Cayce Pollard, an American woman in her early thirties, is a sort of "coolhunter" for hire by various companies, mostly advertising agencies. But why would they want to hire her? Well, she has some sort of spidey-sense, somewhat akin to an allergic reaction, to advertising material (mainly the graphical sort, logos etc.) that "works" or doesn't, which makes her highly useful. It's a bit like the thing that Colin Laney has in Gibson's earlier novel Idoru, but more obviously commercially applicable.
Cayce has been hired by an achingly hip advertising agency called Blue Ant to vet some logo ideas - basically they get a nod of approval or an outbreak of hives and then have to go away and re-think accordingly. While she's in London she's staying in the apartment of her friend Damien, a documentary film-maker, who's off working abroad somewhere. She's also keeping up with one of her hobbies - monitoring updates to a series of viral online short films known among the cognoscenti as "the footage" whose origin is completely mysterious but around which a whole internet subculture has sprung up speculating about the identity of the maker and What It All Means.
Cayce has a couple of meetings at Blue Ant to do her original job, including a couple of odd encounters with a woman called Dorotea who seems weirdly ill-disposed towards her for reasons she can't fathom, since they've never met before. Having met Blue Ant's head honcho, who goes by the tremendous name of Hubertus Bigend, Cayce finds that he's also quite interested in the footage, wants to get to the bottom of its mysteries, and wants someone appropriately hip and groovy and in-the-know (i.e. Cayce) to make use of his effectively unlimited budget to investigate.
Cayce is slightly dubious about the involvement of The Man sullying the purity of the footage-makers' art, and about whether discovery of the mechanism of its production will ruin it for everyone and preclude further footage being created and distributed, but her curiosity and the lure of Bigend's unlimited budget eventually get the better of her. She starts trawling the chat archives for clues, and, in an apparently unrelated event, has a random encounter on the street with some shady characters who collect old artifacts related to computing: one is constructing an industrial sculpture out of scaffolding and old ZX81s, one is collecting Curta calculating machines.
Cayce's technical contacts peruse the footage closely and determine that there is some sort of digital watermark in some of it that may conceal a message or some other form of information. At the same time one of her contacts from the random street meeting comes up with an e-mail address which she uses to contact someone in Russia - are they the maker of the footage? Cayce is invited to fly out to Moscow to meet her e-mail contact, who turns out to be one of a pair of twin sisters, this one mainly concerned with distribution and promotion of the footage, the other - largely non-verbal after being injured by an explosive device in the terrorist attack that dispatched her parents some years earlier - does the actual video-editing, with the help of a whole warehouse full of assistants, who massage the original footage (most of it just found from security cameras and the like rather than purposefully shot) into the grainily enigmatic forms posted to the internet, as well as handling all the embedding of the hidden digital watermarks and similar techno-nerdery.
Having had a fairly cordial session with Stella, the more chatty of the two sisters, Cayce then has an unexpected encounter with Dorotea back at her hotel and agrees to a chat over a drink - foolishly as it turns out, as Dorotea slips her a Mickey Finn and the next thing Cayce knows she's waking up in some unknown building in the middle of nowhere. Making good her escape, only to then find herself traversing some sort of desert wasteland, she is the rescued by some of her fellow footage-hunters, including Bigend and some shady-looking guys who turn out to have connections to the Russian mafia and also have an interest in the footage, for largely incomprehensible reasons. Cayce is invited not to worry herself too much about these reasons and is rewarded with a large sum of money, most of which she gives away to good causes, like the financing of a really enormous structure made of of scaffolding and ZX81s.
In fact, largely incomprehensible reasons feature quite prominently in the blizzard of exposition that occupies the last few chapters, just as they did at the end of Mona Lisa Overdrive. What Dorotea's motivations are for doing any of the things she does throughout the course of the book, for instance, are entirely opaque to me, apart from that she seems to switch sides multiple times. This isn't hugely important after the fun and excitement of what's gone before, but it chafed me slightly more at the end of this book, set in a largely recognisable contemporary world without sci-fi attachments, than it did in a world featuring fully immersive virtual reality, infinitely prolongable life-spans and space elevators, I suppose because that latter world is one I would expect to find baffling in many respects anyway.
The whole idea of mysterious grainy video footage of unknown origin suddenly emerging into popular culture is highly reminiscent of David Cronenberg's Videodrome, though the footage here is generally benign in its effects, in contrast to Videodrome's nastiness. There's certainly no suggestion of the sort of weird effects induced by the video footage in Ring or Infinite Jest. As always Gibson has an effortless grasp of popular culture and the fascination of ineffable concepts like coolness, as well as a nerdy fascination with technology and its design. Cayce Pollard continues Gibson's line of cool, enigmatic, slightly dangerous female protagonists, following on from Molly Millions from the Neuromancer series (aka the Sprawl trilogy) and Chevette Washington from the Bridge trilogy.
Overall this probably isn't as good as some of his earlier stuff, but it's still pretty good. Neuromancer and Virtual Light (each a gateway into a trilogy, as is Pattern Recognition) are still the best places to start.
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