Offmessage

I’m a massive fan of Jeff Noon. There’s no getting away from it. From his early days with the massive cult sci-fi classics of Vurt and Pollen right through to his modern incarnation as rave generation literary theorist I’ve been captivated and motivated by his work. So, to say that I was looking forward to reading Falling Out Of Cars is a bit of an understatement.

To understand what’s going on with Jeff Noon’s books at the moment and to understand why he’s no longer writing books like Vurt and Pollen you have to have read (or at least got the gist of) his CobraLingus manifesto [overview]. He describes it himself as a way of applying the methods of dub reggae to writing - endlessly sampling remixing and resampling the text to produce a work both completely other yet strangely similar to the original piece. Think of it as a 90s version of William S Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s cut-up technique, but with a lot more style. Noon himself says that he first used the method in the chapter beginnings of Nymphomation, before going on to formalise it and use it for the entire of Needle In The Groove. In fact, since Nymphomation Noon has found it hard to leave this method alone…

Which gets us neatly back to Falling Out Of Cars. This is Noon’s road trip. Through another one of his trademark disintegrating worlds the narrator and a rag taggle band of followers/helpers/hinderers attempt to make sense of the strange mission they’ve been given and the wasting disease that is affecting everyone, themselves included. The disease affects the mind, causing its sufferers to slip into a trancelike state, becoming further and further lost to the outside world. What is unclear is the cause, or even real effect, of the disease; what is clear is that there are drugs available to control the effects, but they seem few and far between, and that mirrors and photographs seem to be at the very heart of whatever is going on.

It’s a novel of language, as with so much of Noon’s work. He has written a beautiful book with some tremendously evocative moments and some extraordinarily rhythmic language - there are moments where you are left staring at the paragraph you’ve just read and others where you are driven on by the pulsating beat, almost unable to stop reading. What he hasn’t written, however, is a book that makes any sense. At all. The plot is incredibly simple (almost non-existent) and the way the book ends is simply an ending - there is no great coming together of the strands, no denoument, not even really a satisfactory conclusion to the narrator’s tale. What we have instead is a couple of hundred pages of thought provoking poetic text with little purpose or direction.

And this is where being a Noon trainspotter either helps or hinders. You can clearly see the influence of the CobraLingus method throughout the book. I spent a large time reading the thing trying to spot the source texts, picking up whichever ‘gate’ he was using at the time. It kind of spoilt it for me, to be honest, but then I’m not sure I would have got any more out of it if I didn’t know what was going on. For me Nymphomation was one of the finest pieces of contemporary writing I’d read at the time; he had truly captured the mental state of the times, and the powering rhythm of the writing combined with his trademark confusion of modern imagery made it one of the most striking books of the 90s. Since then the short stories (Pixel Juice) and novel (Needle in the Groove) were difficult, and only brilliant in flashes. Falling Out Of Cars is like that. There are moments that stop you dead in your tracks but there are unfortunately more moments where you really wish you knew what was actually going on.

Along with the publication of the CobraLingus manifesto there was a brief statement by his publisher that he was “not a systems writer.” The fear clearly would be that, like Naked Lunch (and even more so the cut-up trilogy) from Burroughs people would think that Noon would start to write by numbers, that the system would rule his writing rather than his creativity. I didn’t have that fear at the time, but I’m afraid that I do now. Falling Out Of Cars is so clearly a CobraLingus text and so clearly little else that it’s hard to really enjoy it….

So. If you’re new to Jeff Noon you should be reading Vurt, Pollen and Nymphomation right now. Seriously. Right Now. You’ll love them. If you’ve read those three and nothing else why not try out CobraLingus next and then pick anything that was published after Nymphomation - unfortunately one will probably be enough. Personally I think that the CobraLingus method lends itself more to poetry than to prose, as is shown by the examples in the CobraLingus book. Hopefully Noon himself will realise this and do two things I’d really like to see - publish a book of poetry that uses it and publish a novel that doesn’t.