For hundreds of pages, it seems he can do no wrong with the plight we're in. For most of its length. Idoru is the best novel William Gibson has ever written about the world we're entering daily, dense and remorseless and lit from inside: and even its final pages—Gibson's main weakness has always been soupy endings—are certainly no worse than the terminal shenanigans that, like some berserk pinball machine, shook Neuromancer to bits. That novel made Gibson just famous; Idoru cements that fame.

The secret of the new book, as with so many other novels about the world that seem to tell the truth about things, may be love. It was the same with Neuromancer, after all the dips and doodles of plot; at the heart of its cyberpunk vision is the lure of a dark deep engulfing world that the author makes us believe in, and long for too. Idoru is a love song to Tokyo. Despite his quite astonishingly grim knowledge of the costs of the choked virtual-reality buzz-saw labyrinths we're even now sticking our heads into, Gibson clearly loves his version of a 21st century whose inside heart is Tokyo, where it is never outdoors.

It is, throughout his work, the inside of things that counts. Gibson is a true claustrophile, a true lover of the neon-walled, intricate, inward-looking, information-dense urban world that is about to become our main habitat, a year or so hence. The various protagonists of Idoru, typically, cast themselves headlong into searches (or flights) that carry them from the outdoors (or big empty spaces) into small, dense, dark, crowded venues. One of the few quiet moments of the tale takes place in “probably the smallest freestanding commercial structure” in the world, a bar only a few feet square, its surfaces covered with sepia postcards, its shelves filled with dozens of bottles of personalized whiskey. The immediate effect on most readers—as on this reviewer—might be a sense of choking proximity, but very soon the text makes it very clear that Gibson's ultimate intention is to convey comfort. Reality is in the breath of detail.

So, too, the main story. Netrunner Laney's particular skill comes from an attention deficit, which allows him to apprehend patterns of significant information when they are unveiled to him digitally, on computer screens. Working for Slitscan—a corporation which uses his skill to generate tabloid news items about the famous—he detects a potential suicide in the breath of detail about a woman's life and attempts to keep her from killing herself. He is summarily dismissed. He takes a new job in Tokyo, where employees of the famed rock singer Rez are frantic with worry about his plans to wed a beautiful personality-construct hologram—or “Idoru”—named Rei Toei. They hope Laney will be able to help them understand what seems to be an act of insanity.

In Tokyo he is chaperoned by Keith Blackwell, a vast but user-friendly ex-villain who has become Rez's faithful keeper, and whose function is therefore very similar to that of Magersfontein Lugg, the vast excon who adopts Albert Campion in Margery Allingham's famous detective series and keeps him safe. A Gibsonesque soupy ending, in which knight errant Laney survives against all odds, is clearly in the offing.

Everyone, in fact, survives: Laney, Rez, Rei Toei, and a 14-year-old fan from Seattle who has unwittingly smuggled an illegal nanotech device and McGuffin into Japan and who has also been chased in vain by relays of hi-tech villains. It's all a bit softish, as a story. But the underlying vision remains whole.

As the novel proceeds to its feel-good close, Rez and Rei Toei embark on an “alchemical marriage,” a spiritual union through which true understanding of the universe may be achieved. As Laney has perceived, Rei Toei is profoundly “nodal.” She is so dense with the catnip breath of detail that he must turn away, lest she blind him. For she focuses the flow of true meaning in a world bereft of mere sincerity; she is a core of burning—and brand-new—authentic being.

Rez and Rei Toei also begin to construct a nanotech-crafted organic city which will duplicate the MUD (multi-user domain) electronic version of Kowloon Walled City which has featured in the tale, and which will grow indefinitely like a hive, a buzzing of innumerable bees of information, each inhabitant safe in one of a million very tiny rooms, each of them lined with whiskey bottles maybe. It will be an inside city, the city of William Gibson's dreams.

For Idoru is a prophecy, a prayer for information baths that never drown the supplicant. It is also a text on paper, beautifully written, dense with metaphors that open the eyes to the new, dreamlike, intensely imagined, deeply plausible. It is a profoundly cunning advertisement for a world whose enclosed spaces—and infinite domains within the skull—we had better be prepared to join in wedlock. For Idoru is also a marriage song.