Jeff Noon‘s latest novel, Falling Out of Cars, is one of the best things he’s ever done. It’s a moody, poetic book, set in an almost-contemporary England, where a strange malady has affected nearly everyone’s perception. People are no longer able to separate the signal from the noise. There is a blockage somewhere between transmission and reception. Images and sounds are affected with blur and static; texts and clocks become difficult to read; mirrors are positively dangerous…
With such a malady, the world is too close. It becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between one thing and another. You even start to lose the sense of your own identity: the subject is no longer separate from the world, the self no longer distinct from the objects it observes. Everything smears into a beautiful, but also anxiety-inducing, chaos.
There’s a temporary antidote to this plague, in the form of a drug called Lucidity–or Lucy, for short. A hit of Lucy puts the world back at a proper distance, allows you to function, more or less, for a while. But Lucy is not a permanent cure; as the disease progresses, you need more and more of it, just in order to remain minimally straight. Also, taking too much Lucy itself has undesirable consequences: you withdraw into a solipsistic shell, barely noticing or interacting with the outside world, emotions suppressed except for a self-satisfied, mindless semi-bliss.
Falling Out of Cars doesn’t have much of a plot: since the condition it describes scarcely allows for linear developments. Instead, everything drifts and shimmers. The narrator and her associates–people she’s picked up along the way–drive across England in an endless quest, with an ostensible goal, but scarcely any clue as to direction. What we get instead of linear narrative is a series of metamorphoses, obsessions, and hallucinations–drug states, pretty much. These altered states of consciousness are gorgeous, even if they wouldn’t be pleasant to actually live through. Noon’s prose has a wondrous psychedelic sheen, even though his sentences are fairly short and straightforward, and even though this is a melancholy book, tinged with feelings of loss, passivity, and paralysis.
The world is aestheticized by the loss of conventional categories, and conventional opportunities for action. You can’t really willfully embrace this aestheticism, this communicational disease that the book so beautifully evokes–because, if you try to do so, you will only end up with sadness. But since the narrator cannot escape this loss of control, which is also the loss of everything she values and holds dear, she is forced to try to make the best of it: to come to terms with something that remains indifferent to her, and that suspends even that capacity of willing that she would have to have, even to be able to accept it. Noon’s earlier novels have dealt with the strangely inhuman outlines of imaginative fantasy (Vurt) and of music (Needle in the Groove); but here he goes even further in exploring the price of beauty (which is precisely that it cannot be grasped in terms of price).