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Pattern Recognition is William Gibson's first novel set entirely in the present day, and it might be his most rewarding work since the Sprawl trilogy made him a household name in science fiction. Published in 2003, it trades the neon-soaked cyberspace of Neuromancer for a post-9/11 world of marketing firms, internet forums, and global corporate surveillance - and somehow manages to feel even more unsettling for it.

At its centre is Cayce Pollard, a freelance "coolhunter" whose near-oracular ability to judge whether a logo or brand will succeed in the marketplace is matched by an equally intense physical revulsion toward branding itself. Certain corporate mascots - the Michelin Man chief among them - trigger something close to an allergic reaction. She sands the logos off her clothing and wears deliberately anonymous garments, navigating the commercialised world like someone with a heightened sensitivity to radiation. It is an absurd conceit, but Gibson commits to it so fully that it becomes the novel's organising principle rather than a quirk. Cayce doesn't just see the cultural landscape differently - she feels it, and that vulnerability makes her a compelling point-of-view character.

Hired by the slippery Hubertus Bigend - head of the enigmatic marketing agency Blue Ant - Cayce is tasked with tracking down the creator of a series of mysterious film clips circulating online. The footage is short, haunting, and stripped of any identifying context. An obsessive online community has formed around it, dissecting each new fragment as it appears. The quest to find its maker sends Cayce from London to Tokyo to Moscow, drawing her into a web of corporate espionage, post-Soviet oligarchs, and intelligence operatives both active and retired. Threaded through it all is the ghost of her father - a Cold War security specialist who vanished in Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 2001.

The prose is exceptional. Gibson writes in a clipped, image-heavy style that captures the texture of early-2000s digital culture with startling precision - the intimacy of forum friendships, the low-level paranoia of browser histories, the way online communities fracture into factions and flame wars. His descriptions of London, Tokyo, and Moscow are vivid and grounded, establishing each city as a distinct sensory environment rather than a backdrop. If anything, the novel has aged better than it had any right to, its portrait of information overload and manufactured culture feeling more relevant now than when it was published.

Where Pattern Recognition falters slightly is in the mechanics of its plot. Structurally it is a quest narrative, and a fairly conventional one - find the MacGuffin, discover its origins, confront the forces aligned against you. The resolution wraps things up a touch too neatly, and Cayce occasionally remains more a collection of fascinating traits than a fully inhabited character. But for every minor shortcoming there is a flash of sharp insight, an image or observation that lingers well beyond its page.

This is Gibson at his most accessible and arguably his most emotionally engaged - a novel about grief, meaning, and the human compulsion to find signal in the noise. It is as relevant today as it was when it was written, which is perhaps the highest compliment a book set in the present tense can receive.