As a huge PKD fan, I searched out a contemporary heir, an author who could be considered a modern day Dick. One website pointed me to Jeff Noon.
Oh, baby, I feel like doing a backflip. This Brit's writing is tops – fast-paced, weird and mind-blowing trippy. A Man of Shadows is a novel set in or around 1959 in two fantastically imagined cities, Dayzone and Nocturna, connected by a hazy middle turf known as Dusk. The story is classic 1950s crime noir: private eye searching for a teenage runaway amid citywide fear created by a seemingly invisible serial killer. As for specifics, I've created a Man of Shadows highlight reel:
SUPERDUPERDOME
Think of domed sports stadiums in New Orleans, Indianapolis, Atlanta or the indoor arena in London or Manchester, England - only here, the dome extends over dozens of square city miles, large enough to cover all of Dayzone to the north and Nocturna to the south. You can live your entire life within this indoor structure and never once glimpse the real sky, sun or moon. The location, as we eventually discover, is somewhere in England.
DAYZONE
“The sky dazzled, alive with heat and light and colour, painful to look upon directly.” The denizens of Dayzone take pride in being part of an overheated, overlit paradise, the city that knows no darkness, a city kept aglow by an army of agile bulb monkeys dressed in tight, heat-resistant outfits with goggles to protect their eyes as they cling to walls and metalwork with hooks, safety ropes and suckers in their unending task to replace and repair lights across the Dayzone sky.
NOCTURNA
Here we have a city forever held in darkness where long-term inhabitants continually look upwards and negotiate their way from point A to B to C via the position of man-made stars in an artificial night sky. Many people speak in whispers, if at all. Turning the dial on a radio, one will come across old blues songs, sombre minimalist music in a minor key or Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata'.
DUSK
As Breach serves as a freaky, shadowy third city in the hidden margins between Besźel and Ul Qoma in China Miéville's The City and The City, so there's the lands of Dusk separating Dayzone and Nocturna. "Dusk was a place, not a time: a wall of fog that the light of Dayzone faded into. A place of ghosts, of dead roads, unknown lives.” Make no mistake: only outcasts and halfwits inhabit Dusk. “Strange oblations had been found along these borders – at first the carefully prepared corpses of pets and other animals; later, tales of human beings, barely alive, their bodies staked out on the ground, left here to appease whatever gods or demons might rule these parts.”
TIME
“A recent report had stated that more than twenty million timepieces currently existed in the city (Dayzone), with more being designed, built and sold every day.” As much as Dayzone and Nocturna mess with natural circadian rhythms in its division into day and night, the whackiest, most bugged-out aspect is the treatment of time. Rather than one standard time, residents and visitors can choose from hundreds of personal or commercial timelines. As per the CEO of the leading corporation addressing his pulsing Dayzone city: “But most of all it needs more time. Different kinds of time. A time for every single occasion, mood and desire. The people demand it. And we here at the Ariadne Centre have to administer that time as we see fit.” And the biggest fear for the CEO, his corporation and everyone else: the ever looming citywide time crash. It happened before and it could most certainly happen again.
FIZZLE OUT
Now, do all these artificial times drive some people crazy? You bet they do. "Some Dayzone residents got so confused by all the different kinds of time on offer, their minds couldn't take it anymore. Time slowed down to zero, a space where nothing ever happened." Dayzone has a name for this increasingly prevalent syndrome: chronostasis. Meanwhile, dazzle junkies overdose on all the light while others (echoes of PKD's precogs) imbibe a new drug giving them the power to see into the future. Then there's the ultimate rebellion: entering the nether regions of Dusk, never to return.
GLOOMY GUMSHOE
Recall I mentioned a private eye back there. His name is John Henry Nyquist and he's even more sullen and morose than Icelandic author Arnaldur Indriðason's Inspector Erlendur. Readers familiar with the popular Reykjavík detective will appreciate just how sulky and joyless Nyquist must be for me to compare him to Erlendur. But considering all the surrounding out-there flakiness in the novel, Nyquist works perfectly - in one way Nyquist is a manifestation of the city but in another way his personality is the complete opposite of all the day/night/mist/time razzle-dazzle.
NYQUIST IN ACTION
Again, the story revolves around Nyquist hunting down a young lovely runaway. But I haven't said that much about the players or arc of plot for a specific reason: Jeff Noon's novel is much more than another 1950s-style tale of crime by an author like Erle Stanley Gardner or Eric Ambler. Noon's unique, highly inventive setting adds so much.
As by way of example, here's Nyquist on a train traveling from Dayzone to Nocturna in the mysterious realm of Dusk when suddenly the train loses speed and crunches to a halt. The lights flutter and Nyquist's eyes dart to the opposite window where the odd shapes of mist stick to the glass. Something lands on the roof - Thump - and all the passengers begin to panic. Tensions are raised even higher when through the fog something appears at the window that could be a beast, ghost, monster or demon. Nyquist pulls out his gun and...for Jeff Noon to tell.
QUICKSILVER
The city's serial killer has a name: Quicksilver. We meet Quicksilver in action in the very first chapter when a young female professional feels a pain in her side while in the middle of a bustling Dayzone market. "The autopsy revealed five separate stab wounds in the victim's flesh. And yet, out of the many people they interviewed, the police could not find a single person who had seen anything at all out of the ordinary."
How can this be? I'll give you a clue: it has to do with stealing away moments of time - and a connection with a Javanese shadow puppet. Intrigued? I certainly hope so.
British author Jeff Noon, born 1957
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