Jeff Noon

I was already a fan of Jeff Noon from his Vurt books, but it took me a while to check out his more recent work. I was thinking it would feel more different since these are essentially detective novels. But much to my delight, this one was as strange and surreal as Noon's earlier work. It really hits a sweet spot where you're not going to get lost in the weirdness but you're not going to get bored either. This is not your typical detective story. I'm excited to continue the series because show more from the reviews I've seen, things only get stranger from here. show less

I started to review this book a couple of times and really struggled. The writing and language was incredibly evocative and immersed me in the bizarre gritty world where time is arbitrary and there is a city half in perpetual daylight, half in perpetual night, and divided by an unruly dangerously wild, fog-shrouded world of Dusk.

At the same time, since it so clearly existed in some fantastic offshoot of "the real world" my mind kept struggling to make any kind of sense of how the whole thing show more worked. There was no science fiction unobtanium device powering individual times. There was no fantasy wizards did it explanation. It just was. It might even be simply a collective belief system, as arbitrary and illusory as hours and time zones, except that each person picks their own, and switches between them at the whims of capitalism and hedonism.

I finally just had to accept the world on its own terms, exactly the way the residents of the city do. Somewhere outside "normality" exists, but not here and no one is forced to be here and not there. The answer to "why" is "because". Once I did that the story just worked. It probably helped that Nyquist, the protagonist, isn't really at home in a world of arbitrary timelines either.

John Nyquist is easily recognizable as the stereotype noir detective (pun probably entirely deliberate by the author). He's a misfit outsider struggling with his own problems, grasping for any kind of solid answer to give himself purpose and stability. He's given a case to close, but definitely not to solve, and of course he can't not solve it. The need for some truth takes him through alcohol, kidnapping, murder, greed, politics and suppressed family secrets to end up more-or-less right back where he started.

If you like Phillip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Miguel Vargas, and you can accept the world of Nocturna/Dayzone on its own terms this is the book for you. 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

This is a hell of a book - sucks you in from the beginning and spits you out after a rollercoster ride through several layers of reality. One of the best books I've read in a while.

On the surface this is a story about an adict's quest to find his lost sister. Underneath it deals with some quite interesting topics like reality denial and addiction, incest, strong father figures, the role of authorities, coming of age...

The prose is somewhat cryptic with a unique lingo throughout the book and show more the whole setting is not very accessible and remains mysterious which worked nicely for me and added a lot to my feeling of immersion. The book is certainly not easy to read but there is enough action going on to keep you entertained until the end. It certainly worked for me - missed my train station to work twice. There is a bit of porn-ish material with transhumans in the end; I thought it ok but it might put some people off.

Overall a book I cannot recommend highly enough, entertaining, intelligent and powerful. Read it and be careful, be very, very careful... show less