Jeff Noon's Falling Out of Cars is a bizarre, highly inventive and finely crafted road novel where the narrator, Marlene, aged thirty-five, keeps a diary as she rides in the back seat of her car through a blighted England. In this desolate, near-future landscape, nearly all men and women have fallen sick from what is called "the noise," a condition without surcease that blurs everything perceived, including, most dramatically (gulp!), one's sense of self.
Marlene is sitting in the back because Peacock, a gun toting war vet, and his attractive honey, t'ai chi practicing Henderson, are up front. They're on a quest at the bidding of an old guy, a magician or sorts, named Kingsley, searching for the charmed shards of a particular mirror. If all this sounds odd, you're right, it's most definitely oddball flaky with bits of Latin American-style magic realism added in.
To share hits of this Jeff Noon dark literary gem, I'll link my observations to a number of direct quotes taken from the first third of the novel.
“Many times before I have done this, and always each time the confusion takes over. I can bring to mind scattered details, emotions, overall moods; it's just that something is lost along the way. The noise is a dark hand, a soft hold, slow poison, sickness, it will not leave me go.”
For the past year, Marlene has been grieving over the death of Angela, her beautiful nine-year-old daughter, a loss caused by a combination of noise and an overdose of Lucidity (the drug taken to ease the sickness). And to compound her suffering, Marlene fears the noise will eat away her memory, wiping away any thoughts or feeling or recollections of her beloved Angela, leaving her with a hazy, barren numbness.
“She was a neat, serious looking young woman, perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old. A girl, really....The girl had kept it going, for some reason, when all the mirrors had sickened, and been turn aside.”
They spot a hitchhiker holding a sign with one single word – “Wherever.” Marlene asks Peacock to stop. Now their threesome has turned into a foursome. The girl's name is Tupelo, her parents naming her after the town in Mississippi that was Elvis' birthplace, which speaks to the pervasive influence pop culture holds in this near-future, information-based world. And that business with the mirrors relates to the way the sickness makes a viewer's sense of self even more scattershot (I use the word scattershot purposely) since when one looks into a mirror it is as if one's own identity is shattered by a blast from a shotgun. But Tupelo is among those rare individuals exempt from the sickness, even when looking in a mirror.
“We're losing ourselves. We're losing all the traces, all the moments of the world, one by one. I have to keep writing.”
Prior to her divorce and losing her dear Angela, Marlene was a journalist. Marlene continues to put pen to paper and the written word serves as nothing less than her life raft even as she succumbs more and more to the sickness.
“Dominating the landscape was a large visual display advertising the Lucidity drug.”
Diseased England is so contaminated by the noise, the Lucidity drug (Lucy) is dispensed by the government. But here's something I haven't seen others reviewers suggest: Perhaps there are serious possible side effects when taking the drug; maybe, in some individuals, Lucy compounds the noise and increases a sense of disorientation. Might those in power benefit from huge swaths of the population reduced to passivity and helplessness?
“In those days the sickness had not yet found its way completely into the network, but calls were already plagued with interference, with hiss and crackle, ghosts on the line.”
The sickness is all pervasive, it even infects and scrambles technologies (the ultimate virus?). In other words, not even computer games, phones and other gadgets are immune from contamination. The devastation, disorientation and loss in Noon's England is so extreme, it can remind one of chronicles and novels about the country ravaged by the Black Death during the Middle Ages - Oisín Fagan's Nobber comes immediately to mind.
Recall I mentioned magic realism. One of the more intriguing episodes in the novel happens when Marlene enters The Museum of Fragile Things. She encounters a number of beguiling forms of art, including a small library where the words in books disappear once those words are read. And who does Marlene see amongst the volumes? Tupelo. A conversation ensues bordering on a magical mystery tour where language begins to disintegrate.
As I kept reading, I couldn't help thinking that Jeff Noon has given us a cautionary tale, one that has strong parallels with our current world of increasing technology, a world where the influence of literature and the fine arts is disappearing at an alarming rate. Added to addiction to things like TV, computer games, cell phones and Twitter-like internet sites, we now have not only booze and hard drugs shrinking people's minds and spirits but the widespread use of, to name just two, fentanyl and oxycontin. How far are we from an entire society of minds falling out of cars and not even realizing it is happening?
British author Jeff Noon, born 1957
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