Spook Country - Interpretation and Reception

Interpretation and Reception

Spook Country appeared on bestseller charts by August 7, 2007 – five days after release. The novel entered The Washington Post's hardcover fiction bestseller list for the Washington D.C. area in late August at #4, and by September had reached #2 in San Francisco and Canada. It was listed at #6 on Publishers Weekly's hardcover fiction bestseller list for the U.S, as well as on The New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover fiction (where it lasted three weeks). It earned a nomination for the BSFA Awards for best novel of 2007, and finished second to Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union in the standings for the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel the following year. In August 2008, Rebecca Armstrong of The Independent named Spook Country as one of the "Ten Best Thrillers".

Mike Duffy felt that although the novel was less overtly science fiction than Gibson's earlier novels, it retained their "wit, virtuosity and insights", and had "the same giddy mix of techno-fetishism, nuanced edge and phraseological finesse which enlivened his previous work". "Spook Country, in essence," pronounced The Telegraph's Tim Martin, "is a classic paranoid quest narrative, but one that refashions the morbid surveillance tropes of the Cold War for a post-Iraq era". Ken Barnes of USA Today found that "andscapes, events and points of view shift constantly, so that the reader never truly feels on solid ground", but judged the novel to be a "vivid, suspenseful and ultimately coherent tale". In a review for The Washington Post, Bill Sheahan hailed the novel's capture of the zeitgeist, and compared it to the acclaimed literary fiction of Don DeLillo:

Despite a full complement of thieves, pushers and pirates, Spook Country is less a conventional thriller than a devastatingly precise reflection of the American zeitgeist, and it bears comparison to the best work of Don DeLillo. Although he is a very different sort of writer, Gibson, like DeLillo, writes fiction that is powerfully attuned to the currents of dread, dismay and baffled fury that permeate our culture. Spook Country – which is a beautifully multi-leveled title – takes an unflinching look at that culture. With a clear eye and a minimum of editorial comment, Gibson shows us a country that has drifted dangerously from its governing principles, evoking a kind of ironic nostalgia for a time when, as one character puts it, "grown-ups still ran things." In Spook Country, Gibson takes another large step forward and reaffirms his position as one of the most astute and entertaining commentators on our astonishing, chaotic present. —Bill Sheahan, The Washington Post, July 22, 2007.