Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

The writer who invented 'cyberspace' has lost contact with a new world of reborn faith and cultural conflict. Pat Kane pulls the plug on hi-tech fantasy

William Gibson writes a techno-thriller set in London's advertising community! State it baldly, and it might seem too bathetic to be believable. The creator of the term "cyberspace" – whose books provided a social paradigm shift, with its own mythology – has so run out of juice that he has to find inspiration in the trend-monkeys of the capital's media classes. Has the heir to Arthur C Clarke lost his oracular nerve? Is he trying to lay the ground for a new career in corporate consultancy?

The plot of Pattern Recognition is altogether too tailored for people who spend time punching away at machines-with-screens. Cayce Pollard is a freelance trend-consultant who operates by intuition: she knows viscerally when a logo or brand is going to work, and gets paid fortunes for two-minute sessions. This useful trait frees her up to indulge her real obsession – charting a phenomenon called "The Footage". These are anonymous postings of short movie clips, whose enigmatic beauty is tantalising netheads. One of Cayce's clients thinks they are "the ultimate marketing strategy", and commissions her to trace them to source.

Thus begins what sometimes seems like a combination between a frequent-flyer travel review, a gadget-boy's wet dream (ooh! Apple Mac I-Cube!), and a more boho-friendly version of a Tom Clancy potboiler. Those who enjoy Gibson's familiar tropes and tricks – loner hero/heroine, in love with branded hi-tech, goes on quest through real or virtual space, meets/ fights/fucks with urban eccentrics, talks like Raymond Chandler with laptop underarm – will enjoy this novel. Like all recent Gibson works, Pattern Recognition presumes that seeing the world as a chaos of clashing and fusing cultures, refracted through information technology, is somehow the truest rendition of the present. The only difference here is that Gibson plonks this in the recent past: 2002, when the tumble of tall towers cast a pall over all imaginings.

Yet there are some quite absurd omissions from this cyber-politan sheen, particularly from a writer who preens himself on the sensitivity of his antennae. Of course, there is the usual range of social grotesques and clichés from contemporary Japan, Gibson's preferred seam of Otherness: the sweaty-geek schoolgirl fetishist, the opaquely exuberant designs in neon-drenched streets, even an inscrutable Oriental anti-hero (Boone). Too many Western hipsters – from Barthes and Blade Runner onwards – have regarded the ludic excesses of Japanese affluence as some alien portent of the future rather than just the usual marketing blowout, with Buddhist-Confucian twists.

Possibly bored with all this, Gibson instead seeks out his source of redemptive difference in Russia. The Footage isn't some awesomely clever "viral" campaign, but the product of Nora, a crippled Moscow ciné-auteur. She has been sending out expensively enhanced clips of her award-winning short film, living in a Soviet-era bohemian hangout converted to a digital studio. All this is funded by a shadowy Russian property billionaire with a guilty conscience. And so, improbably, on.

One feels a little for Gibson's eternal-student idealism here. The marketing phenomenon sending the creative classes of London and New York crazy with envy is an old-fashioned Romantic project: something born of "art, freedom and things of the spirit", says Nora's sister to Cayce. In these rooms, "people valued friendships, ate and drank ... Now we say that everything Lenin taught us of communism was false, and everything he taught us of capitalism, true".

However, as the ethical zenith of a novel straining for contemporary relevance, this is stunningly off-beam. Does Gibson really think, post-11 September and now post-Gulf War II, that the measure of our current chaos can be taken from an elegiac musing on the failures of capitalism and communism? In a work which aspires to live in the shadow of the falling towers, the complete absence of any engagement with spiritual mindsets (particularly Islam) seems less like a stylistic decision, more like a structural blindness.

Was the destruction of the World Trade Centre really "an experience outside culture", as Gibson puts it? Or was it the ultimate revenge act against the semiotic dominance of Western consumerism? As Jean Baudrillard has said, "this was not the hatred felt by people from whom we have taken everything and to whom we have given nothing back, but rather the hatred felt by those to whom we have given everything, and who can give nothing in return". In a novel which tiresomely vaunts its knowledge of signs, Gibson displays not the slightest inkling of the symbolic violence that the West's marketing-blitz wreaks on reticent cultures. As the hijackers note put it, "the time for play is over; the serious time is upon us."

The subplot of Cayce's father – an old US intelligence spook, who disappears on 11 September – is intended to provide the deep link between the frothy world of trendspotting and the Day That Changed Everything. Willis Pollard always warned his daughter of the dangers of "apophenia – the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things". Whether sifting through data to find possible threats from enemies of the state, or cool-hunting to find the next version of the reversed baseball cap, too much reliance on "pattern recognition" is rendered by Gibson as bogus knowledge.

Tell that to David Blunkett and John Ashcroft, straining at the leash to turn all our data transactions into a search archive for "anti-terrorism". Or to the video game creator Will Wright, now helping the CIA to anticipate future threats through devising what USA Today jokingly calls "The Sims: Axis of Evil version". As Gibson's mentor William Burroughs might have put it: even literary paranoids can't know the half of what's going on, let alone anticipate it in fiction.

Yet there are many for whom Cayce's affliction – her visceral rejection of certain brands – is becoming more a rallying cry for resistance than a cute way to make a living in Madison Avenue and Soho. And what might be destroyed under the onslaughts of "regime change" are not just the commercial trivialities of pattern recognition, but the possibility of human recognition: the need for a genuine "dance of civilisations".

Gibson's tinny designer prose is barely up to the fictional task of rendering this global crisis of meaning; he should stick with the mirror-shaded cyborgs. But whose prose will be?

Pat Kane's 'The Play Ethic' will be published by Macmillan