've taken an extreme, unusual journey to becoming a novelist," says British
novelist Jeff Noon as he sits in the café of San Francisco's Hotel Triton. A
photographer from the Chronicle hovers around our table, snapping
pictures. "I was a playwright for a long time, and I used to do a lot of other
things, like play in bands, did stand-up comedy, and I ended up working at this
bookstore. One day, a friend of mine who owned a small publishing company came up
to me while I was working and suggested I write a novel. So I went home that
evening and started writing Vurt. And I didn't plan a single thing. I just
started out...Mandy came out of the all-night Vurt-U-Want, clutching a bag of goodies.
...and let it go from there."
Ringpull Press released Vurt in England in 1993. Six months later, a
vacationing American literary agent found one copy of the book in an
English-language bookshop in Berne. He bought it on a chance, and after reading
the book, was so impressed that he immediately contacted Ringpull Press, bought
and sold the American rights to Crown Publishers in five days. Noon quit his job
at the bookstore as soon as he heard about the sale. Just a little over two years
later, Vurt is out in paperback from St. Martin's Press, Crown has
released its sequel, Pollen, and on both sides of the Atlantic (but
especially in America), Jeff Noon is being heralded as one of the best new voices
in science fiction.
"It's a complete surprise to me," he says, pointing out that he never
specifically intended to write a sci-fi novel. "The Americans see my books in a
much more alien way, more like science fiction than the British do, because both
books are packed with British cultural references, many of which Americans don't
get, so they're reading it in a slightly different way, and I think that's part
of why they're getting off on it as science fiction. In Britain I think these
books are seen as 'state-of-the-nation' novels, just exaggerated and made a bit
weird."
In other words, much of what American readers see as a gritty, cyberpunk future
is simply a reflection of the contemporary Manchester where Noon lives and which
serves as the foundation of the world in which his novels are set. Of course,
there are the hallucinogenic feathers, genetic hybrids of dogs and humans,
and giant pollen clouds to contend with, as well as elements borrowed from the
mythologies of several cultures, but the effect is much more like Anthony Burgess
or the more surreal passages of William S. Burroughs' writings than ordinary
science fiction. "I improvise and try to reach a state where my mind is totally
open to ideas, where I can shock myself and amaze myself," Noon says of his
writing process. Vurt, for example, was initially a stopgap, a word that
Noon was using instead of "virtual reality" until he could come up with a better
name; the substitute was so odd-sounding that it stuck. The idea of making Vurts
feathers came later. "I knew that I had to have a doorway through to this
dreamworld, so I wrote about ten pages and tried having the characters take pills
or use syringes, but none of those ideas were weird enough for me. And the idea
for the feathers just arrived in my head. 'Ok, it's a feather. What do they do
with it? They put it down their mouth.' Once I had that, a lot of ideas
followed." What makes the novels so effective is that the characters have a
strong sense of psychological validity to them; the reader believes in their
interactions and their personal motivations. And then they stick a feather in
their throats, and the reader has to trust Noon and make a leap of faith into the
Vurt world.
Meanwhile, Noon has already completed a third novel, one with a slightly
different setting that will be released in Britain in the fall, and has story
ideas for at least two other stories about the Vurt universe. Given the rush of
publicity that has accompanied the release of his books in the U.S., I asked him
if Hollywood had expressed any interest in either of the novels. "There's been
various people after Vurt, but nobody has signed anything, and I've given
up worrying about them," he says. "Anyway, I want to make my own low-budget film
in Manchester. It's always better to do things yourself, you know?"
