Nymphomation
By Jeff Noon
Black Swan Books
Available at Powerbooks
Somewhere between the wordplay of Lewis Carroll and the wired-up visions of William Gibson stands British writer Jeff Noon, busily pushing the envelope of cyberpunk fiction.
Noon has written five novels, each set in Manchester or London, and each developing his unique version of a world seen through a glass darkly. There’s always sex, drugs, and rock and roll in his books; indeed, most of Noon’s characters spend their lives seeking some kind of diversion from the mess the planet’s become.
His latest offering, Needle in the Groove, almost manages to approximates rock music, or at least the lyric sheet of your favorite CD. Told in zippy, unpunctuated sentences/separated by backslashes/to suggest lines of rock poetry/like this, Needle in the Groove follows the rise and fall of Glam Damage, an underground Manchester band seeking a bass player.
Elliot, the bassman, quickly learns Glam Damage is using "liquid dub poetics," a new but controversial audio technology, to remix their first single, "Scorched Out For Love." The song is recorded onto a small liquid-filled globe and then shaken up for each separate mix, like those kitschy snow globe paperweights. With ferocious new bass lines added to their DJ/drums/vocal mix, Glam Damage are set to hit the charts…
Until someone in the band gets the idea of smoking the mix.
What follows is a journey through the inside of music, where samples and riffs co-mingle freely with fantasies and memories. It’s a radical technique that Noon pulls off seemingly with ease, living up to the book’s back-cover blurb: "If music were a drug, where would it take you?"
oh yeah, I play the bass/the bass plays me/the four-stringed, thick-bellied monster, you know, the one that eats all other noises alive
and I’ve gone walking down these four strings most every hour of every day, of every year and every busted heartbeat, just trying to get along to where the last riff kisses the dark/the subsonic groove we call it
and finally getting to reach the end of it/the end of the last tune, and what I find down there, in the grooves of the soul/and how the bass ain’t got four strings at all/just when you think you’re getting a grip of it
how it’s got these other strings, invisible like/ below the low, and deepcore/you gotta dive down underload to get a finger on them/and watch yourself doing it, watch yourself
those strings can pull you under, believe me
There’s little punctuation in Noon’s writing, but Needle in the Groove hits a vein of headlong prose that outdoes other, more epic efforts at capturing the rock life – Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet, for example. He has great fun filling his alternate-universe Manchester with streets and places named after famous rock bands from the steel town: Oasis Lane, Joy Division Terrace, Morrissey Gardens, The Fall Parkway. And beneath the speed-paced, blurry narrative, Noon has a steady finger on British rock history: from skiffle, to British Invasion pop, to ‘70s glam, through punk and into DJ-sampled music.
Strip back the linguistic stunts, though, and Noon is a humanist, perhaps even a moralist, at heart. Noon splashed onto the scene in 1993 with Vurt, a look at an alternate future where criminal teen gangs, robocops and aliens partake of the latest brand of artificial escapism – a virtual reality reached through the aid of feathers classified into six illegal categories.
The feathers are used to "tickle" the user into an artificial environment – something as innocuous as a lush, tropical dreamscape or as potentially dangerous as English Voodoo.
In the later Nymphomation (1997), Noon imagines an industrial city where a weekly government lottery game is king (kind of like the Philippines, in a way), where mechanical "blurbflies" shout out advertising in the streets, homeless people live in vertical holes dug in the ground, and the average person lusts after a matching "domino" for Friday night’s lotto drawing in order to gain "a million lovelies."
Domino Day, lucky old Manchester. The next Friday, game forty-one. Native gamblers, stuck superlove crazy to the televiz, goggle-eyed and numberholic as the credits came in colours. Tango the dominoes, forever changing. Pipsville, dig those chances! Bulging air, message heavy. Blurbflies in the a swarm, singing streets alive. Madverts. Dream to play! Play to win! Win to dream!
This satire of government-sponsored gaming gets even more interesting when a group of mathematically-gifted hackers discovers a process whereby random numbers copulate like mad, creating new combinations and outcomes in a process known as "nymphomation." In the best cyberpunk fashion, Noon pits the flawed rebels against the prevailing social order: there’s a hacker named Jazir who serves beef curry by night; a certain DJ Dopejack; and a "bleeder" named Daisy Love, whose DNA allows her to predict domino combinations.
Noon’s cyber-universe is decked out with sly Lewis Carroll touches, suggesting a new language, à la Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. Like Philip K. Dick’s bleak but hysterical futurescapes, advertising permeates every facet of life in Nymphomation – the police force is funded (and outfitted) by Whoomphy Burgers, for instance – and it’s often hard to tell where life ends and technology begins.
And maybe that’s Jeff Noon’s final objective, after all: to find the human soul buried amid the miles of sensors and cyber-connections, the spinning numbers and spinning records, and to locate the heart that continues to beat at the end of all these technological rabbit-holes created by man.