A MAN OF SHADOWS

The City Of Light

We pass judgement on Jeff Noon’s latest, plus all the biggest book, comic and videogame releases of the month.

released 3 august

384 pages | Paperback/ebook

Author Jeff Noon

Publisher angry robot

Although he published an e-novel, Channel SK1N, in 2012, it seems like a while since Jeff Noon was truly a presence in British SF. The man who, in the words of Warren Ellis, “was the sound of post-rave” in the ’90s with his very British take on cyberpunk rather fell out of view in the wake of his 2002 novel, Falling Out Of Cars.

Now, that exile seems at last truly to have ended, as a man who trades in what he calls “avantpulp” returns with a fantastical crime novel. At its heart lies John Nyquist, a down-at-heel PI who calls to mind Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or (a writer namechecked by Noon when he spoke with SFX recently) Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer.

But whereas these hardboiled tough guys tramped around California, Nyquist’s beat is altogether stranger. Taking the idea of a neon-lit city to its logical extreme, Dayzone is a conurbation of perpetual light, where darkness literally never falls. Here, moving through a kind of wildly alternate 1959, Nyquist scrapes a living as best he can and occasionally lands a case that promises a better payday – such as the hunt for missing Eleanor Bale, the teenage daughter of a rich family.

It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that, as an able detective, Nyquist tracks down his quarry. Which is when Shadows really gets moving, because the rules of noir demand that any well-todo family where the younger members go missing has to have something to hide. But what?

The answer to this question is gradually teased out in a novel that charts Nyquist’s intersections with an apparently invisible serial killer, Quicksilver; his journeys through Dayzone, Nocturna (where the day never dawns) and Dusk (the eerie, indistinct area that marks the border between the two); and hints that Nyquist’s own personal history perhaps has a wider significance than he realises.

All this would be odd enough in itself, yet it’s the way the novel deals with time that really sets the head spinning. In Dayzone, people purchase time. Really sad cases find themselves running on multiple timelines, lost in time(s). And when the hours and minutes that make up the day are so commodified, there’s a constant risk that things will fall apart if the market becomes unstable – any similarities here to neoliberalism are, presumably, intended.

Take all this together and, while there are surface comparisons to be made with the work of China Miéville or even Jeff VanderMeer, the overall atmosphere lies further east: in the transformations and switchbacks that run through the work of Franz Kafka, or the absurdities of Milan Kundera.

Which shouldn’t be taken to mean that Shadows reads like a literary novel that’s slumming it by donning gumshoes. It’s more that the book takes on a hallucinatory quality that will be familiar to readers who have encountered Noon’s fiction. At times, especially in the middle of the book, this may be to its detriment. There’s a sense that, in place of words tumbling out, what’s needed is more of the plot-focused economy associated with the pulps.

Then again, you don’t want to grumble too much. Not only are there are more good ideas in Shadows than many writers manage in a lifetime, in the moments when Noon truly hits the mark his prose takes you to weird and scary places other novelists don’t go – a reminder of why he’s so revered. Noon, the outsiders’ outsider, is most definitely back, and that can only be a good thing.

The next Nyquist book, says Noon, will be “all about words”, set in a city where everyone is obsessed with writing.

In the city of Dayzone, people have to buy time