Spook Country
by William Gibson (Viking)

A woman moves through a forest of symbols, peopled by liminal obsessives, gathering clues to a conspiratorial mystery. So might you describe Thomas Pynchon’s diabolically lean and funny The Crying of Lot 49, perhaps the most perfect American novel of its age. Fitting the same description is the new novel by William Gibson, whose own literary trajectory has seen him develop from noir prophet of cyberspace (the word he coined in Neuromancer, 1984) to a kind of wifi’d Pynchon for the ubiquitously sign-drenched present.

The heroine, Hollis, is a former singer for a cult early-1990s indie band, now a journalist. She accepts a commission from an obscure British magazine to interview some LA practitioners of “locative art”: installations in public places that are invisible unless you have a VR headset, in which case the virtual performance is overlaid on physical reality. But the tech genius behind the locative installations is also involved in something weirder: arcane data, encoded into the music on iPods, is being smuggled to Costa Rica and back through an old man who speaks Russian; and much ingenuity is being spent on trying to track a shipping container, flitting from boat to boat at sea for years, whose contents are are unknown. Continued →

A movement for string quartet. Demo features robot string players. Please spare a thought for the robots as they saw sadly at their instruments. Human musicians interested in playing it, please email me for the score.

Sirens of Baghdad
by Yasmina Khadra, translated by John Cullen

Cities are suspect to the newly converted puritan. This novel begins with a cynical view of Beirut: “Its alleged charisma doesn’t jibe with its qualms; it’s like a silk cloth over an ugly stain.” In Wolf Dreams, the previous novel by Khadra, Algiers was pictured as a whore lifting up its skirts. The sirens of Baghdad, meanwhile, are both air-raid sirens prefiguring bombing raids, and seductive voices, singing first of a life of dissolute pleasure, and then of death. Both novels are stories of conversion, in which a young Muslim turns to violent Islamism. Wolf Dreams was set during the Algerian civil war of the 1990s (”Yasmina Khadra” is the pen name of a former officer of the Algerian army); Sirens of Baghdad is a novel of the current Iraq war. Continued →