Bülent Ecevit Osman Yusuf

Rummaging through the shoebox of shattered dreams

Many years ago, I wanted to be a journalist. The glitz and glamour of a wordsmith, that was the life I aspired to. I didn’t make it - boo hoo, sob sob - but at least I have a fat folder of press clippings to show for it.

Reading through them now, the agonies of composition and editing are mercifully forgotten. Now I can regard them from a distance with an objective eye. There’s even a hint of surprise (and yes, satisfaction) that I wrote stuff good enough to publish.

Looky here, a preview of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition for The Observer (January 2003):

A new book by William Gibson is always an exciting event. After all, this is the self-confessed technophobe who wrote Neuromancer, and introduced the world to cyberspace and cyberpunks. Pattern Recognition, his seventh novel, is notable for being set in London one year after 11 September, and the business of imagining the future takes a back seat to the complexities of the modern world.

In a tip of the hat to Naomi Klein, the heroine, Cayce Pollard, makes her living through an unusual sensitivity to corporate branding. When a toothsome ad executive asks her to investigate the source of a mysterious phenomenon on the internet, which could be the most important viral marketing campaign ever devised, Cayce soon becomes entangled in a world of paranoid surveillance and commodity fetishism. Pattern Recognition is a stylish and ambitious novel. Equal parts detective story, travelogue and cultural satire, it is also (dare I say it) about one woman’s quest for emotional fulfilment, and proof of Gibson’s growing maturity as a writer.

Not too bad. Some of the sentences in the second paragraph are a little clunky. I’ve a strong urge to rewrite and clean it up, but that’d be an act of pointless revisionism/complete waste of time/rampant egomania* (delete as appropriate).

But this article was the cause of a particularly surreal episode; the week following its publication, I went to see Gibson do a promotional reading at the Congress Centre in London. Whereupon his PA introduced him to the stage with a reading of this exact same article. 

I was thunderstruck. I broke out into a sweat and squirmed in my seat, and peeked around the room to see people’s reactions. And of course, they couldn’t care less. They were about to see their hero, this was just a fluffy preamble to get them even more stoked up.

Afterwards, I stuck around to get my book signed. I couldn’t pluck up the courage to tell him that I was the “journalist” whose news item they’d read out. It seemed like a grotesque act of vanity. And besides, why would he believe me? So I went home, signed book under my arm, walking on air.

I told my editor the next day. She had difficulty hiding the fact that she didn’t give a shit. But I very much gave a shit. In retrospect, my attempt at becoming a big-shot newspaperman was gloriously muddled and fabulously misguided. But this was an achievement to be proud of. Those were my words, and William Gibson had listened to them.