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Falling out of Cars
by Jeff Noon
(Doubleday, £12.99, 345 pages, hardcover; published in November
2002.)
Ever since the release of Vurt -- the author's 1993  cult-hit
debut novel -- Jeff Noon's work has been consistently idiosyncratic,
strange, and uncompromising. His eighth book, Falling out of Cars,
is no exception.
Something bizarre has happened to the world. Time and memory are now
unreliable. Printed words are disappearing as soon as they are read.
Music can only be perceived as random cacophony. Technology can become
infected with "noise" that makes it break down. Photos are nothing but
patternless visual data. Mirrors are dangerous, even deadly. There's
a drug, Lucidity, that can help people shake off some aspects of the
condition.
Falling out of Cars is a road novel set in this near-future
world where information-based civilization is falling apart. It follows
the journey of Marlene, Henderson, and Peacock as they drive around
England on a mission for the mysterious Kingsley. They are trying to
gather fragments of a mirror that may be at the heart of the world's
affliction. Along the way, they encounter a young woman, Tupelo, who
is among the few who are immune to the strange disease: she can read
time, listen to music, and so forth.
Falling out of Cars is the record Marlene keeps -- or tries
to keep -- of her quest to flee from her tragic past. Despite her daily
dose of Lucidity, Marlene is gradually succumbing to the malady, and
it gets harder and harder to distinguish dream from reality, hallucinations
from events. The narrative follows her breakdown, gets increasingly
fractured into nearly incoherent fragments whose meaning is elusive
yet tantalizingly almost graspable.
Noon's use of language is rich and evocative. Falling out of Cars
-- exploring what happens to identity when the symbols that define it
cease to make sense -- shimmers with unexplained and intriguing mysteries.
Originally published, in slightly different form,
in The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 22 March 2003.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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