Pattern Recognition

[sawyl]

Despite the embarrassingly long time I've had it on loan — months? years? — I've not felt any particular impetus to rush through Pattern Recognition. Rather, I've deliberately dragged my feet, reading a few pages a day, savouring the clarity of Gibson's limpid, alienated views of London, Tokyo and Moscow.

While I enjoyed the whole book, I thought it was at its absolute best when Gibson simply allowed his protagonist, Cayce Pollard, to simply wander through the modern urban landscape. Cayce's description of her process of recontextualisation, the anglicisation of her internal system of semiotics, to create something she terms mirror-world is simply wonderful:

Mirror-world. The plugs on appliances are huge, triple-pronged, for a species of current that only powers electric chairs, in America. Cars are reversed, left to right, inside; telephone handsets have a different weight, a different balance; the covers of paperbacks look like Australian money.

Cayce is a classic Gibson protagonist. She's detached, rootless and rather self-unaware; but also, possessed of a unique curse: an excruciating sensitivity to brand images. This ability, it seems to me, serves a two-fold purpose. Firstly, it gives Cayce a convincing reason to be at the heart of the action and to trigger the concerns of her adversaries. Secondly, it allows a Sartrean exploration of the role that branding plays in the denial of authenticity — for just as Roquentin experiences extreme reactions to objects in Nausea, Cayce suffers similar problems when confronted with the productions of modern advertising.

Through Cayce's allergy, brands, designs and trademarks are all viewed with a cold, jaundiced, disconnected eye. By seeing the effects of the signs on her sense of self — a headache, a near faint, a complete panic attack — the effects of these symbols on our own existence become clear. When this is coupled with Cayce's own lack of understanding of her own nature and her inability to deal with the behaviours of her parents, then I suspect that the problem is supposed to be a manifestation of her problems (for which she is a surroggate for the reader) reconciling the modern world with her need for authenticity. That the allergy eventually resolves itself when Cayce becomes reconciled to herself and reconnects with the world — i.e. when an authentic life choice opens up to her — only seems to accentuate the point. Or maybe my limited knowledge of existentialism has caused me to see something that isn't really there.

Whatever. I really enjoyed Pattern Recognition, which proved — unsurprisingly! — to be a richer, more complex, more nuanced book than I'd expected from the BBC radio adaptation. Not that I'm criticising the adapatation; I can certainly understand why they might have needed to compress certain episodes and combine some of the characters together; but I can now see how much was lost in the abridgement process.