Noon is endlessly inventive in this story. From a purely conceptual level, he succeeds brilliantly in constructing a macro- and micro-level environment that is vividly realized and full of surprising attributes. He is almost as good in creating a cast of bizarre yet sympathetic characters – Scribble the narrator with some bad serious bad karma; his mentor and half-crazed buddy The Beetle; Mandy the new girl with a bad attitude; Tristan the rasta-Vurtian whose dreadlocks are permanently braided into the matching hairdo of his girlfriend Suze; Twinkle the twelve year-old as tough as a roller derby queen; and my favorite, the Game Cat who knows all the secrets of virtual reality, and sometimes tosses out a helpful hint.
But Noon’s prose is as vivid as his characters. He has crafted his own crypto-punk-adelic style of writing, sort of like what Kerouac might have done if he had traveled a virtual road rather than a real highway. Noon invents his own hyped-up jargon, but it is close enough to what druggies and posers say in everyday life to make it seem all so real. His sentences are punchy, and move with a very distinctive rhythm. I can imagine this making a great audio-book – or a mega- movie.
Other hip sci-fi writers – William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Orson Scott Card – may be better known, but Noon’s name is not out-of-place in this group. At a time when most genre writers are re-heating the same left-overs, this author shows that there are new stories out there for authors brave and bold enough to seize them.
Modern day Luddites have often complained that virtual reality is like a drug. But in Jeff Noon’s novel Vurt , it is a drug, imbibed by means of feathers that the addicts use to tickle the back of their throats. Say “Aaaahhhhhh!’ and go on a journey to some elaborate and dream-like world – either by yourself, or (through sharing feathers) with your cronies.
Noon has constructed a whole Vurt culture and a hierarchy of feathers, some legal and easily obtained, others forbidden and almost impossible to find. At the highest level are the yellow feathers, both highly desirable and very dangerous. Many people never return from yellow feather trips, since the only was of getting out of its virtual reality is by winning the game it brings on, or die trying. But there are also many types of blue, silver and black feathers, each with their own quirks and qualities.