Half past Noon obliterates itself in favor of quarter to none. We are stranded in the middle of this indecipherable lucifer-ish hour which indicates neither the imminent necessity of dawn nor the continuous perseverance of night. Our weary eyes are fixed with hazy gazes, our eyelids full of sand grains crumbled out of broken pieces of clock’s hands and rusty workings. They all stain our alredy blurred vision even more with an unstylish stye of unanswered dilemma: to stay or to leave? Having gone back in time through the wormhole-like strobe-stricken corridors, dancehalls and dance floors of Club Noon, having been high on linguistic proliferation of “Never” which had been snorted from Automated Alice and then sneezed out in a sensational session of sternutation caused by Pollen‘s“Maybe”, having sucked in feathers that reach well beyond the realm of distinguishability of writing and its UniVURTse of pure associative “pictures”, we finally enter the underground, the conclusion, the beginning which ends it all. Do we have enough strength for the final round? Let’s dance one last time and play to… nymphomate.

I must have smelled a pretty huge rat when I opened the previous review with this rather bland mention of numerals – even them – not being able to withstand the overbearingly “picturesque” nature of Vurt as a novel of somewhat uncategorized novelty. Indeed, little did I know that numbers, whose linguistic representations are numerals themselves, would play a pivotal role in Nymphomation. Since Jeff Noon’s most famous prequel runs its course as a complementary explanation, lying behind all the wheres, whens and hows of Automated Alice, Pollen and Vurt, I am going to try to employ and retain a certain parallelism between the sealing nature of Nymphomation and the following text. Simultaneously, any abundant form of hinting exuberance will be annihilated for, as you may already suspect, it would be easier for a camel to walk through the eye of a needle than for me to give all the details away.

Dominoes. That’s what our good old Manchester AD 1999 is suffering from, being a test site for a new type of lottery whose main components are 168 pips on 28 bones along with two ever-present constants: probability and greed. The grandmaster of puppets is AnnoDomino Co., an enterprise behind the “dom-i-nooring” weekly entertainment with the mysterious Mr. Million holding the reins. Our protagonists are: a bunch of students of the Manchester University and an overzealously keen seventeen-year-old home-grown hacker led by the local professor of mathematics who tries to take the hazardous company down by pulling off a crafty break-in into its real as well as post-virtual premises by hook or by crook. You do not need to know more, you do not need to know less when it comes down to the dry facts of the novel. Having said that, allow me to skip its other arid parts and lead you to more water-rich grounds.

Were I to compare Nymphomation to a wristwatch, taking into consideration fact that it is carrying a considerable weight of previous novels on its shoulders, I would call it Omega. Though the above post-virtuality is what really hits the jackpot, compensates the missing Alpha element and brings on the “rolexing” atmosphere of completion. What really links the novel to the vividness of Vurt is its ability to generate invocations of associative imagery, yet this time without the side effect of language (and its misty “behindness”) leading a downright blatant rebellion against its own modes of being. What comes to our minds, then, when the plot thickens? Flashbacks of Johnny Mnemonic, shards of The Lawnmower Man, splinters of Albert Pyun‘s B-“blockbusters” and – hats off – the “transmutation” of Tetsuo in Akira, for starters. Interestingly, all of the above should have been experienced during the reading of Vurt, but due to its magical ability to erase language we are able to catch the radiant presence of these flickers only in Nymphomation. As regards other features that weld all four novels together, Celia Hobart, wearing Whippoorwill’s feather in her hair, figures as a really important ally here (that is clearly an irrefutable proof that Automated Alice is indeed a pre-prequel with a spin-off-ish [twin] twist[er]), it is revealed where the…hmm… nano-dreamo-lubricant Vaz originated from and, last but not least, we finally realize that Vurt is something even less fathomable than things which could have been devised in the wildest dreams of all the masters of daydreaming combined. Nymphomation also helps to highlight, in a somewhat syncopathic manner though, another step in Vurt‘s evolution which can be witnessed in Pollen.

What about the razzmatazz, the nitro, the flamboyance of Noon to push the language forward by pulling it back which has been so dimly exposed by the prequelo-sequeling sequence of our temporal investigations? Language devolving, plunging, breaking down into primordial amorphous compound of incomparability, indiscernibility, unnamability. From the flawlessness of “Never”, pointing straight up in the poly-futures in Automated Alice, through the concretization of “Maybe”, boiling furiously in the cauldron of Pollen‘s self-reductive smartness, to the fuzzy state of preconfiguration found in Vurt, where the ultimate discontinuity of letters to be per se is surpassed only by the silence of their post-dreamagery to prevail. Is Nymphomation going any further within this highly abstract “territory”? Is it able to take one more step to transcend it? Yes, for a fracture of second in one extremely concrete moment, when we make a hopeless attempt to somehow visualize inside our heads the undergoing process of nymphomation. Unfortunately, to make it describable would mean to take a new form of letters to appear, a perplexingly odd one for sure and almost too quixotic to bear. Since I do not possess such a tremendous amount of power to spare, I rest my case. After all, on a day-to-day basis we, humans, are very palpable and therefore perfectly capable of making do without such intangible extravaganzas… for a while. Perhaps it is our innate predilection to amuse ourselves by forging or discovering the amazing mazes of absolute abstractions and astounding astonishments. However it is a topic of another… writing session.

So here we are: finished, done and about to be gone. Party is over, the lights are on, casting jaundiced afterglow of doubt whether our state of utter wretchedness, brain drainage and physical exhaustion might have been perpetuated by something else than the four story binge we have just taken part in. The domineering feeling of “it-never-happened” – the very same which drives you insane every time you come back from the holidays abroad – haunts our wasted minds but only for a brief moment. The insides of our noses tickle a little, that’s totally understandable, and we are amidst one of the biggest throat droughts of all times. We pass out along the way home or perhaps we do not, because we are soon in front of the door that overhears a fight between the key and the lock. As we hang our coat, a hangover steps into the shoes of the remains of the night. Falling over on our beds, our boots undone but still on, we cling to one thing: not to think at all and sleep without a single dream. Good night, my Dearest after-Noon Friends, and sleep tight.

Amonne Purity

We’re all just out there, somewhere, waiting to /re/happen.

Scribble /slightly purified/

Three out of four. Numerals taking charge of verbs, adjectives, adverbs, their syntactic combinations and unsystematically anti-semantic disjunctions. Then a sudden explosiveness of succulency overthrows them all without the slightest throe of hesitation, conscience or doubt. Almost ironically, it is as easy as 1-2-3. The robust complexity of a nonexistent fractal, Escher-like impossibilities currently prequelling the non-sequeltion, for we have finally reached the top story which is, a bit paradoxically, placed on the ground floor of Club Noon. The fount, the origin, the source. Shall we feather up a bit for the occasion or, on the contrary, feel under the feather? We should go for both and something third will come along. Awaiting the fourth. However, let’s skinny-dip and melt into the feast of dreams served by the Vurt itself first.

To claim that entering Jeff Noon’s writing via the chronological back door of his quaintly insubordinate novels resembles backing oneself into an unescapable corner is like stating that if you listen to Joy Division, you might get a little down. Vurt, being a third step of my temporal fiddling around the machinery of letters conceived by the British author, is a living proof that not only does it intensify and further the general hullabaloo of concepts lurking at various thresholds which have been previously traced inside Automated Alice and Pollen (although here they seem to do so in a very ‘rewindy’ manner, crouching in an exceptionally deep, almost undetectable shadow of a novel yet to be/that has already been sequelled), but also brings itself to conclusion that the only attainable way of getting nearby its dreamscape-ish frantic sturdiness is to let go of letters and reading completely and, instead, switch to images, associations and the pure allure of leering. To become King Leer, if I may pun a little, without two-faced heirs getting in your hair.

Being left to my own devices and, unfortunately, at the mercy of letters (oh, how I wish I could free myself from these infatuatingly irksome inkblots just this once!…), I am unable to conjure or conjecture any single ”dreamage” that would not be dependent on writing. That’s why I am going to drive you nuts today with far-fetched comparisons, overspeculative metaphors and barely justifiable obscure deja-vu(rt)-ish ”pictograms” – almost-pictures. These are, I suppose, the last resort of ‘dreamagery’ which should be used as the sole mean to de-scribe Vurt. Since I do not own a feather smeared with Vaz and am complied with reality to wave a pen or, rather, a keyboard instead of a magic wand <sighing aside>, I have been recently gnashing my teeth, pushed up against the wall, in order to bend, crash, pulverize and dissipate the following letters as much as possible. Without further ado, welcome to the vurt-like wake of their wakefulness!

Pictures, pictures ”burning bright, in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?”. Yes, they are like these wild beasts, unleashed, on a prowl for yet another skirmish, blitzkrieg, bloodshed, their fangs and claws unsheathed, frothing at the gob, just like Flann O’Brien upon being reminded of his Irish fellow – J.J. A dope-fuelled gang of young goons calling themselves Stash Riders – Scribble, Beetle, Bridget, Mandy and – tagging along unintentionally – The Thing (I bet my bottom dollar John Carpenter would be laughing under his breath right now) – drives around the streets of Manchester AD unknown, occasionally reeling around places whose wretchedness and ”skidrowness” have been exceeded only by the shabbiness and scabbiness of its tenants. The purpose of their motorized ramblings is to find a way to bring their lost gang member back to reality from Vurt. For not every feather has been fashioned to become a portal which enables dilly-dallying, reminiscing or busting a nut in an alternate reality of shared dreams which is what Vurt happens to be, plain and simple. What are our hoodlums looking for is a particular kind of vane, extremely difficult to obtain, its name – Curious Yellow – and – just as the hue of an extremely poisonous Phyllobates terribilis a.k.a. the golden dart frog is a sign of a lethal snack for all South American rainforest carnivores – the fauvistic saturation of the rare remex may turn out to be the color of Stash Riders’ ultimate game.

Shrugging off this much too much ”rhymey” sentence – the pictures, the pictures! What is it that makes Vurt so…hmm…picturesque? Is it some sort of archetypical fear, last time felt genuinely when our hairy predecessors had to skedaddle because they had caught a glimpse of eyes much more predatory, much more deadly, much more saber-toothed than their own merciless instinct-driven irises? Is it some kind of primordial hate, the residue of which could be detected for instance in the orange tint of a clockwork Alex and his band wreaking horror-show havoc? Is it the language itself, saying „I’ve had enough of this conveyable mode of mine! Delivering stories, delivering emotions, delivering descriptions, delivering after-images of quasi-existence to some haughty self-proclaimed avant-garde punks! If I am a mere delivery man, from now on I will deliver my own deliverance from all this bull…”? That’s how Vurt might have appeared. Out of condensed pre-Big Bang singularity of accumulated fury to self-create as well as create ex nihilo. Out of choking on the grape seeds of wrath. Out of looking back with anger on that what could have or could never have been. It does not show, it does not indicate, it does not contribute, it does not retribute, it does not rebute. It only looks. And all we can do is sit back and enjoy the downpour of its inapproachability by remembering other things we have experienced during our existence here on Earth: scenes from the movies we saw, shards of sensations we perceived while listening to some stray songs, many other recollections skulking in obscurity of the word ”perhaps”… Vurt looks. We can add ”likes” to its look to make it appear. Vurt looks like. Full stop. Oh, pardon me, an ellipsis… The automated one…

How and why can we enjoy it, then? I still remain baffled after having asked myself this question over and over again for the past couple of days. Maybe it’s got to do something with an as of yet undiscovered self-referential game, its rules hidden behind the collective dream which has been concocted by itself for the sake of itself contriving itself, etc.? Zhuangzi’s feathered butterfly… Suppose we forget the image of the ethereal Matryoshka Doll-shaped universe/univurtse ”dressed up” in a crystal plumage of dreams and keep our ears to the (under)ground floor of Club Noon for a while? Maybe we could hear the enlightening flutter of butterfly wings followed by the unknown rattle of domino bones?

Amonne Purity

The artist, you see, must travel backwards in time. To become, once again, a child of dreams.

Pablo Ogden

Welcome to the second chapter of prequelo-sequelling adventures in Noonland! Last time we embarked on a delicious temporal escapade with Alice Liddell and Celia Hobart to 1998 and 1860 Manchester there and back, respectively. After our “danciful” (loaded with exceptionally fanciful dance moves) ‘clubbing marathon’ with both girls, we, as readers, are going to descend today even deeper, down the prequelling membranes of dates and other tic-toc-ish hiccups which constantly annihilate and recreate the quintessence of Club Noon. We land in 1995, however the year in which the action of Pollen takes place is unspecified. All we know is that our sneezing has been going off the roof for quite some time now, it is more dream-punk-noir in here and the bouncer’s list is being stricter this time. Do not worry, the barrel-chested, hefty muscleman blocking our way is my pal. He is very fond of pure Vurt drifters like me, even if we pay a visit to the Univurtse less than occasionally.

From the very first page we immerse ourselves in the vivid, cheeky, hard-boiled style of Pollen with remarkable ease. Prefaced with a muzzy, death-rattling monologue of a retired Shadowcop – a police officer ‘equipped’ with the ESP powers – called Sibyl Jones, the plot is composed of her gripping recollection of events which occurred between May 1st and 9th AD undisclosed (with an epilogue on August 24th the very same year). Surely, as it is not uncommon for tough-as-nails protagonists, apart from abusing wine on a daily basis, our insightfully named narrator is also able to reignite our insides with a certain aptitude for evoking various ‘scents’ of letters or maybe even the general concept of literature possessing ‘sense of smell’ and all the cavalcades of percepts, mental images, sensations and other imaginary appearances associated with it. Never mind that now, though. As usual I must have gotten distracted, however this time by the blatantly obnoxious hay fever of mine. Ahchooooo!!!!

Getting back on the anti-digressive track, nevertheless still being stuck between a rock of detail disclosures and a hard place of letting you excavate them on your own, I should perhaps begin with the clarification of the key term “pollen”. We find ourselves in Manchester again, a multi-real hub of Noon’s narrative, whose cityscape has been stuffed with all the conceivable, neo-trippy personas, who look like the end result of Salvador Dalí’s wildest outbursts of imagination combined with soft cyberpunk vibes. Outcast zombies, wretched dogmen and aloof dogbots, slutty bitchgirls and dim-witted robogals, mischievous AI’s bugged with delusions of grandeur as well as many other ‘newmonic’ hybrids and chimeras comprise the fabric of society which must have undergone extensive fertility treatment that got out of hand in the past. Fecundity 10 was the name of the panacea, hinted here and there along the way, which shattered breeding barriers not only between species, but also between realms of Eros and Thanatos. On top of that, we have the reality of Vurt or Univurtse, as I have dubbed this knar-like meta-world of interconnected dreams recently, which has quickly gained a quite misty yet remarkably evident, lest to say matter-of-fact status with its striking resemblance to vague however superficially familiar characteristics of the Internet. Apparently, the dualistic nature of the Univurtse has gradually become more and more self-aware, ‘tidally locked’ to expansiveness and is now looming large as a slayer of yet another procreative boundary to be overthrown – the new lover in the pool of lewdness being the gravid voluptuousness of floral world, personified by the little Lolita-like nymphet named Persephone…

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Drawing near an interlude of the temporal prequeltion inside Jeff Noon’s four-story ‘discotheque’, I inevitably reach the trickiest dance floor to conquer, with virtually/vurtually no chance of busting some original moves on it – the comparison room. Nevertheless, I shall at least try to slide my head a little, pull off some desynchronized popping and avoid dislocating my shoulder after 1990-ing like a legit fledgling. I am going to spare you the essay-ish slops which would turn up sooner or later, just like during those long afternoons wasted on writing assignments back in high school – I will get straight to the point. If Automated Alice is the saucy lambada of proliferating, impeccable ‘never’ of letters, Pollen should be labelled (although labelling is only one vowel away from libelling…) a study in boosting the temporality of their temperate ‘maybe’. The above statement should not be regarded as a derogatory, one-line summary, though. That is out of the question! Noon’s second novel (chronologically speaking), having several aces up its sleeve (e.g., the ultimately blurry ontological status of John Barleycorn, Sibyl Jones’ fate after having rescued one of the characters from the Boomer juice OD, etc.), proves to be following the well-known path of letters to shapeshift their repetitive outcry of mimicry into the playful concert of conceptuality. ‘Maybe’ evolving into ‘never’. It sometimes involves devolving too. To de-mature sentences instead of making them grow old, to mirror their as yet undiscovered Benjamin Button side, to turn them into a ‘child’ they have or – more interestingly – have not been before. So far I have noticed this rare peculiarity in full bloom only in Beckett’s prose, but maybe I will bore you to death with it some other time…

Sneezing our way through the ‘dancefloor’ of Pollen, we notice that Noon is definitely – if I may wink a little – in his morning hours – crisp, brisk, bright and straight. Refreshed as if he took the deep sleep he did not need at all and had not actually fallen into in the first place (he had written Vurt just two years earlier), yet his zenith of prancing debonairly, with a dash of unmistakable frolic, into the wondrous ‘after-noon’ prose of Automated Alice is still to be reached. And this potential mode of letters is criminally contagious – chapter after chapter we absorb every drop of future chirpiness lapping inside its 327-page body. Its streams are pouring into our nostrils, our mouths, our eyes, our ears, whirling around their own frantic fractal axes. Out of the blue, our sternutation ceases abruptly. Then we forget about our pollen counter – beeping wildly and serving as one of the foolproof sound systems down in the Club – while we are drifting away inside the veil of thick, milky white fog of time starting to vaporize backwards again. Wait a minute! Is that a feather between your lips?…

Amonne Purity