Somnopolis

“Well, I’ll eat it,” said Alice, “and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door: so either way I’ll get into the garden, and I don’t care which happens!”

It’s been some time since Jeff Noon first assaulted the 90’s with a debut that suggested an e’d up Philip K. Dick with a masters degree in English folklore. I haven’t read Vurt or Pollen in a good few years, but I remember the exciting feeling of having discovered something new, a fresh voice in British sf, that hinted at an all-too-soon future bacchanal bearing down on Manchester’s streets.

It’s been a while so since I last wrestled with Noon’s dreamlike prose, but over the weekend I gobbled down Falling Out Of Cars, which I had avoided when it was first published due to severe critical mauling. Now there are certain irritants present in the text. Britain has been afflicted by a horrific disease that causes people to go insane if they view their own reflections. Mirrors are avoided as a matter of course. Watches present a threat to sanity, as the ability to comprehend time has deserted the general populace. The only way to maintain some shreds of sanity is to take daily doses of the commercial drug Lucidity, or Lucys as they are called.

As the story is told from the point of view of someone infected by this disease, descriptions tend to veer off, sentences slow to a stop followed by an infuriating collection of periods and the dialogue reads like a drug-addled student who has just been awoken on the floor of a dance club the morning after the night before.

After a while though I grew to understand that Noon had set himself certain rules and these narrative quirks were symptoms of that discipline. Compare to Blindness by Jose Saramago, critically applauded despite the continuing anonymity of its characters, that facilitated a world drowned in shadow. Removing names allowed Saramago to provide further insight into how bewildering and strange it must be to become suddenly blind. By positing a world with ‘infected’, mirrors and strange spaces, Noon has robbed his characters of that essential building block of the individual’s psyche – Lacan’s mirror stage.

The French psychoanalyst posited the theory of the mirror stage to explain how an infant individuates itself, understanding that it is a seperate person. Under Noon, identity becomes fluid in a world where no one can see themselves. Most freeze in confusion, psychologically stalled. Others find new mantras or exercises to distract from the condition. Even the practice of taking Lucys, keeping sweet as the main protagonists term it, allows for a kind of structure and purpose.

Further direction, and the erstwhile plot of the novel, is provided by a quest to collect magical shards of a broken mirror, that each have some relevance to the overarching affliction suffered by the people in Britain. The shattering of the mirror is compared to the ur-myth of Narcissus drowning after falling in love with his reflection. Apparently the infected mirrors are somehow captured aspects of the natural world, the water that the tragic Greek stared into. This is all very poetic, but no actual reasons are provided and no solutions offered.

Noon has drawn inspiration from Lewis Carroll for his book Automated Alice (which I seem to recall was briefly mentioned in Bryan Talbot’s exhaustive Alice in Sunderland). I also see some hints of Carroll in Falling Out Of Cars though, with its systematic insanity resulting from a set of rules. The mathematic escalation of madness, the lunacy inspired by the number zero, it settles beneath the straining narrative like a horrible marsh, threatening to suck you down.

Cheerful fare so!