Whodunit cloaks issues of marketing, technology

Cayce Pollard is the cutting edge of contemporary culture. An uber-cool young urban woman, Cayce is able to recognize hip trends before they take off, thereby allowing her marketing clients to “commodify” those trends and reap abundant profits. “It’s about group behavior pattern around a particular class of object,” Cayce explains in William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition,” an intriguing novel of technology, art, marketing manipulation and mystery.

“I try to recognize a pattern before anyone else does,” Cayce explains, and then “I point a commodifier at it.”

There are two particular developments, though, that Cayce can’t decipher. First, the whereabouts of her father, a security expert with possible ties to the CIA who went missing in New York on Sept. 11. She can’t pin down what he was doing in the city that day and where he might have been at the fateful hour. Did he perish in the tragedy or simply disappear?

And what, exactly, is the story behind the anonymous footage that’s been popping up on the Web?

Cayce, we learn, is a “footagehead,” one of a group of fanatics obsessed with a series of video clips that have begun to show up on the Internet. The footageheads gather in an online conference to watch and track each segment as it appears, spending hours in cyberspace debating the footage’s possible creator, and whether the film is a work in progress or a completed narrative simply awaiting a perceptive arrangement of its pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle whose shape is known to the creator alone. (The segments have appeared in what seems to be a random order, telling no particular story but offering such compelling images that people become hooked on trying to figure out how it all fits together.)

The footage offers Cayce a respite from brand names and iconographic images in the world of trend forecasting and marketing, since the footage’s two main characters offer no clues via fashion or hairstyle as to their location or era: “He might be a sailor, stepping onto a submarine in 1914, or a jazz musician entering a club in 1957,” Gibson writes of one of the characters. “There is a lack of evidence, an absence of stylistic cues, that Cayce understands to be utterly masterful.”

In these cinematic segments, Cayce glimpses a world more real, perhaps, than the actual world she knows, and wants nothing more than to see the whole film. Yet the “one hundred and thirty-four previously discovered fragments, having been endlessly collated, broken down, reassembled, by whole armies of the most fanatical investigators, have yielded no period and no particular narrative direction.”

The irony is that Cayce, for all her edginess and market savvy, is allergic, if you will, to branding and feels physically ill when confronted by logos, billboards and marketing displays. She cuts all labels off her clothing and belongings, and must work to isolate herself from offending images lest they make her sick. (The flip side of this allergy is her ability to know, on first sight, whether a new logo design will be a hit -- a talent that garners her great money and acclaim.

Cayce travels to London to assess a new footwear logo, and it is there that the three compartmentalized strands of her life -- her interest in the footage, her need to learn what happened to her father and her trend-spotting profession -- will collide in a sophisticated whodunit that is as fresh and literary as one could hope to find.

Blue Ant, the company that has hired Cayce to consider a client’s logo, asks her to find the footage’s creator so the firm can use this new way of gaining worldwide recognition for its own commercial ends.

Gibson (author of “Neuromancer” and other sci-fi works, as well as the individual credited with coining the word “cyberspace”) succeeds in bringing to light the subtle and sometimes frightening aspects of today’s Internet culture. “Pattern Recognition” works compellingly on two levels: As an intriguing mystery with delicious vigor and bite, the novel lures readers into unfamiliar provinces and unforeseen situations to solve the problem at hand. On a deeper level, the tale is a social commentary, taking a long, hard look at the monoculture in which we live: “whatever it is that gradually makes London and New York feel more like each other, that dissolves the membranes between mirror-worlds.”

Combining old-fashioned storytelling techniques with a recognition of yet-to-be-defined patterns, Gibson’s tale is a robust inquiry into the many (and often veiled) ways that marketing shapes the world in which we live.