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Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers (1927)

‘Pardon my Stevensonian manner.’

‘Begin right at the beginning, if you will, please. I have a very trivial mind. Detail delights me. Ramifications enchant me. Distance no object. No reasonable offer refused…’
(Wimsey’s rambling manner)

‘I sleuth, you know. For a hobby. Harmless outlet for natural inquisitiveness, don’t you see, which might otherwise strike inward and produce introspection an’ suicide. Very natural, healthy pursuit—not too strenuous, not too sedentary; trains and invigorates the mind.’ (Chapter 4)

‘You’re a noticing one, aren’t you?’ said Mrs Cropper. ‘Make a good waiter, you would—not meaning any offence, sir, that’s a real compliment from one who knows.’
(Chapter 10)

Plot summary

This is the third Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Dorothy L. Sayers. It is a very long, convoluted story about a will which involves understanding a complex family tree which goes back to the late eighteenth century.

It opens with Wimsey and his good friend, Detective Charles Parker, having a meal in a cheap Soho restaurant and arguing about the behaviour of a doctor in a murder case. Their argument prompts a chap dining alone at the next table to introduce himself as a doctor who has had a similar experience and Wimsey promptly asks him to tell his story.

He was physician to an elderly lady dying of cancer who’d had several operations. She was attended by a nurse who he fell in love with and he thought the old girl had months left to live. But then the woman’s great-niece dismissed the nurse, and two servants, replaced her with a new nurse and took over full-time care of her herself. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the old lady died, leaving everything to her great-niece.

The physician was, understandably, suspicious and insisted on a post-mortem and full inquest. However, both found no evidence of foul play and his conscientiousness rebounded on him as the small village community closed ranks to defend the great-niece and accuse him of meddling, throwing in the idea that he had neglected caring for the lady because of his affair with her first nurse. His clients started to drop him and eventually he was forced to sell the practice altogether which is why he finds himself unemployed in a cheap restaurant in Soho.

Wimsey is immediately grabbed by this (to be frank) boring and banal story and won’t let it go. The unnamed physician finishes his story and leaves without introducing himself or giving the names of any of the people in his tale.

So Wimsey gets in touch with a new character, a spinster lady named Miss Alexandra Katharine Climpson, to investigate, by going to Somerset House and searching for deaths which match these circumstances. (It is typical of Wimsey, and Sayers’ sense of humour, that Wimsey pranks his friend Detective Parker by inviting him to come and meet old Miss Climpson in phrases which make it seem as if he has taken a mistress and set her up in a swanky flat, which Parker believes until the door to the flat in question is opened by a sweet little old lady, and he turns to see Wimsey’s face beaming at him.

After a lot of sifting Miss C identifies the participants as follows: the old lady who died was Miss Agatha Dawson; her great-niece is Mary Whittaker; the doctor who talked to them in the restaurant is Dr Edward Carr; the nurse he fell in love with and who was then dismissed is a Miss Philliter; the two servants who were dismissed are Bertha and Evelyn Gotobed. The small town where this all took place is Leahampton in Hampshire.

Wimsey then instructs Miss C to go down to Leahampton, take a room somewhere and make enquiries among the old gossips of the town about the Agatha Dawson affair – which she promptly does, taking a room with Mrs Budge of ‘Fairview’, and attending tea parties with the vicar, Mr Tredgold and his charming wife, and meeting such village luminaries as Miss Murgatroyd, Mrs Peasgood and so on. ‘Gossip’ is the word the characters themselves use.

‘It really is terrible, living in a little town like this,’ went on Miss Findlater, ‘so full of aspidistras, you know, and small gossip. You’ve no idea what a dreadfully gossipy place Leahampton is, Miss Climpson.’ (Chapter 5)

Miss C writes back to Wimsey that there’s no sense of foul play or no more than circulates in any circle of gossipy old ladies. At the same tea party she meets Miss Whittaker and is immediately impressed:

The first impression which Miss Climpson got of Mary Whittaker was that she was totally out of place among the tea-tables of S. Onesimus. With her handsome, strongly-marked features and quiet air of authority, she was of the type that ‘does well’ in City offices. She had a pleasant and self-possessed manner, and was beautifully tailored—not mannishly, and yet with a severe fineness of outline that negatived the appeal of a beautiful figure. (Chapter 5)

Miss C discovers that clever Miss Whittaker has a fan, an acolyte, the devoted Miss Findley who is encouraging her plan to quit Leahampton and set up a chicken farm where they can both live close to the soil (!)

Despite Parker pointing out that there is no evidence of any crime being committed, Wimsey is intrigued and decides to put a ‘fishing’ advert in the press to see what happens. It reads:

Bertha and Evelyn Gotobed, formerly in the service of Miss Agatha Dawson, of ‘The Grove,’ Wellington Avenue, Leahampton, are requested to communicate with J. Murbles, solicitor, of Staple Inn, when they will hear of SOMETHING TO THEIR ADVANTAGE.’

What happens is that a few days later the dead body of Bertha Gotobed turns up in undergrowth in Epping Forest. The local cops think she died of a heart attack since there are no marks on the body, no sign of foul play. But Wimsey is galvanised. He is now convinced that someone murdered Miss Dawson and is now covering their tracks by bumping off any witnesses.

Bertha’s landlady is called in to identify the body and confirms that the other Gotobed sister, Evelyn, got married and moved to Canada with her husband.

In a tree nearby Wimsey finds a very posh ham sandwich wrapped in paper, posher than Bertha’s class, alongside a bottle of Bass beer. And in her handbag a £5 note, again much above her station. In those days you could trace notes and the cops identify this one as one of a series paid out to a Mrs Forrest, living in South Audley Street.

So off Wimsey and Parker go to question her, Wimsey frivolously posing under the pseudonym Mr Templeton. Mrs Forrest is rich and self-possessed and explains that she is in the process of divorcing her husband and has an active lover. Wimsey makes a fuss about fixing drinks for them (behind a fashionable screen) and takes the opportunity of secreting a glass she’s handled out the window in order to retrieve it later and get her fingerprints and see if there are any fingerprints on the beer bottle: there aren’t…

Parker is still puzzled why Wimsey cares so much about the case and Wimsey explains that he has an entire library of books about murders and murderers, but they are only about the ones we know about. What about the thousands and thousands who get away with it because no crime is even suspected? This may be one of those. He is interested in it:

‘Because I believe this is the case I have always been looking for. The case of cases. The murder without discernible means, or motive or clue.’ (Chapter 8)

The plot is long and convoluted and long before the end I was wondering why I was bothering. Suffice to say it is about the old girl’s money, about the will she left, and involves her very extended family in so convoluted a manner that the book requires an extensive and confusing family tree of the Dawson family to help you understand…

Cast

  • Lord Peter Wimsey
  • Mervyn Bunter – his faithful man servant (served under him in the Great War)
  • Detective-Inspector Parker of Scotland Yard – ‘He’s the one who really does the work’, a ‘restraining presence’ on Wimsey’s over-exuberant impetuosity – ‘When he worked with Wimsey on a case, it was an understood thing that anything lengthy, intricate, tedious and soul-destroying was done by Parker’
  • Dr Edward Carr – doctor to Miss Agatha Dawson
  • Agatha Dawson – old lady dying of cancer, had had several operations, was reckoned to last another 6 months or so, but her great-niece dismissed her nurse, and two carers, the Gotobed sisters, and then Miss D suddenly dies
  • Miss Whittaker – the niece
  • Miss Findlater – devoted fan of Miss Whittaker, ‘a slight, fair girl, with a rather sentimental look—plump and prettyish’ – a ‘very gushing and really silly young woman’
  • Nurse Philliter – original nurse and carer for Miss Dawson, fell in love with Dr Carr, became engaged, was then dismissed
  • Miss Katherine Climpson – ‘a thin, middle-aged woman, with a sharp, sallow face and very vivacious manner. She wore a neat, dark coat and skirt, a high-necked blouse and a long gold neck-chain with a variety of small ornaments dangling from it at intervals, and her iron-grey hair was dressed under a net, in the style fashionable in the reign of the late King Edward’
  • Sir Andrew Mackenzie – Chief of Scotland Yard
  • Mr John Murbles – solicitor and friend of Wimsey, featured in ‘Clouds of Witness’, resident at Staples Inn
  • Superintendent Walmsley – officer in charge of the scene of Bertha’s body
  • Dorcas Gulliver – landlady of the murdered Bertha Gotobed
  • John Ironsides – was to have married Miss Bertha, a clerk on the Southern Railway
  • Mrs Forrest, living in South Audley Street – classy lady one of whose five pound notes was found in Bertha’s purse, getting divorced and has a lover yet inexplicably tries to seduce Wimsey
  • Mrs Piggin – landlady of the Fox and Hounds in Crofton
  • Jim Piggin – husband and landlord
  • Ben Cobling – 87, Miss Clara Whittaker’s groom for forty years
  • Mrs Cobling – 85, ‘a delightful old lady, exactly like a dried-up pippin’
  • Mr Probyn – Miss Whittaker’s solicitor and managed all Miss Dawson’s business in Croftover Magna, now retired to the Villa Bianca, Fiesole
  • Bishop Lambert of the Orinoco Mission
  • the Rev. Hallelujah Dawson – ‘an elderly West Indian of… humble and inoffensive… appearance’
  • Esmeralda – Cockney street urchin who protects Wimsey’s parked car for half a crown
  • Mr Towkington of Gray’s Inn – expert on property law – ‘a large, square man with a florid face and a harsh voice’
  • J. F. Trigg – solicitor in Bedford Row
  • Mrs Marion Mead – false name Mary Whittaker gives to the lawyer Trigg when she invites him to the empty house in Hampstead
  • Sir James Lubbock – scientist consulted by Wimsey in the research for his book, ‘The Murderer’s Vade-Mecum, or 101 Ways of Causing Sudden Death’
  • Sir Charles Pillington – Chief Constable of Hampshire
  • Mr Andrews – local photographer roped in to take photos of the body of Vera Findlater
  • local doctor – a ‘tutster’ who examines the body of Vera Findlater
  • Dr Faulkner – sent by Scotland Yard to double check the local man’s verdict, ‘a lean, grey badger of a man, business-like and keen-eyed’
  • Mr Stanniforth – Sacristan of the church of Saint Onesimus
  • Dewsby – head of the fingerprint department at Scotland Yard

Wimsey trivia

Wimsey is 37 (Chapter 15).

In the first book Wimsey very much smoked a pipe. Now he smokes stylish cigarettes, Sobranes. And cigars. Parker smokes a well-worn briar pipe.

Lord Peter paused, in the very act of ringing the bell. His jaw slackened, giving his long, narrow face a faintly foolish and hesitant look, reminiscent of the heroes of Mr P.G. Wodehouse. (Chapter 6)

Wimsey has bought a new car:

‘The new Daimler Twin-Six,’ said Lord Peter, skimming dexterously round a lorry without appearing to look at it. ‘With a racing body.’

Wimsey’s blether

In a characteristically arcane literary reference, Wimsey nicknames his new car ‘Mrs Merdle’ because it is very quiet or ‘makes no row’, and Mrs Merdle, in Charles Dickens’ novel ‘Little Dorrit’, is an arriviste i.e. newly rich, and causes a minor scandal by very noisily taking his seat in the theatre and his wife tells him to stop making a row. To be honest, this reference is so obscure I don’t really understand it…

But that may be part of the point of Wimsey’s countless fleeting cultural references, part of the point is the speed with which he drops them and races on, leaving most of his interlocutors thinking he’s mad.

‘It’s quite all right,’ he said apologetically, ‘I haven’t come to sell you soap or gramophones, or to borrow money or enroll you in the Ancient Froth-blowers or anything charitable. I really am Lord Peter Wimsey—I mean, that really is my title, don’t you know, not a Christian name like Sanger’s Circus or Earl Derr Biggers. I’ve come to ask you some questions, and I’ve no real excuse, I’m afraid, for butting in on you—do you ever read the News of the World?’
Nurse Philliter decided that she was to be asked to go to a mental case, and that the patient had come to fetch her in person. (Chapter 4)

Or else talks in elliptical telegraphese as here when he summarises his theory about Bertha Gotobed’s demise:

Said Wimsey: ‘We suggested shock, you know. Amiable gentleman met at flat of friendly lady suddenly turns funny after dinner and makes undesirable overtures. Virtuous young woman is horribly shocked. Weak heart gives way. Collapse. Exit. Agitation of amiable gentleman and friendly lady, left with corpse on their hands. Happy thought motor-car; Epping Forest; exeunt omnes, singing and washing their hands. Where’s the difficulty?’ (chapter 8)

Or just general-purpose facetiousness, as here when he rings up Dr Carr:

‘Hullo! hullo—ullo! oh, operator, shall I call thee bird or but a wandering voice?… Not at all, I had no intention of being rude, my child, that was a quotation from the poetry of Mr Wordsworth… well, ring him again… thank you, is that Dr Carr?… Lord Peter Wimsey speaking… oh, yes… yes… aha!… not a bit of it… We are about to vindicate you and lead you home, decorated with triumphal wreaths of cinnamon and senna-pods…’

Presumably this is intended to be funny and endearing but well before I was halfway through this novel I’d concluded that Wimsey really is a tiresome berk and to give up reading any more.

‘Be thou as chaste as ice and have a license as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. I am not a dangerous driver. Buck up and get your leave. The snow-white horsepower foams and frets and the blue bonnet—black in this case—is already, in a manner of speaking, over the border.’ (Chapter 11)

‘Sorrow vanquished, labour ended, Jordan passed. Buzz off, my lad. No, Charles, I will not wait while you put on a Burberry. Back and side go bare, go bare, hand and foot go cold, so belly-god send us good ale enough, whether it be new or old.’

He often sounds a bit like the Fool in King Lear i.e. so arcane and scatter-brained as to sound mad.

‘Well, well—we’ll have a spot of lunch and write a letter to Mr Probyn and another to my good friend Bishop Lambert of the Orinoco Mission to get a line on Cousin Hallelujah, Smile, smile, smile. As Ingoldsby says: ‘The breezes are blowing a race, a race! The breezes are blowing—we near the chase!’ Do ye ken John Peel? Likewise, know’st thou the land where blooms the citron-flower? Well, never mind if you don’t—you can always look forward to going there for your honeymoon.’ (Chapter 12).

Or:

‘Well now, as to the medical problem—the means. I must say that up to now that appears completely insoluble. I am baffled, Watson (said he, his hawk-like eyes gleaming angrily from under the half-closed lids). Even I am baffled. But not for long! (he cried, with a magnificent burst of self-confidence). My Honour (capital H) is concerned to track this Human Fiend (capitals) to its hidden source, and nail the whited sepulchre to the mast even though it crush me in the attempt! Loud applause. His chin sank broodingly upon his dressing-gown, and he breathed a few guttural notes into the bass saxophone which was the cherished companion of his solitary hours in the bathroom.’
Parker ostentatiously took up the book which he had laid aside on Wimsey’s entrance.
‘Tell me when you’ve finished,’ he said, caustically.

It’s almost as if he’s brain damaged.

Wimsy’s flippancy

Sayers loses no opportunity to make Wimsey frivolous and flippant. He is given to extended comic fantasias, satirically quoting poems, adverts, newspapers headlines, in youthful high spirits, while his interlocutors have to wait until he’s quite finished before they can get a word in. And the reader, also, has to wait before he gets to the point.

This can get tiresome. Take this reply to Parker who says there’s nothing to the death of this old lady, to which Wimsey is saying that, on the contrary, he suspects there is. But this is how he puts it

‘You’ve got an official mind, Charles,’ replied his friend. ‘Your official passion for evidence is gradually sapping your brilliant intellect and smothering your instincts. You’re over-civilised, that’s your trouble. Compared with you, I am a child of nature. I dwell among the untrodden ways beside the springs of Dove, a maid whom there are (I am shocked to say) few to praise, likewise very few to love, which is perhaps just as well.’ (Chapter 6)

All of which is a humorous misapplication of a famous poem by William Wordsworth, She dwelt among the untrodden ways if, humorous, that is, you find this kind of long-winded, literary byplay humorous. In the same way that the following quote is a humorous reference to Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, ‘The Raven’.

‘I wish you wouldn’t keep on saying the same thing, Charles. It bores me so. It’s like the Raven never flitting which, as the poet observes, still is sitting, still is sitting, inviting one to heave the pallid bust of Pallas at him and have done with it.’ (Chapter 14)

Bookishness

Like Agatha Christie, Sayers has her characters repeatedly make references to books, crime stories, murder mysteries and so on, thus emphasising the artificiality of the entire story.

‘Oh, by one of those native poisons which slay in a split second and defy the skill of the analyst. They are familiar to the meanest writer of mystery stories.’

‘Outlet,’ said Wimsey, energetically, ‘hi! taxi!… outlet—everybody needs an outlet—97A, St. George’s Square—and after all, one can’t really blame people if it’s just that they need an outlet. I mean, why be bitter? They can’t help it. I think it’s much kinder to give them an outlet than to make fun of them in books—and, after all, it isn’t really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.’ (Chapter 3)

‘That’s so. Well, there’s only one thing that could prevent that happening, and that’s—oh, lord! old son. Do you know what it works out at? The old, old story, beloved of novelists—the missing heir!’ (Chapter 11)

‘[She] gets the said minions to polish her off before she can do any mischief.’
‘Yes, but how?’
‘Oh, by one of those native poisons which slay in a split second and defy the skill of the analyst. They are familiar to the meanest writer of mystery stories.’ (Chapter 11)

Or references to specific books:

At intervals the patient Bunter unpacked himself from the back seat and climbed one of these uncommunicative guides to peer at its blank surface with a torch—a process which reminded Parker of Alan Quartermain trying to trace the features of the departed Kings of the Kukuanas under their calcareous shrouds of stalactite. (Chapter 12)

Epigraphs

Of course the most bookish thing about this novel is the epigraphs. Each of the 23 chapters is prefaced by epigraphs from a deliberate and show-off range of sources, including half a dozen or more from Shakespeare, George Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Don Quixote, Samuel Butler, Tennyson, Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, as well as outliers such as Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the popular novelists Gilbert Frankau and Edmund Pearson, the 17th century jurist Sir Edward Coke, the statesman Edmund Burke, 18th century playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

As you can see, this is an ostentatiously eclectic and showy selection.

Sherlock

This bookish referentiality is epitomised by repeated references to Sherlock Holmes, as if invoking his name somehow lays his ghost, whereas it tends to do the opposite and trigger comparisons of the present novel with Conan Doyle’s masterpieces, against which it mightily suffers.

‘Good gracious!’ cried Charles, ‘it’s perfectly obvious—’
‘Shut up, Sherlock,’ said his friend,

‘Anyhow, curious cases are rather a hobby of mine. In fact, I’m not just being the perfect listener. I have deceived you. I have an ulterior motive, said he, throwing off his side-whiskers and disclosing the well-known hollow jaws of Mr Sherlock Holmes.’ (Chapter 2)

‘I told you I’d be turnin’ up again before long,’ said Lord Peter, cheerfully. ‘Sherlock is my name and Holmes is my nature.’ (Chapter 4)

‘I must say that up to now that appears completely insoluble. I am baffled, Watson (said he, his hawk-like eyes gleaming angrily from under the half-closed lids).’
(Chapter 19)

Lesbians?

Delving deeper into the Dawson family, Wimsey and Parker discover that old Agatha lived for many years with Clara Whittaker, a fierce, mannish rider to hounds. Is there any hint that they were lesbians? Or was two unmarried women living together for many years taken at face value a hundred years ago?

Lord Peter and Parker looked with considerable interest at the rather grim old woman sitting so uncompromisingly upright with the reins in her hand. A dour, weather-beaten old face, but certainly handsome still, with its large nose and straight, heavy eyebrows. And beside her, smaller, plumper and more feminine, was the Agatha Dawson whose curious death had led them to this quiet country place. She had a sweet, smiling face—less dominating than that of her redoubtable friend, but full of spirit and character. Without doubt they had been a remarkable pair of old ladies. (Chapter 11)

And here’s her devoted old groom remembering her:

‘Straight as a switch, with a fine, high colour in her cheeks and shiny black hair—just like a beautiful two-year-old filly she was. And very sperrited. Wonnerful sperrited. There was a many gentlemen as would have been glad to hitch up with her, but she was never broke to harness. Like dirt, she treated ’em. Wouldn’t look at ’em, except it might be the grooms and stablehands in a matter of ’osses. And in the way of business, of course. Well, there is some creatures like that…. The Lord makes a few on ’em that way to suit ’Is own purposes, I suppose. There ain’t no arguin’ with females.’

And his wife’s view:

‘Often she used to say to me, ‘Betty,’ she said, ‘I mean to be an old maid and so does Miss Clara, and we’re going to live together and be ever so happy, without any stupid, tiresome gentlemen.’ And so it turned out, sir, as you know…’

And the Chief Constable’s:

He put his hand down behind the cushions of the car and pulled out an American magazine—that monthly collection of mystery and sensational fiction published under the name of The Black Mask.
‘Light reading for the masses,’ said Parker.
‘Brought by the gentleman in the yellow boots, perhaps,’ suggested the Chief Constable.
‘More likely by Miss Findlater,’ said Wimsey.
‘Hardly a lady’s choice,’ said Sir Charles, in a pained tone.
‘Oh, I dunno. From all I hear, Miss Whittaker was dead against sentimentality and roses round the porch, and the other poor girl copied her in everything. They might have a boyish taste in fiction.’

The female perspective

Old spinster Mrs Climpson is given a number of insights or perceptions about the female experience. Early on she has a sad piece of autobiography about the severe limitations placed on women of her generation, which reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s powerful feminist polemic, Three Guineas.

‘A dear old friend of mine used to say that I should have made a very good lawyer,’ said Miss Climpson, complacently, ‘but of course, when I was young, girls didn’t have the education or the opportunities they get nowadays, Mr Parker. I should have liked a good education, but my dear father didn’t believe in it for women. Very old-fashioned, you young people would think him…

‘My dear father would be surprised to find his daughter so business-like. He always said a woman should never need to know anything about money matters, but times have changed so greatly, have they not?’ (Chapter 3)

And other miscellaneous insights from an ageing spinster’s point of view:

With her long and melancholy experience of frustrated womanhood, observed in a dreary succession of cheap boarding-houses, Miss Climpson was able to dismiss one theory which had vaguely formed itself in her mind. This was no passionate nature, cramped by association with an old woman and eager to be free to mate before youth should depart. That look she knew well—she could diagnose it with dreadful accuracy at the first glance, in the tone of a voice saying, ‘How do you do?’ (Chapter 5)

And:

Miss Findlater has evidently quite a ‘pash’ (as we used to call it at school) for Miss Whittaker, and I am afraid none of us are being flattered by such outspoken admiration. I must say, I think it rather unhealthy—you may remember Miss Clemence Dane’s very clever book on the subject?—I have seen so much of that kind of thing in my rather WOMAN-RIDDEN existence! It has such a bad effect, as a rule, upon the weaker character of the two… (Chapter 8)

And:

‘If Mary Whittaker were to marry, she would marry a rabbit.’ (Miss Climpson’s active mind quickly conjured up a picture of the rabbit—fair-haired and a little paunchy, with a habit of saying, ‘I’ll ask the wife.’ Miss Climpson wondered why Providence saw fit to create such men. For Miss Climpson, men were intended to be masterful, even though wicked or foolish. She was a spinster made and not born—a perfectly womanly woman.)

Miss Climpson had little difficulty in reconstructing one of those hateful and passionate “scenes” of slighted jealousy with which a woman-ridden life had made her only too familiar. “I do everything for you—you don’t care a bit for me—you treat me cruelly—you’re simply sick of me, that’s what it is!” And “Don’t be so ridiculous. Really, I can’t stand this. Oh, stop it, Vera! I hate being slobbered over.” Humiliating, degrading, exhausting, beastly scenes. Girls’ school, boarding-house, Bloomsbury-flat scenes. Damnable selfishness wearying of its victim. Silly schwärmerei swamping all decent self-respect. Barren quarrels ending in shame and hatred.

Miss Findlater the feminist

She talks to Miss Findlater who is a feminist:

‘If you only knew what a stupid lot they are! Anyway, I’ve no use for men!’ Miss Findlater tossed her head. ‘They haven’t got any ideas. And they always look on women as sort of pets or playthings. As if a woman like Mary wasn’t worth fifty of them! You should have heard that Markham man the other day—talking politics to Mr Tredgold, so that nobody could get a word in edgeways, and then saying, ‘I’m afraid this is a very dull subject of conversation for you, Miss Whittaker,’ in his condescending way. Mary said in that quiet way of hers, ‘Oh, I think the subject is anything but dull, Mr Markham.’ But he was so stupid, he couldn’t even grasp that and said, ‘One doesn’t expect ladies to be interested in politics, you know. But perhaps you are one of the modern young ladies who want the flapper’s vote.’ Ladies, indeed! Why are men so insufferable when they talk about ladies?’

‘I mean to be an old maid, anyhow,’ retorted Miss Findlater. ‘Mary and I have quite decided that. We’re interested in things, not in men.’

‘Men’s friendships—oh yes! I know one hears a lot about them. But half the time, I don’t believe they’re real friendships at all. Men can go off for years and forget all about their friends. And they don’t really confide in one another. Mary and I tell each other all our thoughts and feelings. Men seem just content to think each other good sorts without ever bothering about their inmost selves.”
Probably that’s why their friendships last so well,’ replied Miss Climpson. ‘They don’t make such demands on one another.’

‘I cannot help feeling that it is more natural—more proper, in a sense—for a man and woman to be all in all to one another than for two persons of the same sex. Er—after all, it is a—a fruitful affection,’ said Miss Climpson, boggling a trifle at this idea, ‘and—and all that, you know, and I am sure that when the right MAN comes along for you—’

‘Bother the right man!’ cried Miss Findlater, crossly. ‘I do hate that kind of talk. It makes one feel dreadful—like a prize cow or something. Surely, we have got beyond that point of view in these days.’

The male view

‘We talked for some time, Inspector, and I will not conceal from you that I found Miss Grant a very interesting personality. She had an almost masculine understanding. I may say I am not the sort of a man who prefers women to be brainless. No, I am rather modern in that respect. If ever I was to take a wife, Inspector, I should wish her to be an intelligent companion.’

Or our boys being more conventionally sexist:

‘When a woman is wicked and unscrupulous,’ said Parker, sententiously, ‘she is the most ruthless criminal in the world—fifty times worse than a man, because she is always so much more single-minded about it.’
‘They’re not troubled with sentimentality, that’s why,’ said Wimsey, ‘and we poor mutts of men stuff ourselves up with the idea that they’re romantic and emotional. All punk, my son. Damn that ’phone!’

Or Mrs Piggin, landlady of The Fox and Hounds in Crofton:

‘They don’t make them like that nowadays. Not but what these modern girls are good goers, many of them, and does a lot of things as would have been thought very fast in the old days,’

Newspapers

Christie mocks newspapers, giving her fictional newspapers satirical names. Mind you, so did lots of comic authors. In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, William Boot works for the ‘The Daily Beast’. Anyway, in this story Detective Parker reads his news in the Daily Yell. Less humorous alternatives are the ‘Evening Views’ and the ‘Evening Banner’.

It girls

Never had he met a woman in whom ‘the great It’, eloquently hymned by Mrs Elinor Glyn, was so completely lacking.

Elinor Glyn was a bestselling author of popular romances which were often a trifle racy. She popularized the concept of the ‘It girl’, and had tremendous influence on early 20th-century popular culture ‘

Credit

‘Unnatural Death’ by Dorothy L. Sayers was published in 1927.

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Posted by Simon on October 31, 2025

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Pattern Recognition by William Gibson (2003)

This is the first novel in what became known as the ‘Blue Ant’ trilogy. I was wondering what Blue Ant would turn out to be, my mind alive with images of mutating insects, or maybe it was the nickname of some groovy digital weapon, or a piece of cyberspace code.

But no, my heart sank when I learned that Blue Ant just refers to a fictional advertising agency set in the contemporary world i.e. turn of the century New York and London and Tokyo. And that the lead figure in the book is a ‘brilliant’ young logo expert, 32-year-old (page 2) Cayce Pollard who is a freelance fashion spotter, ‘an actual on-the-street cool-hunter’ (page 32), ‘a very specialised piece of human litmus paper’ (page 13):

  • ‘What I do is pattern recognition. I try to recognise a pattern before anyone else does.’ (page 86)
  • All the time she’s spent on the world’s various streets, scouting cool for the commodifiers. (page 195)
  • ‘I find things, or styles, for other people, companies, to market. And I evaluate logos – trademark emblems.’ (page 231)

Just like the character Count Zero in the Neuromancer trilogy or Colin Laney in the Bridge trilogy had special, almost supernatural gifts for spotting trends, nodes and emerging meanings in the endless flow of data in cyberspace, so Cayce is credited with a special, almost supernatural gift to spot new fashion trends –

She’s met the very Mexican who first wore his baseball cap backwards, asking the next question. She’s that good! (page 32)

Except that Count Zero and Laney were dealing with the genuinely weird, visionary idea of dataflows, set in interesting futures, whereas Cayce has a special ability to spot… the latest trends in footwear. Or shirts. Or handbags. It feels like a crashing descent into the banal.

In the first 150 pages of this book the one piece of actual work which Cayce performs for the Blue Ant agency is they show her a new logo designed for a client which looks a bit like a sperm.

‘They wanted me here to tell them whether or not a new logo worked.’ (page 190)

She doesn’t like it so it’s sent back to the designer (Heinz) in Germany, who amends it to more of a squiggle – which she does like. That’s it. That’s how her supernatural abilities are put to use. Felt pathetic, to me.

The novel opens as Cayce arrives in London for a meeting with the Blue Ant advertising agency with a bad jet lag.

She’s here on Blue Ant’s ticket. Relatively tiny in terms of permanent staff, globally distributed, more post-geographic than multinational, the agency has from the beginning billed itself as a high-speed, low-drag life-form in an advertising ecology of lumbering carnivores. (page 6)

The prose from the get-go is whip-smart and street savvy and cool and all those other adjectives, but cannot conceal what for me, as a person completely indifferent to fashion, is the crushingly dull and vapidly narcissistic world of fashion and marketing. And this is the first novel in which the real thinness of Gibson’s plots became clear.

Characters

The book is cleverly constructed and has a number of strands. Cayce is staying at the flat of a mate of hers, Damian, who is off shooting a documentary in Russia. The Blue Ant agency was founded and is run by the preposterous Hubertus Bigend, who drives a fast car, wears a stetson hat, looks like Tom Cruise with big teeth, and has advanced views about how advertising bypasses the rational mind and goes straight for the primitive hippocampus, the basic mammalian stem of the brain (page 69). Just, in fact, like all the pretentious, high-talking heads of all advertising agencies are ‘visionaries’, ‘gurus’, ‘geniuses’, prophets, intellectuals, blah blah blah.

Hubertus Bigend and contempt for the reader

Calling his central character Hubertus Bigend struck me as being a gesture of contempt by Gibson. In the third of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels, Hannibal (1999), written some time after the smash hit success of the Anthony Hopkins movie version of The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Harris has a scene where the psychopath moves amid the crowd in the London Dungeon and freely expresses his loathing and contempt for the shallow philistines who love being titillated by gruesome murders. Peasants! Plebs! It seemed to me that Harris was deliberately gobbing in the face of the people who bought his books and paid to see the movies.

Something comparable struck me as happening here. It seems to me Gibson that is taunting his readers, saying if you can believe in a character I’ve named Hubertus Bigend, you’ll believe anything; if you swallow this stupid, insulting name, it just goes to prove what gullible mugs you are, falling over yourselves to associate yourself with my shimmering street-savvy prose, to slip on a leather jacket and shades and a ripped t-shirt and pretend to be in on the latest thing, in a pathetic attempt to hide from yourself how middle-aged and white and boring you are.

In fact it’s not only Hubertus Bigend who has a stupid name, they all do:

  • Cayce Pollard
  • Hubertus Bigend
  • Damian Pease (page 104)
  • Boone Chu (page 100)

In the Neuromancer trilogy Gibson really did feel like he was writing about gutter punks strung out on future drugs as they hacked in and out of cyberspace in gorgeously whip-sharp prose. You are totally in that world.

The Bridge trilogy which followed felt to me more contrived: its focus is on solidly lowlife types, or people bumping along the bottom of society – a security guard and ex-bike courier and rasta shopkeeper and a damaged teenager – giving the impression of a world which is fly and sharp and cool and street and happening, man. It’s only when the story refers to the authorities who actually run all the amenities of post-earthquake California – for example when the fire brigade gets called in to put out the climactic blaze on the Golden Gate bridge – that you realise that beyond Gibson’s handful of street types and scandi noir assassins, there is actually a great big world of grown-ups, where taxes are gathered to pay for schools and hospitals and police and fire brigade, where bureaucrats and businessmen commute to work every day and get things done. Where people aren’t lowlife drifters, living in cardboard boxers, mixing with cool assassins in long black coats.

Suddenly, the story felt…well… juvenile, wilfully focusing on a handful of rather pathetic outsiders with no particular redeeming qualities or features, certainly in no way representative of the wider world.

The Blue Ant novels feel like they continue this downward arc – that what began as something genuinely subversive and new in Neuromancer has metamorphosed into something shiny and empty and corrupt. The triumph of style over soul. It feels like he’s sold out. The Clash lyric, ‘Huh, you think it’s funny – turning rebellion into money’ kept coming to mind (The Clash are actually quoted on page 130 and the novel features Gibson’s usual clutch of supposed rock stars and fake rock bands).

When you’re a kid you think the music and look of your time is the big deal which is going to overthrow the corrupt old order. Then you watch as the record labels and promoters and stadium bookers and the TV pundits and fashion journalists and style gurus turn it into just another brand, and next thing you know it’s being sold back to you at extortionate prices, marketed and advertised by would-be cool, creepy, slimey, 40-something sell-outs in designer leather jackets.

That’s what this book felt like to me: a creepy exercise in cynical box-ticking set among a jet-setting international advertising and media elite who know all the right people and who are all so fabulous – fabulously well dressed, fabulously well connected, fabulously stylish, and so fabulously interesting, dahhhling, Hubertus has just got the most fabulously interesting theory of why advertising works, dahling, you must hear it, the man is a complete genius!

Absolutely fabulous characters

Cayce, as is repeatedly pointed out, is supernaturally gifted at spotting fashion trends, and this is one of the obvious examples of pattern recognition which crop up throughout the book. Her father was Win Pollard, a leading security expert who made American embassies round the world secure. He had many wise words and sayings like a good father should, well, certainly in an airport thriller.

He advised her to always ‘secure the perimeter’. He warned her against apophenia which is the tendency to perceive connections between unrelated things when there are none. It is a way of overdoing pattern recognition, a form of paranoia. (It crossed my mind, reading this, that creating patterns out of human activity is, in a broad sense, the core approach of all narratives.)

Cayce’s mother, Cynthia is equally as interesting and eccentric, a gen-you-ine Virginia eccentric (page 31) who lives in a nutty community who all believe in Electronic Voice Phenomena, a form of pattern recognition gone wrong (page 115).

Cayce had a therapist, Katherine McNally (page 253) (later this turns out to have been a string of therapists). She goes to a café in Camden and bumps into the famous Billy Prion, lead singer in the famous band, BSE. Her friend Damian is off in Russia making simply the most amazing documentaries ever.

In other words, her life is just so effortlessly glamorous, dahhling. It’s a Sunday Times Style supplement version of cool.

The shiny people in their black leather jackets, black Fruit of the Loom t-shirts, black skinny 501 jeans (page 2) and black shades, collars moodily turned up on their long black coats, or black leather and shiny nylon and squared-off shoes (page 153), smoking Gitanes like Albert Camus, drinking expensive Colombian coffee, hanging out in their cool redesigned interiors and stylish cars are like the pencil-thin, heroin-chic young things out of any number of indistinguishable fashion shoots from the last 30 years, or which populate hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cynical, smooth, stylish, utterly empty car ads.

An ex-boyfriend of Cayce’s (oh, dahhling, how many have there been?) once compared her to a Helmut Newton portrait of Jane Birkin. Well, of course he did. A character she knows looks like Michael Stipe on steroids – ‘Oh I simply love REM, don’t you!’ (page 21).

Later Boone’s luggage is described as ‘one of those Filson outfitter bags that look like L.L. Bean on steroids’, page 172. In other words Gibson is starting to write in clichés and to repeat those clichés.

Cayce’s New York apartment is painted a shade of blue she discovered in Northern Spain and had the paint people mix from a Polaroid she took of it, she’s that good!

The book keeps up a steady stream of name-dropping, trailing any number of undergraduate cultural references from Tarkovsky to Baudrillard (page 48) because the book has intellectual pretensions as well, in much the way that high-end fashion magazines and style outlets like to quote Deep Thinkers, or at least put their faces onto t-shirts, turning them into yet another kind of shiny surface reflecting the characters’ bottomless shallowness.

They’re just names on labels, like all the other brands the text carefully namechecks – Tommy Hilfiger, Levi 501, Volvo, Agnes B, Molton Brown, Burberry, Gucci (127), Prada (188), Gap, L.L. Bean, Louis Vuitton (188), suede boots from Parco, Armani, Versace (271), Cartier (309), Hermès (310).

Everyone is just so fabulously fabulous, thus:

  • Hubertus is a philosopher king who founded the coolest ad agency anywhere (‘He’s brilliant, isn’t he?’ gushes a member of his staff on page 87)
  • Cayce’s friend Margot is doing a course at NYU in disease-as-metaphor (‘Oh how wonderfully Susan Sontag of her!’), as it happens, she is a former girlfriend of Bigend’s – small world, when you’re this brilliant and that good !
  • the text drops key names from an undergraduate media studies course like car keys – Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Jameson, August Strindberg, Andrei Tarkovsky (at least three times pp.146), Truffault, Peckinpah, Apocalypse Now (180), William S. Burroughs (186), James Joyce and Tennessee Williams (286), it’s a shopping list of rather dated intellectual ‘cool’
  • characters wonder whether the director of the fragments is some kind of ‘Garage Kubrick’ (page 47)
  • film-makers are all auteurs
  • Cayce is stopped in the street by someone who thinks he saw her at a fabulous event at the Institute of Contemporary Arts’ (page 19)
  • not one but two of her former boyfriends were fans of Japanese actor Beat Takeshi, star of existential gangster films (page 167); of course they were, haven’t you heard of Beat Takeshi, oh dahling, where have you been hiding?
  • Cayce keeps bumping into rock singer Billy Prion, you all remember Billy Prion the famous rock singer, don’t you?

The text drops not only names but fashionable buzzwords, too, like a checklist from a student reading list of critical theory – liminal (54, 253), discourse, semiotics (‘semiotics of the marketplace’ 2, ‘a semiotic neutrality’ 89, ‘semiotic agoraphobia’ 264), hegemony, hermeneutics, God aren’t we clever and well-read.

As you can tell, I found Pattern Recognition unbearably pretentious, elitist and dull. It’s such a shame because in the Neuromancer novels Gibson seemed to have invented a dazzlingy jazzy, funky, street prose style to match the extraordinary goings-on in his digital future. But in a book like this, the style is broader, deeper and more accomplished, but now feels like it is dressing up distressingly lame, boring, fashion magazine material.

The McGuffin

All Gibson’s previous novels managed to cook up a sense of expectation and mild dread because they all contrived to have a Big Secret at their centre, a secret the characters slowly stumble across and which, in the case of the Neuromancer books, is genuinely mind-expanding (in the second novel a self-conscious, self-aware being emerges from the world’s data; in the third novel, it becomes aware that there are others like it out in space).

However, this entire Big Thing-at-the-heart-of-the-story strategy begins to run out of steam in the Bridge trilogy: in the last of those books we spend the entire narrative being promised that something big, really, really big is going to happen, something that is going to change the world forever, so we spend the entire novel on tenterhooks. And then… it doesn’t happen. Nothing happens at all. Well, the Golden Gate catches fire and then, er, is put out. That’s it.

The McGuffin in this novel is ‘the fragments’. Someone is releasing onto the internet brief fragments of what appear to be a movie. This cryptic procedure has spawned a community of obsessives around the world who have swiftly assigned themselves a ‘cool’ name, the ‘footageheads’, who have wasted vast amounts of time speculating what The Footage means, who took it and why and where it’s all going to end. Footageheads are obsessives and addicts. They think repeated watching of the various fragments, in various orders, gives them a sense of an opening into something, a universe, a narrative (page 109).

There are web communities devoted solely to analysing The Fragments, including one named F:F:F, which stands for Fetish: Footage: Forum, maintained by someone named Ivy, with about 20 regular posters including Parkaboy, La Anarchia, Maurice and Filmy, and where Cayce has been posting thoughts for some time.

As the novel begins and Cayce flies into London to undertake her brief job assessing the new logo for a Blue Ant client (why couldn’t the logo have been emailed or faxed or posted to her?) she is fussing and fretting over the release of the latest fragment, #135.

This silly idea really is the centre of this long novel, I kid you not. When, on the evening of her 1-minute logo-disapproving meeting, Cayce is invited out for dinner and then drinks with the swashbuckling Hubertus Bigend (‘Isn’t he brilliant?’), Hubertus takes Cayce to a cool designer bar in cool Clerkenwell (natch) where he springs on her the real reason he paid for her flight from New York — turns out Hubertus is a footagehead himself and is prepared to pay Cayce big bucks to find out who’s making The Fragments and why.

Before she knows what’s happening, Hubertus introduces her to a Chinese-American named Boone Chu. Cayce initially says no to the whole proposition, but, like Cayce herself, Boone is a genuine footagehead and his passion is contagious.

Tokyo

Cayce spends the first hundred and fifty pages mooching round the environs of her mate Damian’s flat in Camden i.e. up to the Lock, around the market, there are walks up Primrose Hill, she meets people in cafés, has a bizarre encounter in the street with three dudes who are buying and selling a suite of fake hand grenades which contain wind-up calculators (named Voytek and Ngemi), the nips over to Notting Hill and the Portobello Road. Then there’s all the taking of cabs to and from meetings at Blue Ant’s HQ in Soho. In other words, fashionable north and west London are given a good going over in Gibson’s slick stylish prose. Cool.

But via the community of footageheads Cayce has learned that there are various footage experts in Tokyo and so, once Boone Chu has helped persuade her to agree to Hubertus’s commission to track down the footage maker, she finds herself handed a Blue Ant Mac, ipad, mobile, credit card and plane tickets to Tokyo and whoosh! she’s aboard a British Airways flight to Japan. ‘New York, London, Paris, Munich, everybody’s talking ’bout… pop music!’

There’s quite a bit of reportage about what it’s like to arrive in Tokyo, deboard the plane, catch a cab into town, all the skyscrapers, the bombardment of foreign signs which every tourist since Roland Barthes has felt compelled to write a book about. The Blue Ant Tokyo office is terrifyingly prompt and efficient and, after she’s checked into a luxury hotel, arranges an hours-long pampering session with seaweed facials, wax and haircut. Then a new outfit, all in black, obvz.

Then, finally, we arrive at the point of the whole trip, which is some of her pals in F:F:F have identified a certain ‘Taki’, a Japanese footagehead, who claims to know of a ‘coven’ of other footageheads who have discovered a watermark on fragment #78.

Do you care? No, neither do I. Her friends then devise an elaborate scam which is to invent a horny, porny anime babe, call her Keiko, and persuade this Taki to a meeting on the promise that in exchange for his information, he’ll get a picture and contact details for this Keiko. I suppose they could have just rung him up and asked him or asked to meet for a coffee and asked him, But this way creates more cloak-and-dagger suspense.

So Cayce meets Taki in a seedy bar which he has chosen, he hands over the number he claims is in the watermark of fragment #78 and she hands over the bosomy photo of a made-up Japanese babe, goes for a pee and Taki is gone when she gets back.

Out in the dirty alley she is mugged by two guys dressed all in black (obvz) who seem to have Italian accents. But it turns out Cayce was trained in self-defence by her spy father (of course she was) and gives one of them a Glasgow Kiss before stamping on the other’s one’s shoe with her stilleto and running. At the end of the alleyway a lone figure on a moped is waiting, who lifts the visor of his helmet to reveal… it is Boone Chu! He flew out on the same plane as her and has been tailing her.

Long story short, he sweeps her off to a hotel, drinks and recovers and throws on new clothes (all black, natch), then a plane back to London.

Back in London

Boone and Cayce are collected by Hubertus in a cab, so he can debrief them about everything that happened. Boone does the talking and leaves out the mugging and his rescue of Cayce.

Back at Damian’s Cayce is disconcerted to discover Damian has returned to his flat from Russia, and brought along a moody sulky Russian girlfriend, Marina (dresses only in Prada, only in black, natch). Cayce crashes, the others go for meals, Camden is so cool.

Burglary I forgot to mention that after Cayce arrived in Damian’s flat she unpacked then went for a walk. When she came back she realised someone had been tampering with the laptop she uses i.e. had broken into the flat, but using the correct keys. This led to an outburst of paranoia which led her to barricade Damian’s door, then to get new locks.

Logophobia I also forgot to mention that Cayce has a severed phobia which is the other side of her having such a phenomenally good feel for fashion and logos, which is a phobia of logos. Thus a visit to Harvey Nichols upscale department store makes her nearly pass out, and conversation leads to the fact that the Michelin man, logo of Bibendum in Knightsbridge, gives her panic attacks. Thus it is no accident that when she gets back to Damian’s flat after some outing she finds a model of the Michelin man nailed to the door. She nearly throws up and has to detach it without looking directly at it.

Now, no sooner has she arrived back in London than she’s called to a meeting at Blue Ant with Hubertus. On the way in she almost collides with… the man who tried to mug her in Tokyo and is sporting a very broken nose. When she asks reception who he is, reception tells her that’s Dorotea’s driver, Franco (page 199).

Dorotea? Yes we met Dorotea Benedetti (page 9) in the early scenes. She is another freelance, this time an imposing executive, who had been liaising with the German designer about the sperm logo. Boone  explains that Dorotea was angling for a senior job at Big Ant and thought Hubertus had flown Cayce to London to consider her for the post i.e. to be a rival. And that’s why Dorotea commenced this barrage of psychological attacks against Cayce.

But in this new meeting at Blue Ant, also attended by Boone, Cayce now discovers that none of it was Dorotea’s idea, she was put up to it by a Russian who paid her, a tax lawyer based in Cyprus (described as being a centre of Russian money laundering, page 204). Not only did this Russian pay Dorotea to unsettle Cayce but someone passed on to her deeply personal information about Cayce’s logo phobia which she had only shared with her New York therapist. I.e. the Russians appear to have burgled Cayce’s therapist’s office.

So there’s some kind of deeper conspiracy against Cayce going on. When all this comes out in this boardroom meeting, Cayce is speechless with rage and calls Dorotea a ‘vicious lying cunt’ (page 203). But Hubertus stuns Cayce even more by announcing that he has hired Dorotea to Big Ant. Cayce reels out and goes to a Starbucks with Boone who explains that Hubertus doesn’t trust Dorotea but wants her on the inside of the tent pissing out.

Boone announces he’s flying to Columbus Ohio because that’s the location of a firm, Sigil, which specialises in watermarking movies. He thinks it might be them who placed the watermark on the fragment which they swindled out of Beat in Tokyo. So we’re back to The Footage, again, as providing the main narrative engine.

Bournemouth

Remember the oddballs Cayce walked past in Portobello Road, gathered round a car boot where she was astonished to see full of hand grenades till she went closer and discovered that they were only novelty calculators, one of the only hand-wound calculators in the world. To add a bit of grit, the story goes on to explain that they were designed by a Jewish designer Herzstark while imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp.

Now we learn that the two guys gathered round that boot were collectors and aficionados, being Voytek the Slav, Ngemi the black guy. They were waiting for a potential purchaser, Hobbs Baranov to show up. But he didn’t, so they packed up and left, disgruntled.

Well, Voytek gets hooked up with Damian somehow I can’t quite remember, and is part of the ‘Camden set’. Cayce sees him a few times in Camden cafés, even round Damian’s place. Conversation reveals that Baranov is well connected as well as being a fanatical collector. He’s the son of a Soviet defector from the 1950s, possibly recruited to American intelligence (page 242).

We are told that a rare and valuable artifact, a prototype Curta calculator, went at auction to a Bond Street dealer, Lucian Greenaway. Cayce finds out the black guy Ngemi is catching a train down to Bournemouth to see Baranov the purchaser and asks Voytek to ask Ngemi if she can accompany him.

Yes. So Cayce catches a cab to Waterloo (with comic descriptions of British Rail announcements, sandwiches and English tabloid newspapers. Yuk.) Train to Bournemouth, borrows a car, drives out to derelict Ministry of Defence test centre, a handful of pitiful caravans, this is where Hobbs Baranov lives. He is very unpleasant but a fanatical collector of early computers and calculators.

The T diagram The F:F:F people continue to dangle the bait of a made-up hot Japanese footagehead babe in front of Taki i.e. continue sending fake emails from her to him and, having been given the photo Cayce gave him, he more than ever believes she is real and big-breasted and gagging to meet her if only he will hand over Footagehead facts. So Taki excitedly emails Cayce a diagram. It is an image which shows a sort of T-shaped piece of geography and written all over it are numbers. One of them is the same as the number watermarked into fragment #78 as revealed by Taki. So presumably they’re all watermarks to do with the Footage.

Now Cayce has come all the way down to this dingy caravan outside Bournemouth to show it to the collector and expert in the arcane, Hobb. She shows the image to Hobbs and he nods knowingly. Cayce makes Hobbs a deal. She’ll buy the Bond Street piece for him in exchange for information: she wants the email address to which the particular encrypted number Taki gave her was sent.

Back at Waterloo Ngemi tells Cayce that Hobbs, before he became a shambling alcoholic recluse, was something to do with setting up Echelon, an American system that monitors the entire traffic on the web. As so often with Gibson, this snippet is heavy with implied meaning, but light on actual content.

So Ngemi and Cayce go to this Bond Street dealer who is the epitome of superior snobbishness but sells them the Curta calculator, which they promptly hand to Baranov who was waiting outside with the email address Cayce wanted (stellanor@armaz.ru).

Cayce goes sits in Kensington Gardens where, on her iBook, she writes an email to the address asking who he or she is and what they’re aiming to achieve with the footage. (Email is written as e-mail throughout the book.)

Throughout the book she’s plugging her phone into her I-book in order to receive emails. Maybe this was cutting edge in 2002 or 3 but quite obviously it was to be completely superseded with the advent of smartphones by 2007 or 8.

Anyway, Cayce investigates the domain name @armaz.ru and discovers it’s owned by an Andreas Polakov based in Cyprus. She phones Bigend, asks the name of the Cyprus-based Russian lawyer who paid Dorotea to frighten off Cayce and it is… Andreas Polokov (page 259). One and the same man: so, Is the man who appears to be disseminating The Footage the same one who paid Dorotea to put the frighteners on Cayce? And if so, Why?

The guy at the other end of the email replies within half an hour saying he’s in Moscow. Cayce immediately gets Blue Ant’s people to buy her an Aeroflot flight to Moscow.

Moscow

There is the same kind of travelogue description of driving into the city from the airport which Gibson has already given us for London and Tokyo. ‘New York, London, Paris, Munich, everybody’s talking ’bout… pop music!’

The constant shifting of locale is like a James Bond movie and just like in the movies we get a lot of local colour and background information, almost like a tourist brochure.

We get descriptions of Moscow motorways, signage, the imposingly huge hotel (the President), the crappy hotel room, the poor cellphone reception, the rude staff, a couple of super-sexualised hookers hanging round in the lobby. It all sounds like notes Gibson has made on his travels promoting his earlier books.

Throughout the novel Cayce’s closest friend on the Fetish: Footage: Forum has been Parkaboy. He’s been avidly following her investigations into the source of the footage. Now in an email exchange he begs to be allowed to join her in Moscow.

Now, back when Hubertus originally hired Cayce to track down the Footage Maker, Hubertus said she could have anything she wanted, unlimited expenses, buy cars, take flights anywhere, stay in the best hotels etc. So Cayce now tells Parkaboy she’ll get him a plane ticket to Moscow, whereupon he tells her his name for the plane ticket, Peter Gilbert (page 278).

She gets another email from the footage guy telling her to meet him in a Moscow café. So she’s very surprised when the figure who weaves its way through the cafe to her turns out to be… a woman, introduces herself as Stella.

The big reveal

Stella explains everything, explaining the entire plot.

Stella was one of twin sisters, Stella and Nora born and bred in Russia. She and her sister were in a terrorist attack, a claymore mine stuck in a tree, which killed both their parents immediately, Nora was very badly injured with shrapnel lodged in her brain. She had been a film student in Paris. She had been working on several films which she cut shorter and shorter in line with her minimalist aesthetic.

After the injury she spoke only to Stella and only in the special private language which twins often develop. Stella and friends bring Nora her film equipment from Paris which is the only thing which perks her up. She resumes editing her film and paring it down till it ends up as just one shot.

Then they notice Nora staring at the monitor showing closed circuit TV footage of the reception area of the hotel. She is entranced by it. So, hoping to aid her cure, one of the doctors hooks Nora’s recording equipment to the CCTV camera, she begins recording it and editing it. And that, children, is the origin of The Footage which has been dazzling and puzzling the worldwide community of Footageheads. Bit disappointing, isn’t it.

They part, Cayce goes back to her hotel and sleeps, has calls with Boone, Hubertus, then receives a long email about his archaeology project from Damian. Then Stella’s car comes to collect Cayce and take her to an abandoned cinema, which became a squat in the chaotic 90s and is now where Nora sits in a shawl obsessively editing and re-editing fragments of her ‘film’. And where Stella sits for hours watching the genius of her sister, the Creator, the Maker.

Dorotea in Moscow

In the middle of all this, Cayce is astonished when Dorotea turns up in the Moscow hotel. Dorotea urgently takes Cayce for a drink, telling her that the twins (Stella and Nora’s) uncle, the one Stella says is rich and powerful and has been protecting them, well he’s not happy that Cayce has discovered who Nora is. She also casually reveals that she, Dorotea, knows all about The Footage, in fact is the most irritating member of the F:F:F, Madam Anarchia.

But even as she explains all this, Cayce realises Dorotea has drugged her Perrier water and she starts to pass out.

Cayce kidnapped

Cayce wakes up in what feels like a hospital ward, in a hospital ward, strapped to a bed. She dozes, wakes again, is no longer strapped down, climbs out of bed, finds her bag with her clothes stuffed in it underneath, gets into them, goes tentatively out into a corridor, walks towards a door showing daylight, out into the grounds and away from the nasty 1960s building before anyone notices, down rough paths, going down, then up and up and eventually coming to a wire fence topped with razor wire, which she gets over (at the price of ripping her precious Rickson’s leather jacket) and walks on across bare red soil till night begins to fall. She has no food, no water, no idea where she is and no idea where she’s headed.

Parkaboy

When out of nowhere a helicopter with a searchlight comes swooping overhead, lands, and a guy with night vision goggles walks up, oh my God is it Russian Security, the FSB, the Mafia? Is he going to shoot Cayce, take her back for torture and interrogation, is he…

No. As in any Hollywood action movie the dark, helmeted figure walks right up to her to create maximum threat and… introduces himself as Parkaboy! Her friend! From Chicago! Who she helped arrange the plan ticket for.

Parkaboy gives Cayce water then bundles her into the chopper taking them back to the facility while he explains everything (it’s lovely how people do that in thrillers, explain everything. I wish they’d do that in real life).

Back in the hotel bar Dorotea drugged Cayce with rohypnol. But as she went under, Cayce went postal and attacked Dorotea, giving her a bloody nose and black eye. Ambulance was called. All this just as Parkaboy walked into the hotel bar. In one of her last emails to him, Cayce had sent Parkaboy Stella’s contact details so Parkaboy rang rich, influential Stella and within minutes an expensive car with private goons turns up. Cayce was flown to the establishment where she woke up and which she’s just escaped from. Parkaboy explains it is an experimental private prison run by Stella and Nora’s super-rich uncle, really rich, maybe the richest man in Russia. Of course.

Prison? Yes and what are the inmates of this model prison being paid to do? To watermark every frame of the fragments of the movie which mad Nora is creating. Why?

Parkaboy now amazes Cayce by telling her that he was in the room when Volkov and Bigend first met. And talked. He says it was like watching spiders mate.

All this during the helicopter flight. Now the chopper lands. Cayce is cleaned and showered, her bleeding feet tended by a doctor, dressed and taken up to the tower overlooking the facility where she is dazed to meet Hubertus Bigend – he gets everywhere, but then he is a genius! – who suavely introduces her to the oligarch Andrei Volkov.

Over dinner everything is explained

Volkov looks like Adolf Eichman, a non-descript middle-aged man except with a chunk missing from his right ear (page 334). Through a translator he apologises to Cayce for the trouble she’s been through, shakes hands, says something in French to Bigend and departs with his three security guys, flying back to Moscow.

Cayce is introduced to Volkov’s Polish head of security, Wiktor Marchwynska-Wyrwal and Sergei Magomedov, as he, Bigend, Parkaboy and Cayce sit down at a cloth-laid table as an expensive dinner is brought to them and served up.

Marchwynska-Wyrwal takes up the explanation. Volkov is now the richest man in Russia. The claymore mine attack was an assassination attempt on him which failed but killed his brother, Nora and Stella’s father. From that point onwards, out of guilt for his dead brother, nothing was too good for his nieces, Nora in particular, and Volkov paid for an editing suite to be installed in her Swiss clinic.

As Nora created footage, her sister Stella wanted it to be conveyed to the world, but it was Sergei who developed the methodology of releasing it in numbered fragments, each containing watermarks, with a view to creating a cult following.

They monitored the various forums and chatrooms and groups which set themselves up as footageheads but it was a casual remark of Cayce’s, in her early days of posting, a casual throwaway remark that maybe the entire thing was the whim of a Russian mafiosi, which made all their security operations sit up.

Turns out Volkov had two security operations, a traditional KGB one and a web-based one. The traditionalists broke into Cayce’s flat and bugged all her devices. The less conventional ones hired Dorotea to sabotage Cayce’s career. Now, Volkov’s security guys already knew that Bigend had been making strides in discovering the footage creator, so when they learned that Cayce was going to join Bigend’s company the team went into overdrive and Dorotea was ordered to bug Cayce’s London base (Damian’s flat), then to try and mug her in Tokyo to get the watermark number which Taki had just given her.

All this is explained over this formal meal in a Russian prison-turned-hospital. As if all this wasn’t enough, Cayce’s father comes up in the conversation. For a moment I thought he was going to actually walk through a door and turn out to be a key player in this bonkers conspiracy to get a psychologically damaged young woman’s movie fragments out to a waiting world. But no. Volkov’s security people think Cayce’s father is dead, as she does. Nonetheless there is what is presumably meant to be a deliciously ironic toast to Wingard Pollard and men like him in the security services of the West who kept capitalism alive, for without him where would the oligarchs to today be? Lol.

Possibly this was wicked satire in 2003 but now it just reads like factual description of Vladimir Putin’s oligarch capitalism.

This bizarrely tranquil climax to the story prompts the thought that thrillers are ultimately comforting because, although a bunch of people might get shot or tortured along the way, things always turn out to be entirely comprehensible and loose ends are always neatly tied up like the ribbons tying up a fancy birthday gift.

It’s this childlike explanatoriness of thrillers, the neat tying up of loose ends, the complete explanations of the world, which makes them, ultimately, genre fiction and not literature.

Trouble is the explanations always happen right at the end of the text and are often contorted as hell in order to explain away the exciting but contrived scenes from earlier in the book, when it was still in ‘thrill mode’. As here. All those thrills and spills, burglaries and muggings and high-speed escapes, boil down to very little in the end.

Bigend walks Cayce to her room and explains that Dorotea was playing both sides. Only when Cayce used the .ru email address did Volkov’s security operation really leap into action, and Dorotea’s position become exposed. She flew to Moscow and was quizzing Cayce about the source of the email trying to identify who Cayce got that email address from (we know it was Hobbs) because Dorotea thought it would be a bargaining chip with Volkov’s people. But instead Volkov’s people arrived at the bar of the Hotel President to discover Dorotea assaulting the new best friend of Volkov’s nieces, so it was all up for her.

The long and the short of it is that nobody knows her current whereabouts. Best not to ask, Hubert advises. The implication is that Dorotea has been liquidated. Bigend bids Cayce goodnight, leading her to the small motel room she’s been assigned within the facility.

Immediately after dinner Wiktor Marchwynska-Wyrwal had given Cayce an envelope. Opening it she sees it’s a summary of Volkov’s security people’s extended efforts to track down her father. But no joy. Missing presumed dead in south Manhattan on the morning of 9/11. So, once again, what has been  trailed throughout the novel as an exciting and mysterious disappearance of her father the senior American security official turns out to be… a damp squib.

And Cayce was given another envelope. It contains a stylish handbag containing lots of fresh cash. Parkaboy drops by with bottled water. She tells him everything and starts to cry about her father. He gives her a hug and says, Well, at least they found the Maker.

Epilogue

The short final chapter ties up loose ends.

Cayce sends the money she was given to Voytek so he can stage some mad art exhibition involving lots of scaffolding.

Billy Prion the former rock star she kept bumping into in Camden is chosen as the face of some new yoghurt drink.

And she sends some cash to her mum, which helps pay the lawyers who are establishing her father’s legal status as deceased so as to free up his pension and insurance.

Her friend Margot writes to say she just saw Bigend on telly with some oligarch.

Damien writes to say he’s finished shooting his archaeology documentary about digging up a Stuka on some Second World War battlefield. Cayce had gone to visit him and ended up down in the digging trench, shovelling mud and crying helplessly. For her buried past. For her dead father.

Cayce’s therapist is pleased to hear that her panic attacks, her logophobia, her abreaction against all kinds of branded consumer goods, seem to have disappeared, but offers her a few slots in the autumn. Somehow this whole crazy experience has been therapeutic. Cayce is cured!

The book ends with her lying in bed in Paris, spooned up next to Parkaboy aka Peter Gilbert, who, we learn, is now her boyfriend. She’s in no rush to go back to work. Which must be nice. Nice swanning round the world on other people’s expense accounts. But then that’s the life which, ultimately, this book portrays.

New York, London, Tokyo, Moscow, Paris, expense accounts, upscale therapists and cabs everywhere, Cayce is a perfect epitome of the globalised, international, jetsetting advertising and media élite.

If you want a more realistic account of London advertising agencies try this.

9/11

Early on Cayce describes how her dad, Wingard Pollard, was in New York on the morning the twin towers were blown up. His family doesn’t know why, he didn’t live in New York. He left his hotel in lower Manhattan on the fateful morning and was never seen again (pages 185 to 187). Cayce’s dad was a security expert. Security. 9/11. Russians. The reader suspects there might be connections. The reader hopes there might be interesting and mind-stretching connections. But no.

Cayce herself was also in Manhattan that morning and saw the attacks from the room of a business contact she’d gone to see.

She looks up, then, and sees, borealis-faint but sharp-edged and tall as heaven, twin towers of light. As her head goes back to find their tops a vertigo seizes her: They narrow up into nothing at all, a vanishing point, like railway tracks up into the desert of the sky. (page 227)

Great writer, isn’t he, Gibson? Great creator of snappy, vivid sentences, acute imagery. Shame his plots can’t quite match his prose style.

Looking back to 2003, we can assess how 9/11 seemed so important for a long time. For quite a few years afterwards, it felt like it had ushered in an entirely new era, one of perma-fear and anxiety, periodically stoked up by further terrorist atrocities in England and across Europe. I suppose the book was written in the immediate backwash of 9/11 and that including it as a thread lent the book a kind of hyper-charged paranoia, giving a dark halo to the story about mysteries, espionage and paranoia.

But one of Donald Trump’s many achievements has been to bring America to such a verge of social upheaval that 9/11 seems like a tea party now. Al-Qaeda never got to storm the Capitol. Feels like the real terrorists are all-American patriots and the next bloodbath / atrocity might be carried out by guys wearing baseball caps or the American police mowing down an apparently endless list of unarmed black men. 9/11 was eclipsed by the war in Afghanistan and then by the massive fiasco in Iraq. And then the near collapse of the entire financial system in 2008, and… so on and so on.

Reading the 9/11 passages in this novel made me realise it will have been 20 years ago this September. 20 years. It feels well settled in the past, now, superseded by many more recent events.

9/11 references pages: 136 to 137, 185 to 187, 232, 348 to 349.

Black

Gibson has a really tedious obsession with black, the teenage colour of cool. Black jeans, black t-shirts, black leather jackets, black sunglasses. He is, as my last review suggested, the Lou Reed of science fiction, the man in black wearing a black leather jacket, ripped t-shirt and black shades.

Except that, with this book, Gibson abandons science fiction altogether. But not the obsession with black as the colour of cool. On every page someone’s clothes or car or room is black, it is so oppressively ubiquitous that way before page 100 I began to wonder whether he was sending himself up, or maybe his readers; maybe he’s parodying himself.

The hotel room in Japan has all-black furniture. The replacement keys Cayce gets for his flat are black. Cayce has a black Rickson’s jacket, which comes folded in black tissue. Boone wears an old black horsehair coat. On the plane back to London she wears a black blindfold. Damian’s girlfriend Marina only wears black Prada. Damian wears a black hooded sweatshirt. Cayce wears black Levi 501s, black t-shirt, black shoes. Hubertus’s associated Bernard wears a permanently rumpled black suit. To dress for a meeting Cayce wears a black t-shirt, a black skirt, black leggings, black Harajuku Japanese schoolgirl shoes, a black leather jacket and a black East German handbag. Ngemi wears a black faux leather jacket. He wears black 4-eyelet Doc Marten boots. The make figure in the fragments wears a black leather coat. In dreams she sees her father holding a black Curta calculator. The cases passengers are wheeling towards the Eurostar terminal are black. Dorotea wears an entirely black Armani outfit. The German designer from whose apartment she watches the World Trade Centre burn wears black glasses (136). Cayce’s Pedipole at the Pilates gym includes black foam stirrups (247). Cayce wears a black nylon flight jacket (249). When Cayce first saw the Albert Memorial it had been black (253). Stella’s drivers wear black leather jackets. They drive black Mercedes (290). Cayce wears a black cardigan (297). When Dorotea turns up in Moscow she is dressed all in black (312). When Parkaboy turns up he is wearing a heavy black shirt (326). After the scene in the hotel bar three dudes with black leather coats turn up (327). Cayce’s blistered feet are put into black felt house slippers (332). Cayce has a shower and changes into her black cardigan (332). Parkaboy has a shower and changes into new black jeans (333).

Men in Black. Back in Black. Paint it black. Gibson’s obsession with black could be interpreted psychologically, as a form of displacement activity. As his plots became more complex but more contrived and, in the end, more trivial, so Gibson upped his concern with style and surface, and the growing obsession with black clothes and shirts and boots and shades is a kind of compulsive attempt to make the characters ‘cool’ even as the plots become more complex and inconsequential.

Credit

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson was published by Viking Press in 2003. All references are to the 2011 Penguin paperback edition.

Other William Gibson reviews

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by Simon on April 19, 2021  •  Permalink
Posted in Novel, Science Fiction, Thriller
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Posted by Simon on April 19, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/04/19/pattern-recognition-william-gibson/