All Tomorrow's Parties - William Gibson

All Tomorrow's Parties - a title always guaranteed to snag the attention of a Velvets' fan like me - is the third part of Gibson's late-90s Bridge Trilogy. The others are Virtual Light and Idoru. I haven't read either of those but I'm certainly going to now.


I love Gibson and I loved this book. The bridge in question is the Golden Gate, which has been taken over by interstitial settlers since the long overdue earthquake made it unsafe for vehicles in the early 21st century. People there live in small re-purposed containers and sell stuff to tourists. Meanwhile in Tokyo, Colin Laney lives in very similar conditions in a subway station. There he immerses himself in the net in search of nodal points and his idoru Rei Toei, a seductive holograph. Laney sends ex-cop Rydell to collect the projector carrying Rei Toei. Rydell's next port of call is the bridge where he encounters his former girlfriend Chevette, also returning to the bridge where she lived with a previous lover.


From there on in, it's the beginning of the end of the world as bridge-dwellers have come to know it. I won't reveal any more because the plotting is so wonderfully tight. The dialogue is sharp, the prose sizzles with cyperpunk connectivity. Nobody but nobody does it better than Gibson, the Elmore Leonard or Stephen King of near-contemporary dystopia.

1Q84 Book Three - Haruki Murakami

OK, not the best idea to read book three of a magnum opus with no knowledge of the first two.  But there we are.  This is what I did - and it didn't matter.  Murakami's dystopian world is so similar to the 'real' world as it was in Japan in 1984 that it makes no difference. His big concept is self-explanatory and does not subsume the three main characters, Aomame, Tengo and Ushikawa,  Aomame has crossed into this world and killed the Leader of the Sakigake sect.  She is being hidden by the Dowager but it obsessed with finding Tengo, briefly a schoolmate twenty years ago.  Tengo is a part-time teacher who has ghost-written the sensational bestseller Air Chrysalis for the teenaged prodigy Fuka-Eri, real name Eriko Fukada.  Air Chrysalis is ostensibly science fiction but actually it is an expose of the Sakigake cult.  In this world - which no one has noticed is different, even though the main difference is two moons - the air chrysalis and the Little People who make them are real.  Ushikawa is the profoundly ugly investigator who has been hired by Sakigake to track down Aomame.  He goes to great lengths because he feels responsible, as he was the one who vetted her when she started work for the cult.  Unable to breach the Dowager's elaborate security he decides to track down Tengo instead.

It is an intriguing book, which keeps rumbling on in the mind long after you've put it down.  The Little People, when they appear, are jaw-dropping.  Who is the unseen fee-collector for the national TV service who keeps banging on people's doors - even when they haven't got TVs?  What is his relationship to Tengo's comatose father?  What difference does the smaller, greenish moon make and why has nobody noticed?

Murakami's cool, understated prose makes the bizarre instantly acceptable - and, when the truly bizarre things happen, gives them double the impact.  By focusing on the three main viewpoint characters, and giving them each a chapter in turn, he builds an appreciation of their personalities by sheer accumulation.  Their linking characteristic is a patient stoicism - it doesn't matter how long Ushikawa has to stake out Tengo's apartment; Aomame cannot and will not leave Tokyo for a safer location until she has found Tengo, even though she has no reason to believe he has thought about her since they were ten years old; and Tengo is content to sit by the bedside of the father for whom he has no feelings whatsoever, using his spare time to plod away at his novel.

Superb.  I will be happy to read the other two books (published in a single volume in the UK) but what really appeals to me is Murakami's earlier international successes, Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore.