Review - idoru - William Gibson

idoru
William Gibson, Viking, 1996

I like William Gibson’s books. I was bowled over by his first novel, Neuromancer (1984), which won the Hugo, the Philip K. Dick Memorial, and the Nebula awards - in case you’re not into the genre of Science Fiction (SF), these are all very prestigious. He coined the term “cyberspace”, envisioning both the internet and virtual reality before most people had even heard of them, and Neuromancer was hailed as the “Christ-child of cyberpunk”, (a genre of SF which became self-conscious during the 80s, first characterized as Radical Hard SF, or Neuromantics, or the Mirrorshades group. At its best, it describes with all the linguistic style of the modern novel, a hi-tech future which is sometimes a drug-induced nightmare, sometimes a surrealistic New Age, always just beyond the cutting-edge of physics and metaphysics.) At 48, Gibson is an American draft-dodger who has been living in Canada since he was 19 and has picked up the best of both cultures. His subsequent novels are Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, the best-selling Virtual Light, and his short stories collected in Burning Chrome.

I surfed the net (653 matches to “idoru” found by my HotBot search engine) to give you a flavour of both the man and his writings: “Gibson's stuff is the reactor core steam of all tomorrow's parties breathing down your neck today. Not so much an imaginary future as a highly specific look at a present in midstage adrenaline OD.” (Spin) “Gibson brings to the surface the beast that lurks behind the dense surreal surface of pop culture, simultaneously as meaningful and empty as a video screen.” (The Nation) “Gibson distils a technopunk sensibility with the kick of white lightning and the clarity of white light.” (Village Voice)

So what of Idoru? I was disappointed. If you have never read any Gibson, then start with Neuromancer - and persevere beyond the baffling first pages.

Idoru (a Gibson neologism) is an advanced software program meaning idol-singer or idol-guru. The idoru is an ‘imaginary’ pop star, a cybernetic Madonna of the future - although the Japanese are already creating these as I write. The action is in a new millennium Tokyo, after The Quake, with new self-building buildings, a new mafia, smuggled nano-technology and a couple of innocents-abroad in a big bad technoworld. Colin Laney has a ‘gift’ due to early drug experiments, of fishing for patterns in the dense texture of computer web information. He sees ‘nodes’ and discovers narratives intuitively by accessing the net. For me this was the most interesting feature of the book, as it mirrors contemporary preoccupation with narratives and stories, and the ways that these can convey more than the sum of their parts. In this virtual, holographic future, Gibson is pushing the frontiers of the Flesh made Word which helped me to ponder the Mystery of the Word made Flesh.

The sub-plot concerns Chia Pet McKenzie who is active in the fan club for Lo/Rez, a superstar rock duo. She is bundled off to investigate some new rumours about the plans of Rez, one half of the band, to marry Rei Toei, an “idoru”. She is inadvertently used to smuggle illegal nanoware to the Russian criminal underground and gets caught up with a nice boy-next-door Japanese computer nerd who guides her round the Virtual Walled City and helps save the day. The Famous Five on Acid.

Third Way (not sure they ever published it!)

Article - I was a Housegroup Junkie

I Was A Housegroup Junkie

It’s midnight and I’ve just got back from Richard and Dawn’s. It was a fantastic housegroup. As usual, I’m hyper at the moment and need to unwind before I can begin to think about sleeping. So pull up an armchair - I’ve got one of those special housegroup armchairs which look and feel so comfortable for the first 5 minutes and then begin to twist your spine as you sink into the crevice at the back. And if you try to make yourself more comfortable, one of the castors falls off (and I say “Oh, don’t worry, it’s always doing that…”) and then you try and mend it and completely distract everybody and then you sit down and it makes a mildly rude noise which will make anyone under 18 spend the next hour suppressing giggles. Of course, I’ve sprinkled milk chocolate crumbs all over the seat and these will gradually melt during the evening and work their way deeply into the fabric of your trousers. But you will be too busy trying to keep away from the traces of jam you have just discovered on the left arm to notice the chocolate. And only if you are very inquisitive will you find the unspeakable things wedged down between the seat cushion and the sides of the armchair.

So hands up if you would like a coffee. Or rather, hands up if you don’t want one, or if you’d prefer tea… or orange. So how many coffees is that? It’s special housegroup coffee, by the way. They collect all the powdery bits left in the bottom of the container ships which bring the coffee beans over from Finland (where they are used as ballast on the return trips from delivering live elks to the Highlands) and then they freeze-dry it, although you can still taste the North Sea oil a little, and certainly smell the elks, until you add the dried milk, that is. Actually it’s not just any old dried milk, it’s Coffeypal. That’s healthier than dried milk and congeals into soft little white balls which give a whirlpool effect as you stir in the few granules of sugar which haven’t stuck to the sugar spoon. It looks a little like a slightly blocked shower plug-hole.

Do help yourself to a housegroup digestive. They all have the hairline cracks which will cause them to break into a hundred pieces between the packet and your plate. It’s surprising really, because biscuits that old are usually a bit softer. The silica gel I keep in the biscuit tin must help.

So shall we wait a little longer for anyone else to come, or shall we start? Let’s split into small buzz groups and discuss that for just a minute or two. OK. So who would like to Open with a word of prayer? Now we’ll move into a time of open sharing. I’ll begin.

It all started when I was about 15, that very vulnerable age when you can fall into so many traps. I was bored with church. Sermons were beginning to lose their excitement. I couldn’t ask questions and I began to realise that our minister only had two basic sermons anyway: the evangelistic ‘let Jesus into your heart’ sermon, and the discipleship ‘pray-more, read-your-bible-more, give-more, witness-more’ sermon. On top of that, the liturgy had lost its allure and I seemed to spend most of the time working out why there were semi-colons in places where I expected commas; or adding up the hymn numbers on the board to see if they ever came to 666. Even the choruses I used to love seemed to have become devoid of intellectual challenge and kept reminding me of Barry Manilow.

Then one evening, some of my friends asked me to go to a Housegroup in another church. That evening changed my life.

I knew I shouldn’t really have gone. We still had a mid-week prayer meeting then, and the Prayer Warriors (Mabel & Elsie - we were very short of male Warriors - in fact we were very short of anybody) had often warned us young people, “Just say no!” But when you’re young, spiritually bored, and a born leader, and you see others going to housegroups, and it doesn’t seem to make them start thinking for themselves… well, what harm can it do, to go just once, I thought.

But I didn’t realise then how addictive housegroups were. So I had been to one meeting, and I hadn’t become charismatic (another thing the Prayer Warriors had warned against) - although I did get a bit of a buzz for the next day or two. Anyway, by the Sunday, I couldn’t wait for Wednesday and the next meeting. It was just ‘soft’ housegroups at first. You know, a few choruses, a lot of ‘sharing’, occasionally opening the Bible and seeing how quickly we could get off the subject. “Pooling Ignorance” was what the Prayer Warriors had called it. It was great, and I couldn’t get over the sense of freedom and excitement that I experienced in those heady, early days. There was Dotty Daphne, who was seriously into ‘pictures’, and Derek who had an uncanny knack of interpreting the most obscure ‘visions’. I thought he’d be stumped by Daphne’s picture of a man dressed all in black taking a white rabbit out of a top hat. But not Derek. Strangely though, we never heard back from Paul Daniel’s when we invited him to come and ‘preach with a view’.

Of course we had to be discerning, and I well remember the theological discussion we had about the omniscience of God after Gordon gave a ‘word’ one week, that started “Thus saith the Lord, ‘I love you my children, and have nothing against you, as far as I know…’” We decided he was prophesying ‘in the flesh’ and he stuck to his more usual ‘word’ after that incident: “Thus saith the Lord, ‘I love you my children and I am going to do a New Thing among you…’”

If those bits of Lego in the cushion are beginning to bother you, by the way, do take them out through the little tear in the cushion cover and pop them into Charles’s sock which you’ll find down the side of the chair there. He left it a month ago after we had laid hands on his athlete’s foot at the monthly healing meeting. It didn’t get any better, although Daphne’s cat never had any more bowel problems after that particular prayer time.

Anyway, one thing led to another, and eventually the ‘buzz’ of these ‘soft’ housegroups began to wear off. Then I met a friend one Saturday morning in the Springs of Living Joy Christian Bookshop and Coffee House, and he told me about the Housegroup run by the Strictly Particulars on Sabbath Eve at 7pm - it had been started to try and attract young people who might otherwise be led astray by the world, the flesh and the Devil on a Saturday night. (There was a jazz band playing in the Town Hall every other week.) Well, some of my friends warned me about getting into the ‘hard’ stuff, but before I knew where I was I had been to a meeting on Infralapsarianism and Vatican II and couldn't wait till the next Saturday when we were going to share informally on Pseudepigrapha in the Intertestamental Period. It was all downhill from there. Soon I was on Premillenarianism and the Middle East, The Significance of the Tabernacle Tent Pegs for Today, and I even led a housegroup on Predestination. I think it was ‘meant’.

But after a while, just as the ‘soft’ had led to the ‘hard’ housegroups, so my search for that ever elusive Housegroup High led me to the exotic and bizarre. I am talking the Katmandu of ‘Caring & Sharing’ groups. I am talking ecumenical housegroups during Lent.

Churches Together in Neasden (CTN) had never been very strong, mainly because it was only the Quakers, the Methodists and the 8am 1662 Congregation from St Etheldredd’s that attended. In fact, it was I and some friends who the following year set up CAN (Churches Apart in Neasden) and inaugurated the Truly Reformed Allcomers Summer Housegroups (TRASH) which started in March and went on till October. I was so addicted by then that even TRASHCAN failed to flash a warning light to me. The CTN groups were just week-fillers really. We used to discuss books written by Catholic Abbots with sets of initials like OBJ or CSSM after their names. There were lots of long pauses and we lit candles and decided that it didn’t really matter what you believed, as long as you believed it sincerely; and of course you had to be nice. I knew there was something deeply wrong with these housegroups because we didn’t have coffee, we had sherry. And some of them smoked. So anyway, one week, when John, who was between churches at the time, said that all religions were basically the same, and said, “just name any two religions you like… they’re all the same really…” I said “Christian Science and Melanesian Frog Worship.” The rest of the group thought I was very narrow-minded and Zöe pointed out that Mary Baker Eddy had kept pet frogs as a child. They didn’t like the way I kept dragging the Bible into things either.

When they introduced a ‘new’ chorus one week - “kum bi ya, my Lord” - I abandoned CTN as a lost cause. But it was a springboard for TRASH and soon I and a group of like-minded individuals from different churches were meeting in housegroups almost every evening. I didn’t realise it then, but in reality I was getting TRASHED every night.

If you want to use my housegroup ‘bathroom’ by the way, it’s at the top of the stairs. You can’t miss it, and if you do, you will stumble into a room with resentful looking teenagers in it, with earphones on, who will give you a ‘just you dare try and have an I’m-really-interested-in-young-people conversation, and we’ll smoke our pot in front of you and see if you tell our parents’ sneer. The light switch for the bathroom is in the airing cupboard. The obvious switch outside the bathroom door will turn the living room lights out, so we know when to laugh and shout up to you where the switch is. And I think you’ll find that the key in the bathroom door doesn’t quite turn. But it does make a lot of noise, and if you should manage to turn it, you will only be able to unlock it by putting your shoulder under the door handle and forcing the whole door up on its hinges. Someone will probably have to shout those instructions through the bathroom door to you while we’re saying the grace together. There’s a knack to flushing the loo. If you don’t catch it with another twist of the handle just a second after the initial turn, then you have to wait for the cistern to fill again. It’s a very slow filler, so probably I’ll send someone up to shout through the door “Are you alright?”.

As you can imagine, trying to support a habit like TRASH was very expensive and demanding. In the end, I even sold my guitar to pay for coffee and digestives. I knew I was out of control when I sent out a prayer letter to friends ‘looking to the Lord for support for my Neasden-wide ministry…’ But it wasn’t just the financial burden, it was the demands on my imagination and the group’s own giftings that led to my ultimate demise. Here’s a typical evening.

Arrive at 7pm for 8.30pm.
Coffee & digestives.
Move into a time of open notices.
Welcome latecomers.
Discuss who should open in prayer.
Welcome latecomers.
Sing choruses. (Tricky without the guitar, but fortunately Donna had a real gift for the gazoo, and she was only 16. Later we were to discover the freedom of Kendrick Karaoke tapes.)
Alan leads the next in his 15 week series on “Skin Diseases in Leviticus”. (We all assure him that his face is looking a lot better now and that 17 is a difficult age.)
Joyce arrives and apologises for her lateness (she does this every week). (She had a divine appointment with a man on the 39 bus whose dog had just died and who had been wondering about re-incarnation. She was able to share with him everything that Donald had told us the week before about Ecclesiastes and Tibetan Tantric practice. He had been very interested and said he would give Buddhism serious consideration. Doesn’t God work in mysterious ways?)
Alan says he has to go home because he has no lights on his bike. (Although I notice that Neasden Wanderers are on Match of the Day.)
Move into a time of open prayer. (We focus on Alan’s face and the man on the 39 bus. Jeanette isn’t here tonight so we skip praying for her aunt’s bunions just this one week.)
Discuss who should close in prayer.
Coffee & digestives. (Chocolate digestives if it was someone’s birthday, and it usually was.)
Continue fellowshipping informally with a Summer Ripeness Worship Cassette in the background.

Of course, not every evening was as exciting as this. But I think this gives you a tantalising flavour of what housegroups can be like. I’ve not gone into too much salacious detail as you might end up being drawn into my spiral of housegroup degradation. (Although I can’t help mentioning the inverted catering pyramid. Each week, the host and hostess try to present a more lavish and yet ‘casual’ spread of refreshments than the people who catered the previous week. So you start with the traditional coffee and digestives and three months later you’re snacking on venison vol-au-vents, crème brûlée tarts and non-alcoholic piña colada.)

I only understood the true extent of my dependency when one memorable evening the meeting was at my place, and nobody turned up. (I was so out of touch and had ‘lost it’ to such a degree that I had not even realised that Neasden Wanderers were in a Cup replay at home.) I found myself saying to Trevor McDonald at the end of News At Ten “thank you for sharing that.” I was shaking and in a cold sweat. When I asked the continuity announcer to close in prayer after the National Anthem, she didn’t, and I knew I had become that Housegroup Junkie I had always despised. I desperately needed help.

The Prayer Warriors, Elsie and Mabel, unknown to me, had been praying for me all this time. They had a friend, Arthur Pasty, who founded Capernaum Re-Roofing Ministries (remember that disastrous housegroup in Mark 2?) He ran a self-help meeting for housegroup junkies at Gadarene Grange. It was very informal and really just a time for open sharing with other addicts. But there was one big difference. We had to completely ignore one another. You’d sit there and say things like “I’d just like to share how I’m feeling…” and no one would look at you. Or Arthur would say, “And what do you think of that, Linda?” and Linda would have to keep polishing her nails. There was no coffee or digestives and Arthur would deliberately not close in prayer. We had Pastor Pasty’s telephone number and could ring him at any time of the evening if we felt a housegroup coming on.

Of course, they say you’re never really cured. I still kept using “really” and “just” and I had to keep out of any groups in homes involving 6 people or more, otherwise I started sharing uncontrollably. I used to miss the closeness and warmth that the housegroup gave, but I discovered that rush-hour on the Northern Line seemed to meet those needs. Last month my nephew had a gazoo for his birthday, and I found myself involuntarily closing my eyes and lifting up my head with a beatific smile, hands aloft, as he played ‘Old McDonald had a Farm’.

Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering why I was at Richard & Dawn’s housegroup tonight. Well, we had an itinerant evangelist in town last week leading a Neasden-wide Name It And Claim It Celebration. When he said there was a man in the tent with a secret sin that involved other people, I just really knew he was speaking to me. I went forward, had a spirit of Small Congregations cast out of me by one of the ministry team (Daphne, actually) and I’ve never looked back since . (That’s because I hurt my neck as I fell over.) I was spectacularly healed of my addiction.

Would anyone like to close in prayer?

A chapter in Housegroups, Crossway, 1996