow this, Spook Country and Zero History.