First off, I want so say that I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was such a relief to read something I could follow and understand without too much in depth analysis. I'm sure there is more to the story than what is on the surface, but the story itself was a definite page turner that kept me interested no matter who the story was focused on. I liked how Gibson left a lot of the book up for interpretation. The use of ambiguity is effective, but not overwhelming.
Okay so here's my case. Being that this course is titled "Fiction in the Blog Dimension", I have become suspicious about this book as a form of blog. First of all, there are a total of 73 chapters in this book. This is unheard of for a novel, at least in the novels that I've read. Some chapters aren't even a page long. Each deals with a specific incident for a specific character or group of characters. When I read chapter 42, entitled "Red Ghosts of European Time" for the second time after skimming through the book, I noticed that this chapter is relatively insignificant to the plot of the story. It almost seems like a reflection of the day's events and describing what Fontaine was doing before he went to bed, much like a diary. Most chapters have this sense when you read them. Then I thought, wait a minute, a blog is a form of a diary. So, couldn't this book be a form of a blog?
The more I think about it, the clearer it comes. This book is a collection of diaries of several characters, except they are not written in first person. They are all third person. The best analogy I can think of for something like this is a forum, which is a form of a blog in which several users interact from their own computers and with their own points of view. For the most part, they stay focused on one topic and one can follow each person’s interpretation relatively easily. This parallels Gibson’s book, where the “forum topic” is The Bridge, because everyone has an affiliation with it in some way.
So there you have it. I claim that William Gibson’s book is cleverly structured as a blog.
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What you mean is a blog can be a person, a place or a thing that the characters or bloggers share in common even though they don’t necessarily have to make contact with other characters or know about each other. All they need is a focal point, so does this mean that Coupland’s novel is also a blog?
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