Zero history is how, at one point, a character in this novel describes the bureaucratic footprint of a man called Milgrim, a former drug addict put through expensive rehab by a mysterious businessman for whom he now works. Knowing William Gibson, it is no coincidence that this character's name recalls that of Stanley Milgram, who in the 1960s conducted research into the psychology of obedience to authority.

Gibson, the quondam cyberpunk prophet, is interested in the ramifications in the contemporary age of this official, credit-report sense of "history": how one gets it, and how, perhaps, one might slip through its cracks. The story is about surveillance, through GPS or CCTV, and about being on and off the radar. It is also about clothes: a paradoxically secret brand of superdesirable denim, and industrial espionage among parties bidding for US military contracts. Gibson the one-time fetishist of imaginary weaponry or futuristic computing devices here spends a lot of time describing seams, textiles and Velcro fastenings.

The most visible piece of high technology here is the iPhone; and it already looks a little old-fashioned for nearly everyone to be thumbing iPhones – rather than, say, customised Android devices – for conducting terse jargon-heavy conversations or controlling robot penguin balloons. But the novel, overtly cynical about brands, is still in thrall to their incantatory power (particularly those of motorcycles, coffee shops, laptops). Less ubiquitous Apple branding would not have helped the curiously inert finale, which features everyone sitting in a van operating their capacitive multitouches in response to video feeds from drones.

Perhaps overcompensating, Gibson has loaded the beginning of the novel with physical description, as readers are reunited in a rococo London hotel with former rock singer Hollis Henry, heroine of 2007's Spook Country, a weirder and denser thriller about locative art and shipping containers. Hollis is still associated with the Belgian advertising bigwig Hubertus Bigend, whose whim drives the novel's action.

Bigend is portentously described, early on, as "an overly wealthy, dangerously curious fiddler with the world's hidden architecture", but soon relaxes into the essentially satirical figure from previous novels. "Ralph Lauren shops at Hackett, I'm told," he announces over breakfast. "That's an extremely complex piece of information, conceptually." After the slightly ponderous opening, Gibson also gets into his evocative groove: one of Hollis's bandmates turns up wearing "a sort of post-holocaust drum-majorette jacket"; and there is a wonderful walk-on part for a computer expert (and Amstrad nostalgic) named Voytek, who swears with intense aplomb.

It remains a challenge, however, to get excited about a mystery involving trousers; and the plot merely complicates rather than thickens, to the extent that characters have to offer each other little potted versions of the story-so-far so that the reader may be reminded what is going on between a collection of rivalrous surnames.

The singular and compelling achievement of the novel, its emotional and phenomenological centre, is Milgrim himself, around whom the rest of the book sometimes seems to rain like so many foam packaging pellets tipped out of a box. Newly awakened from a decade of drug-haze, Milgrim stares at the world as though it is fresh-minted, prompting most of Gibson's best writing in the mode of naggingly tangential observation, and some subtle, humane comedy. The hint of a Frankenstein trope in the changing dynamic of Milgrim's relationship with Bigend might have been more intricately developed, but everyone, it seems, was too busy stroking their touchscreens.