Pattern Recognition is William Gibson's eighth novel, and the first to take place in a world that is more or less the one we live in. Although the plot is somehow restricted by having to take place in reality, it still has the jet setting, international espionage flavors of Gibson's other works. The characters are similarly diverse.
All of this is established elsewhere, and the reader can read many reviews that give good summaries of the characters and plot, and for that matter can read the book themselves. Along with being a work of some moment, it is also a fun, easy book to read. And after reading the book, the reader will probably be responding as if it were a science fiction work, because they will be thinking "and what is that about". For better or for worse, science fiction is not about space travel or robots, or even about matrices and neurolinguistic hacking. Science fiction is about ideas. And with all respect to the genuinely multidimensional characters and intriguing plot, this book is still a science fiction book, because the main thing to be gained from it is ideas. And what are the ideas and themes that make up this novel? To me, I would break them down somewhat like this:
- The World Trade Center and aftermath. I have read that 9/11 actually happened during the writing of the book, and was worked in retroactively. I have also read that 9/11 was meant as a divide between the 20th and 21st Centuries. I almost put that as a thematic element, my mind having plagiarized without my consent. However, I have to be honest and say I can't actually say what 9/11 means to the plot. In fact, somewhat curiously the book takes place mostly in New York, Tokyo, London and Moscow: the cities that defined the cold war era. It should also be noted that even in 2009, its hard to remember just what the weeks and months after 9/11 felt like. It would have been impossible to not write about them.
- Corporate control over media and culture. The title character works in the field of advertising and marketing, as someone with an innate ability to understand what logos will be successful. She herself has panic attacks when dealing with logos or fashions she doesn't like, the flip side to her talent as a cool hunter. The company that employs her has a number of different advertising strategies, including hiring attractive people to spread viral marketing. This is actually somewhat at odds with the above item. In the months after 9/11, the espionage in the book centers not around terrorist cells or their adversaries, but around a company that sells shoes and wishes to find out the secret of how the "footage" is becoming so popular. The simple plot for this book would involve the search for a WMD, not the search for the secret popularity of an art film.
- Online community. Gibson was ahead of the curve here, because at the time the book was written, online communities were not mainstream. They were not unheard of, but social networking was confined to small groups of people who often didn't actually know each other. This site is one place I don't have to explain this, for those of you here who were members in 2002, you can remember the giddy days of sharing secret codes with people who you knew nothing of, hadn't met and probably were not going to meet. The "footage heads" of the story are people who are in a community because they share a secret. Their secret is in some ways just as arbitrary as Lesbians, monkeys and soy, and perhaps forms a connection because of that. Beyond online community, communities and alliances that are created on the fly are also important. In several points in the book, the protagonist finds what she needs by a string of coincidences, such as having an African calculator merchant lead her to a retired, reclusive NSA spy. It could be argued that the tension between the corporate control of culture (mentioned in the above point) and the spontaneous help and aid the people outside of it give to each other is one of the biggest themes of the book.
- Coincidence, meaning and pattern recognition. The title is a pretty big guide here. The book is about people's search for meaning, and whether the world is obliging in that respect. The leitmotif is best demonstrated by the protagonist's mother, who follows Electronic Voice Phenomenon recordings, believing she is hearing the voices of the dead. The "footage" that is the central mystery of the plot could also be seen in much the same way, being minimalistic enough that its many followers can all find different meanings in it. And of course, on a meta level, the plot of the book is filled with coincidence, with the reader having to judge what is meaningful and what is not. There may be, and probably is, several layers of coincidence and meaning that is undetectable on the first reading. But even after many readings, I get the idea that the mystery of pattern recognition may be left as a mystery.
The final concept, pattern recognition, probably ties the other threads together. After all, something has to, and "pattern recognition" is meta enough of a concept to do so. Otherwise, it is thematically about the human mind's ability to find order while negotiating a world split between spontaneous, authentic online communities and slickly manipulative cultural elites, and also dodging terroristic attacks. Which sounds as confusing as it is, and why there is perhaps some deeper level of thematic unity I have yet to detect.