Vurt

Fascinating idea for a book. Weirdly dark but worth the read. This is one I always lend out.

oops .. should have put these as reviews rather than comments!

The 'drug' of Jeff Noon's near-future is 'vurt', an experience of collective dreaming. The story is narrated by Scribble, a hip malcontent who is searching for his sister and lover Desdemona, whom he lost in the vurt.

What makes this novel work for me (when at time the prose falters) is Noon's ability to communicate his experience of Manchester and make a fantastic world seem utterly real.

"Shards of glass under my feet, the colours of dreams. In Bottletown, even our tears flicker like jewels." Says the narrator Scribble . Scribble's friend Beetle sees this beauty more intensely than most. He has, Scribble says, "The gift of being able to see beauty in ugliness." That is the path of those who have known suffering, the mystery of beauty in ugliness and great wealth in poverty. The creative force that burns yet liberates.

The beautiful Bottletown is a ruined slum. Only the lowest of outcasts live there. First those who had exiled themselves from society; the poor, the students, the unemployed, and then those who had been rejected by society. The inspiration came from a recycling "bottle bank" that the council had stopped emptying. Even when the bins overflowed people still used the area to discard their glass and Bottletown grew "shard by shard, jag by jag, until the whole place is some kind of glitter palace, sharp and painful to the touch."

This is not just a district of fly tipping but an allegory for our lives. The streets are overflowing with "crystal sharp segments of smashed up wine bottles, and beer bottles, and gin bottles." With every step you take, glass cuts your feet and you "sink into a bed of pain." But in all that shattered glass, loveliness was born. "The whole of Bottletown shone and glittered like a broken mirror of the brightest star," the narrator Scribble recalls. "Such is beauty, in the midst of the city of tears".