Hak Nam

William Gibson – Idoru

An alley in Kowloon Walled-City, Hong Kong (since demolished and replaced with a park).

PEOPLE have been singing the praises of William Gibson’s Neuromancer for a good number of years now, which I still haven’t read. Supposedly the book that started all that cyberspace malarkey with people jacking themselves into the net and existing in some kind of virtual reality environment for better or worse. Idoru seems to follow in this vein, its primary theme being the relationship between digital space and reality. It also seems to capture that real pre-millennial fin de siecle  fear that pervaded a lot of sub-cultural elements Gibson touches on.

One of the things that I enjoyed a great deal in the novel was the ridiculous description. There are bars with themes as diverse as Franz Kafka, and chewing gum, and cultists mingling in the packed streets. All of this detail seems merely to unsettle and alienate the reader and create an intense and surrealistic cityscape for Gibson’s future Tokyo. The characters too are amusingly overwrought – somehow feeling like stereotypes without quite being placeable. Blackwell, for instance, the head of security for Rez is completely unsubtly a bad-ass:

He lowered his hands and stared at Laney, as if seeing him for the first time. Laney, avoiding the gaze of those eyes, took in the man’s outfit, some sort of nanopore exercise gear intended to fit loosely on a smaller but still very large man. Of no particular color in the darkness of The Trial. Open from collar to breastbone. Straining against abnormal mass. Exposed flesh tracked and crossed by an atlas of scars, baffling in their variety of shape and texture. Idoru, Chapter 1 ‘Death Cube K’

The absurdity of the characters and setting do not fail to amuse throughout the novel, and they seem to add to this feeling of alienation that the reader gets. The two major city environments within the text are Tokyo and a virtual reconstruction of Kowloon Walled-City. Certainly, for Gibson’s western audience the elements that are chosen for showcase seem altogether alien – Pop Idols, Love Hotels, the famous Akihabara and Kabukichō districts. Anyone who has travelled can identify with the way that the most cultural different elements of a place stand out and it Gibson’s narrative certainly focuses on that here. The other location, Walled-City, is based on a part of Kowloon in Hong Kong which was demolished in the mid-nineties. It was famous for it’s streets which had to be lit all day due to sunlight being unable to penetrate and it’s large criminal element.

This is where Gibson seems to be making his point. The romance between the pop-star Rez and the digital eponymous pop-star is something I can’t really comment on – the story apparently stretches over three books. However, Tokyo in Idoru seems to be not the hi-tech hub of civilisation that a modern city should be, it comes across as not only alien to the reader, but hostile, deformed and Kafkaesque in its nightmarishness. When we are confronted with the Walled-City, however, we are given the broad geometry of the place and its enclosed, secretive nature, but we are shown the city through the eyes of a tech-conscious girl, who is seemingly not afraid of the construction she finds herself in (though on a side note, she is scared of a character within her digital Venice). We are given the Walled City in terms of the people we meet inside it – and in fact, it is through the efforts of one of the residents of the Walled-City, that some of our other characters, whom we have only seen the digital avatars of, are finally humanised.

            We  can look down on the use of exoticising tendencies with regard to Tokyo, a city that has a long history of things which aren’t as culturally vapid or bizarre as Pop Idols and Love Hotels. Gibson’s novel does its job as a science-fiction novel – getting the reader to ask questions about the nature of human beings and what our humanity means, and we can credit Gibson with having the foresight to look into something as immediate (now) as digital space.