Jeff Noon

This odd, fascinating novel has a lot of the standard setup of a noirish detective story: a burned-out private eye takes on the case of a missing young woman and becomes entirely too invested in her for his own good. But nothing else about this story is standard. It's set in a bizarre city in a version of the 1950s that never was, a city half of which is constantly illuminated by a sky made of glaring light bulbs and half perpetually covered in artificial night. A city that is a jumble of show more shifting, fragmented time zones, where time itself behaves strangely.

None of this makes any real sense, even internal sense, except in a dreamlike sort of way that just gets more and more dreamlike as the novel progresses. But I'm amazed by how well it works. Jeff Noon does a great job of bringing this impossible world vividly to life, despite suffering from an annoying stylistic quirk that kept threatening to throw me out of the story. (Seriously, man, there is a reason why your English teachers tried to warn you about overusing the passive voice!)

Mind you, it's entirely possible that the reason it worked so well for me, and why I enjoyed it as much as I did, has a lot to do with my own relationship to time. I've worked rotating shifts for many, many years, and I know all too well the feeling of shifting constantly between time zones without really going anywhere, the feeling of living on a clock time different from that of those around you, the feeling of not being tied to the cycles of the sun. I also know the feeling -- the deeply surreal, disconnected, timeless feeling -- that comes when the clock inside your brain finally just gives up and stops completely. And this... Well, I think this basically is that feeling translated into book form.

Rating: 4/5, although I'm tempted to rate it half a star higher just for how powerful that sense of recognition was for me. show less

As someone who has loved Lewis Carroll's Alice stories since he was a very young boy I must say that I found Jeff Noon's amusing novel, Automated Alice both clever and funny, very funny. The whimsy begins with computermites and seems to be infinite before the book is over.
Poor Alice is alone, bored, and sleepy in her Great Aunt Ermintrude's house in rainy Manchester, but she is quickly swept away into another world as she follows Whippoorwill, "a green-and-yellow-plumed parrot with a bright show more orange beak", up and away into the mechanism of an old grandfather clock. The reader, along with Alice, never has a chance to look back.
If I have any complaint with the novel, it is that like a Viennese chocolate torte it was too sweet and before the end of the book my head began to feel like it does when I have overdosed on sugar. Curiously the capriciousness speeds along at a pace which is fast and faster, to the point where I began to feel my mind spinning. It reminded me of the Red Queen's admonition to Alice : “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” (Through the Looking Glass).
It is all tremendously amusing when you find yourself laughing out loud on almost every page and you are mystified by the circumlocutions and wordplay that is positively preternatural. This is a book for all who love puns, riddles, titillating moments filled with uncommon literary references that lend the text a postmodern sheen. Some call this novel an instance of cyberpunk fiction, but I merely suggest that all who dare explore the world of speculative fiction will find this a delightful novel. show less

How abstract are you willing to go? If you're not scared of a little meta then this book is for you. This book takes an LSD trip and combines it with an ever lasting Virtual reality trip. Drugs are administered through feathers, which you almost swallow. That's pretty much the most concrete one can get describing the contents of this novel.

The plot revolves around a writer (Scribble) who loses his sister in an out of control virtual reality drug trip. In exchange he ends up with a being show more from that reality. In the rest of the book the main character tries to rescue his sister by trading back the alien for his sister. Reading this feels like being chased by sensory overload, as if that could be a monster hunting you.

Vurt is often compared to works by William Gibson, but unlike Gibson Jeff Noon actually provides assistance here and there to help you understand the maddening world of the protagonist. It takes effort reading this novel but it's worth it. Once you get used to the language, the character confusions and the reality stretching world descriptions, you're in for quite a trip.

If you can get a hold of a library edition then try that first, although the book is good, it's definitely an acquired taste. show less

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, show more 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. show less