Portrait of a novelist
Ra Page
THE NYMPHOMATION by Jeff Noon
Doubleday, £15.99, pp. 362 Strictly speaking, Jeff Noon doesn't write novels, he paints them. Sampling and blending ideas from the ever-widening spectrum of popular culture, he daubs them onto the canvas of an otherwise perfunctory story. His fourth novel attempts to fuse higher mathematics, virtu- al reality, Indian cuisine and the rave scene, while continuing to reconceive his home town, Manchester, with geographic pedantry and technological lunacy. This time around, Manchester is caught in the grip of a sinister new lottery game, 'Domi- no Bones', a city where Whoomphy Burg- ers' sponsor the police, `ultragarlic' lubricates the club scene and where adverts are broadcast by fully automated, swarming robots. Amid all this Noon draws our attention to the story of four maths students recruited by their tutor to hack into the lottery company AnnoDomino and expose a suspected scam.
Whichever way one looks at Noon, he has been a key figure in the recent evolution of technological language, from brittle, anaesthetic jargon to today's pseudo-organic cyberspeak. Biologists and computer programmers are forever astonished by the casual accuracy of such phrases as 'computer virus' and when Noon first started writing about blurbs (Bio- Logical-Ultra-Robotic-Broadcasting-Sys- tems), it wasn't wholly surreal to learn that these were in fact large worms that needed to be fed regularly and kept in sawdust before they could become flies.
Like many novelists of late, Noon tries to make amends for the way science has been derided by the arts over the last few centuries and embellishes his prose with the decor of higher mathematics. But dili- gence rarely follows his enthusiasm. Noon doesn't have to be a mathematician to write this kind of book, but there is no excuse for laziness. Someone should tell him, for instance, that pure maths isn't actually about numbers but functional rela- tionships only ever expressed in algebra. When he whimsically poses a new math- ematical function, `nymphomation', where- by numbers 'breed' together, one feels he is exploiting the field rather than exploring it.
Form and theme, Noon keeps reminding us, should be equivalent: characters are introduced collectively, inviting the reader to bet which characteristics belong where, and blurbflies are employed to transfer the narrative focus from one scene to another. But the technique is always more present than the subject. Beneath the facetious game-playing, Noon isn't really interested in human conflict, and the basic dynamics of narrative drama are missing.
Important observations are raised about the religious undertones of the gambling ceremony, and the discomfort of not knowing one's future (individually felt but socially alleviated) is effectively bounced off the greater discomfort of knowing it too well — genetic calculus promised to predict exactly what natural causes will kill each of us and when, if misadventure does not get us first. Yet nothing is resolved. If this were an art exhibition, it wouldn't dis- appoint, nor if it were a short story, which, as with so many science-fiction writers, is the ideal laboratory for his experiments. Even then one wonders what this tale would have to offer beside the more adventurous 'Babylon Lottery' of Jorge Luis Borges.
Jeff Noon is a well liked novelist in Manchester but few people finish his books. They tacitly understand that these are not quests on which they must accom- pany the author, or even puzzles they should help him to solve, but on- going public spectacles, work in progress. Ideal for advert breaks and channel- hopping.
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