Jeff Noon

This book had sat unread on my shelves for an unfeasible number of years. I approached it with some trepidation because what I remembered of its acquisition was based around what a lot of people with tastes rather different to mine had said about it. This included that it was raw, and new, and streetwise. I was prepared to not be impressed.

Was I wrong about that!

We are in near future Manchester (a city I know slightly), in a scuzzy flat with the Stash Riders - the Beetle, Bridget, Scribble, Mandy and the Thing From Outer Space. Their lives revolve around acquiring and experiencing the street drug of choice - Vurt, absorbed into the body via drug-impregnated feathers which you place in your mouth. If two or more people use the same feather at the same time, they experience the same dream-world together.

Scribble lost his sister in the dreamworld some time back, and he's trying to rescue her. This results in an urban odyssey that includes robocrusties, dogrock musicians, dreamsnakes, drug designers and the police (both real and virtual). There is a lot of hallucinatory adventure and plenty of action. The result is similar to Philip Dick's A Scanner Darkly, but without the major identity crises. Also, the characters' degree of stonedness doesn't seem quite as extreme as PKD's, though the book is written from Scribble's p.o.v., recounting the story some twenty years later.

The characters are vivid. Are they all likeable? That depends on the reader; personally, I don't find it necessary to like or relate to the characters in a book; there are no guarantees about who you will like or will like you in real life, so why should books be any different? And in real life, there are all possible combinations of how much you like people, and vice versa. Sometimes you find people who you would expect to like, but just fail to connect with on a basic level for no apparent reason. Other times, you meet people who you first intensely dislike, but come to respect because of one quality or another that they possess. Sometimes, you start out in conflict but work through that to friendship. It's called life. This book is rather like that.

But I digress.

Manchester is a pretty big character in this book, and Mancunians will appreciate that. Although written thirty years ago, the book has aged well; there is only one telephone in the novel, and it's a landline. And there is a magazine in the novel that is frequently quoted from and referred to (and whose creator plays a part in the story), and you are free to think of it as a street newspaper, or a fanzine, or a website, or a feed - it doesn't matter which one, because it could be any or all or none of these things and the reader will get the idea. There's a bit of referencing 1980s British media personalities, one of whom is now definitely persona non grata.

The world of this book draws you in, just as the feathers of Vurt do. And I found myself wanting to read more, to the extent that I burned through this in two or three days. Vurt completely exceeded my expectations. I was expecting some angry, post-punk grunge writing with no finesse; I actually found sophisticated, energetic and inventive post-punk grunge writing of considerable quality.… (more)