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Summary: Take the trip - and do not look back!
Review: Noon will take you through a wild journey filled with every pain and pleasure you could imagine. All you have to do is tickle your throat with the right feather, sail down this river of cyberpunk, and try not to jerk your self out. Once you finish Vurt you will run to the closest Vurt-u-mart (or dealer) just to bring yourself back.
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Summary: What is going on?
Review: Is it possible to embrace an incestuous protagonist? To side with a gang of cop-killers? To care about people who are rootless and careless and directionless? If Jeff Noon is doing the storytelling it is possible. Furthermore, the world Noon creates is so compellingly twisted and mysterious that the sociopathy of the Stash Riders is made to seem almost heroic. That's the mark of a helluva storyteller.
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Summary: One of the best
Review: I bought this book on the strength of winning an Arthur C. Clark award and the customer reviews on Amazon.com.
It didn't work for me. The characters were thin and the plot was plodding and stiff.
I will consider more carefully the recomendations on Amazon.com.
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Summary: A Feather Full of Dreams
Review: "A young boy puts a feather into his mouth..."From the first sentence of the book, I was drawn in. I forced myself to read only one chapter at a time, to actually consider what I'd read and let it sink in, and that made this book that much richer. To me, it heralded back to Clockwork Orange. The Stash Riders (made up of Scribble, Beetle, Mandy, and Bridget) have their own vocabulary grown from the world they inhabit - where feathers can hold their fondest dreams or worst nightmares, where the worst poison comes from dreamsnakes, where pure is poor, and where shadowcops lurk above every all-night Vurt-U-Want. Scribble is a young man, not so out of the ordinary, who wants nothing more than to have his sister back again. That want drives him to a destiny he'd not even considered, gaining and losing almost everything in the process. I'm enamoured with this book. It stays on my nightstand so I can hear Scribble tell his story whenever I want. Let Jeff Noon take you into his tangibly ethereal world.
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Summary: The most vision-inducing novel I have ever encountered
Review: The colors on the cover of Jeff Noon's "Vurt" are something of a clue to what lies inside: a technicolor dreamworld where the pace of life approaches that of a video game. But we're not in Kansas anymore from the opening pages: the world Noon spins is one of robo-crusties, shadowgoths, fleshcops, and, of course, the feathers. The basic plot is a little convoluted, but it basically involves an underground culture similar to the drug culture today (I have heard that Noon drew on the Manchester drug/rave scene to create his hollow lanscapes of urban decay and drugged-out escapism). In this culture there is a group of "stash riders", our heroes, who lounge around tripping on feathers which send you into a virtual reality when they are placed in the mouth. Scribble, the protagonist, is trying to go far enough into the "vurt" to find answers about the disappearance of his sister. More than any other book out there, "Vurt" deserves to be made into a movie. Its insanely intense visuals would just now be able to be translated onscreen, thanks to computer technology. But at the same time it is fun to imagine your own versions of pivotal scenes, such as someone dying by melting into luminous fractals. The pacing of the story is so breakneck that it almost leaves you breathless to close the book at the end. And after Noon's hilarious descriptions of some of the people and things in the book, I have very detailed images of them in my mind. I recommend this book to anyone interested in cyberpunk, the drug culture,, or movies like "Strange Days" and "The Thirteenth Floor".
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