The Frame

I love me some William Gibson; unfortunately I didn’t love this book. The main character is a rock-singer-turned-journalist who takes a job, sight unseen, with a mysterious magazine which may or may not exist. There are also two other plots that converge with this plot, one involving a druggie working for a possible government agent, the other following a family of criminals marked by their freerunning ability. They’re all after the same thing, but none of them seem to know what it is or exactly how to get it. Everything and everyone is shadowy, a spook. There are a lot of good sections in the book, but the ending is disappointing–when they finally find the thing, it’s a bit anticlimactic. Bringing his trademark cyber/hacker situations into the real world, into a real world that is starting to become almost indistinguishable from a cyberworld, is a good move, but it doesn’t pay off as much I would have liked. (Nor as much as it does in his previous novel Pattern Recognition, which is a great book that I highly recommend.)