Publications > Scream City > Scream City Issue #1 > Falling Out of Cars by Chris Amies

Is there a connection between Manchester and Science Fiction? Away from the dominance of London and the south, is a new language more likely to flourish or required to? It seems likely, with authors such as Anthony Burgess, Alan Garner, Ian McDonald and Gwyneth Jones all hailing from the Manchester area and rewriting the fictional map in their own ways, and in all three cases with the help of music whether popular or classical. And in the early 1990s a new publishing house, Ringpull, introduced us to an author with a style all his own ...

In his first novel, Vurt, (1993) Jeff Noon, formerly guitarist with Manicured Noise, introduces us to a Manchester where the drug of choice is immersion in a virtual world, delivered by feathers placed down the throat. Some feathers (the blue) are benign: but others, the yellow, can kill. Vurt is a chase thriller set in a violent world where dogmen roam and shadowcops patrol the streets, where in Bottletown the streets are carpeted with broken glass, and where the old divisions between beast and human, real and virtual (hence, 'Vurt') are thinning.

It's a book with drugs in, but Noon - who was born in Droylsden in 1957 and strongly denies being any part of a generation that would involve Irvine Welsh - spares us the obligatory drug hell. Junkies are boring. All they care about is where the next fix is coming from. But what if the drug, or the feather, actually got you into another world, and that world was objectively real, made so by the Vurt feather? And if, to go further, objects could be lost inside the Vurt, if they were swapped for an object of equal worth?

Hence the Thing that the Stash riders, up until then a happy-go- lucky crew of youngsters living Moss Lane East, have in their van. The Thing just turned up and in exchange the Vurt took Scribble's sister / lover Desdemona; now all Scribble and his friends want is to swap them back. All the police want is to do them in. And somewhere, retreated into the Vurt, is the game's controller, the Game Cat.

So Vurt becomes the Orpheus story, with Scribble - he's a DJ sometimes known as Inky MC - going into Hell to retrieve his lost love. The language isn't quite as unleashed yet though there are already plenty of jokelets: naturally a robocrusty (a half-robot being with a dog on a string) has his hair in droidlocks .... Turdsville, where the dogs live, is a particularly nasty invention, a dog equivalent of Bottletown, surrounded by waste. Right from the start Noon is obviously fascinated by boundaries, by the edges of things, by the way that one state can slide into another. The world of Vurt allows five basic states of being: human, dog, vurt, shadow, robot. Then there are second-level beings - hybrids between two of the five basic states - who are generally accepted as being superior to the five. Pure, goes an often repeated slogan, Is Poor. (and third- and fourth-level beings, while rare so far, are even better than second- level).

Vurt's protagonists, while not necessarily from poor backgrounds, are alienated by unfriendly family lives - a common Noon trope is the absent or abusive father - or by their choice of life. Jaz, a principal character in Noon's third novel Nymphomation (1997) is British- Asian, and Vurt contains a remarkable sequence where Our Heroes evade the cops by diverting through an Eid celebration. Scribble himself is an outsider to outsiders by being apparently pure human but having within him, though he tries to deny it, a sliver of vurt, which betrays itself by flecks of gold in his eyes, and by his ability to go into the Vurt without needing a feather.

The classical Mythology references turn up again in the second novel, Pollen (1995), the story of what happens when the whole world gets hayfever. Plant life tries to replicate itself by attaching to humans. It's also a tale of two taxi drivers and the search for the primal map, and a retelling - made explicit in places - of the stories of Persephone and of John Barleycorn.

"5.30 am. Somewhere along the Hyde Road.

Kracker turns right onto a greasy, overgrown path towards the Ardwick Industrial Estate."

"Columbus has the city spread out all around him, radiating from the centre of his brain. This is the Hive of Manchester."

After Pollen came Nymphomation a kind of prequel to the other two. Riffing on the late 20th century British obsesssion with the national Lottery it postulates a Manchester where betting on dominoes, via a game very similar to the Lottery, has become an overwhelming mania. The city is abuzz with advertising 'blurbflies', squashy flying robots that hacker / waiter Jaz dissects in an attempt to subvert the domino domination.

The substance that he finds in the flies is a universal lubricator - he markets it as Vaz, and by the time of Vurt, which takes place about fifty years later, "Sometimes it feels like the whole world is smeared with Vaz." Huge trucks of the stuff thunder down the motorways in Pollen. Nymphomation can be read separately from the others, but although it takes place earlier, it has more resonance if you have read Vurt first. Then you realise who the little girl, Celia, grows up to be; and you understand the last line of Nymphomation: "The young boy puts the feather into his mouth."

Nymphomation also starts each chapter (each chapter representing

one weekly game of the Dominos) with a burst of experimental language, which some readers may find alienating but none of it is nonsense. Like James Joyce or Lewis Carroll, Jeff Noon never wrote a sentence of nonsense in his life - not one that actually meant nothing. "Domination day, lucky old Bonechester. The naked populace, making foreplay to the domiviz, bone-eyed and numberfucked as the opening credits came in a shower of pips." ('Game 42').

Talking of Lewis Carroll, Noon also mentions Alice in each one of his books; and this comes to the fore in Automated Alice, a curious little pendant to the Vurt novels as well as an addition to the Alice books. It's the illustrated story of a little girl who follows her escaping parrot into a strange land where human- animal hybrids hold sway. Quite likely it's a children's book from the Vurtiverse.

There are newer books such as Needle in the Groove but for now I leave it with the Vurt books.

You know that only the good Gumbo can take you this far .... (Pollen) --

Manicured Noise came from the south Manchester artistic scene of the late 70's that was just too bohemian to rock out. Author David Nolan explains. Trust Howard Devoto to put a bony finger on it. When I asked him why he quit the Buzzcocks – after playing eight gigs and releasing one E.P. – his reply managed to sum of the whole Manchester / bohemian / post-punk scene in one withering epithet. 'I was not,' he said, 'fantastically taken, I suppose, with the aesthetic of it all.'

Manicured Noise, Ludus, The Negatives, Magazine. All part of the scene kick started by two performances by the Sex Pistols at the city's Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976. Devoto organised the first one and played bottom of the bill at the second. Musicians, artists and bohos intertwined by geography, personal relationships and a general feeling that this shouty punk rock thing was all a bit too much of an effort, dear.

It works like this. Concentrate. There'll be a test later.

Howard goes out with Linder Mulvey. Howard and Linder are frequent visitors to Paul Morley's house in Stockport. The Negatives rehearse there. So do Manicured Noise. Arthur Cadman and Philip Tolman of Manicured Noise form Ludus with Linder. Tony Wilson was a pal. Paul Morley writes about Devoto and Magazine in the NME. 'We used to write about him as being the most important man alive,' says Morley now.

Morley also uses NME space to big up the band rehearsing in his back room in Stockport. 'Current musician's favourites Manicured Noise – ask Vic Goddard, The Banshees, Wire what they think of M. Noise,' he wrote in 1978. Linder does the artwork for the debut Magazine album. And for the Buzzcocks. And creates a menstrual egg timer which is given the number of FAC 8 for Factory. And wanders around cemeteries with her new bezzie mate Morrissey. Shame she couldn't work her magic on The Negatives.

All very wafty and bohemian. All very fabulous. All very 1978.

I Swear I Was There: The Gig That Changed The World published by IMP Books on 4 June 2006.

Vurt (1993) ISBN 0312141440 Winner 1994 Arthur C. Clarke Award
Pollen (1995) ISBN 051717667X A sequel to Vurt
Automated Alice (1996) ISBN 0552999059
Nymphomation (1997) ISBN 0552999067 A prequel to Vurt
Needle in the Groove (2000) ISBN 0552999199
Falling Out of Cars (2002) ISBN 1899598162

Further information

[JC note 2019: both additional information URLs quoted in the original print version are now either completely dead or hijacked for other purposes. However, the Jeff Noon Wikipedia page [->] is as good a reference as any.]