I was sent an e-copy of A Man of Shadows by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This book first caught my eye as I was scrolling looking for interesting upcoming books and I couldn’t help but be disappointed when it said they weren’t accepting any more requests for it. But I took a chance, wished for it and my wish came true! A Man of Shadows arrived safely to my kindle and I dived right in!

The brilliant, mind-bending return to science fiction by one of its most acclaimed visionaries

Below the neon skies of Dayzone – where the lights never go out, and night has been banished – lowly private eye John Nyquist takes on a teenage runaway case. His quest takes him from Dayzone into the permanent dark of Nocturna.

As the vicious, seemingly invisible serial killer known only as Quicksilver haunts the streets, Nyquist starts to suspect that the runaway girl holds within her the key to the city’s fate. In the end, there’s only one place left to search: the shadow-choked zone known as Dusk.

This book was way more abstract than I initially imagined it would be. The originality of the dystopia plot line was something that drew me to the book in the first place, but nothing can prepare you for the sci-fi web that is woven between these pages. I really have to hand it to the author for keeping on top of this complex setting, as well as weaving a brilliant novel of mysteries and thrills.

Our protagonist, the private investigator John Henry Niquist is hired by Bale, a rich businessman in Nocturna whose daughter, Eleanor has run away. The sci-fi/ dystopia twist is that in this 1959 American region, there exists a city concealed by a dome; Dayzone where they have lamps and bulbs everywhere to drive out the dark, and Dusk, a mysterious and generally inhabited area which lies on the edge of the zone. Since time relies on tracking the earth’s orbit around the sun, the people in these zones, as well as the nearby city of Nocturna – existing in perpetual darkness, live majorly on personal timelines, adjusting to common ones when they go to work etc.

As Niquist journeys to the strange city in search of his client’s daughter, he comes across many darker corners of Dayzone where light and time addicts convene and lose themselves, sometimes forever. What is strange, is that as the mystery and search continues, it would appear that Eleanor Bale has something to do with the mysterious killer Quicksilver, whom no one has seen; a fog will fall on the local where he is to attack, and someone will then drop dead from a knife wound. No one sees Quicksilver in action, and he leaves almost no trace – other than the unfortunate victim.

As far as the plot is concerned, this was an enjoyable read; the ongoing mystery of Quicksilver, and Eleanor’s determination to run away keeps the reader engaged in the story. Admittedly around half way through the timeline story was becoming very confusing, but I tried not to dwell too much on it and concentrated on the story. I think you’ll end up like the people in the book if you try to keep up with all the timelines!

Niquist also deals with his own demons, clearly an alcoholic and suffering from trauma since childhood; events that have scarred his life transmit to his surroundings. The two protagonists are not two to get along, but they must work together to determine what Quicksilver is, and how it is connected with Miss Bale. Her mother has been driven mad – we assume by some timeline trouble, and her father is not letting on everything about his slightly dysfunctional family – facts which could aid Niquist in his investigations.

Overall I did enjoy this book; as I mentioned it was slightly confusing during the middle chapters, but in all an enjoyable read. It was a breath of fresh air, mixing multiple genres – sci-fi, dystopia, a slight fantasy – together to create a really unique story. SOme dark twists keeps the audience engaged, and develops a great atmosphere.

I am rating this book 4*/5. For fans of thriller, sci-fi, and dystopia books.

This is a multi genre sci-fi thriller that is dark, intelligent, atmospheric and decidedly ambiguous. It is guaranteed to absorb and provoke thought. Jeff Noon engages in the heavily detailed world building of a city concealed amongst us by a dome. Half of the city, lit by lamps, exists in endless sunlight, and the other half in Dusk, wherein lies the odd and all the horrors of darkness. The two zones are connected by train. Within this weird world, time is money, a commodity to be traded and where people exist in their own particular timelines making time both an obsession and a critical factor. The troubled PI, John Nyquist, languishes at the bottom of the ladder, when he is hired by the father of 18 year old runaway, Eleanor Bale, to find her. A search that finds him making connections with a dangerous serial killer, Quicksilver, notoriously killing openly, yet to all intents and purposes, an invisible man.

This is a place where illicit drugs mess with time and the crime noir aspects hark back to the classics of the genre where the action takes place in a shadowy world. A tired and sleep deprived Nyquist has to venture into the dark, disturbing, and feared Dusk which will test him to his limits, physically and mentally. He is determined to find the beautiful, complicated and fragile Eleanor, amidst the menace and despair of Dusk, the foreboding presence of Quicksilver, and other ruthless forces. This offbeat novel, is beautifully artistic, raw in its blurred impressionism and surrealism flavoured with rather a strong dash of the fantastical. Noon has written a complex and superbly plotted multilayered novel which goes all out to embrace the strange. It will have you questioning what is real and what is time. A highly imaginative and enthralling read which I highly recommend. Many thanks to Angry Robot for an ARC.

I've never read Jeff Noon before, and I found A Man of Shadows to be a very strange book. To be honest, if I had known beforehand that he was an author of the "new weird" subgenre, I might have never looked at this book, but now that I'm finished, I must say the experience was both interesting and somewhat gratifying. 

I won't pretend that I "got" the story. The plot is actually pretty standard, when you peel always all the strangeness and layers. The ideas are pretty incredible though, and while I would normally be frustrated by the feelings of vagueness of uncertainty, with this book I was oddly fine with the nebulous approach. Everything about the setting kept me guessing, trying to envision the world and get a firm grasp of it. I'm not sure I managed even by the end, but by then that becomes beside the point.

All in all, this was a pretty bizarre read, one I would recommend if you enjoy "new weird" or mind-bending sci-fi.

This is fabulous mind-blowing entertainment at the same time effecting .. fathers looking for their daughters not only for love but to sustain their rich businesses or personal powers. Meanwhile there are  inexplicable deaths by multiple stabs by an unseen perpetrator their cities. A secret in the past goes back generations and private eye Nyvquist is hired by her' father to find Eleanor . His obsession and care grow for her as he searches, and this takes him into landscapes of shifting times, dayzones and night, and into the most dangerous: dusk where he meets her nemesis, which is almost the end of him! Brilliant and gripping altogether

Possibly more ‘SFF' than truly ‘noir’, for the gritty/detective side was second to the mysterious/dusk/visions side; but I like both genres, so that was fine with me. It took me a while to get into the story, though, and I’m not really sure whether it’s because it didn’t fully grip me, or because I was also busy at the time with other books.

The story follows John Nyquist, jaded detective with quite a few dark shades in his past, after both his parents died; hired to find the runaway daughter of powerful businessman Patrick Bale, he stumbles upon more than what he’s signed for, including the daughter’s true heritage, a drug cartel, and the mysterious killer nicknamed ‘Quicksilver’, who offs their victims in the blink of an eye. As any good noir detective, Nyquist can’t leave enough alone, and feels compelled to help the daughter, who he feels has run away for a reason that’s more than just teenage angst.

The setting is definitely interesting, and would even lend itself to more developments, I’d say, considering the two sides (Nocturna vs. Dayside), the mysterious Dusk in-between, the microcosms in each part (like the bulb monkeys in Dayside, always running from one light bulb to the other in a desperate effort to keep the light going), the time-screwing aspect (how can anyone goo on different timelines that keep changing depending on where they go and what they do?), etc.

I felt that there was a lot going on here, especially with part of the plot revolving around characters and events with a foot in all those parts (as in, things like ‘works in Dayside, lives in Nocturna, has ties with Dusk’); but while some of it was shown, I expected more in that regard—and yet, at the same time, there were moments when the world superseded the narrative, making the latter muddled. I’m not sure if the intent was to show Nyquist’s descent into his own time-related problems, or to echo the ‘time drug’ concept, but it made the plot difficult to follow even though it’s not -that- complex.

In the end I couldn’t decide if this was a novel about these different cities or about the characters—I felt that one way or the other, there wasn’t enough to really keep my interest.

I'd say the three words I'd use to describe this novel are confused, complicated and 'meh'.

A Man of Shadows tells the story of a private detective named Nyquist, whose life seems to be slowly falling to pieces. However, he still manages to get hired by a super-rich CEO, who needs to find his daughter, Eleanor. What then ensues is Nyquist running around this fantasy world in an ever-deepening state of obsession and delirium attempting to catch Eleanor and save her for a reason which was not explained to us until the very end. AND to cap it all off, the story takes place in this bizarre fantasy world, where there are two cities--Dayzone, where it is perpetually light, and Nocturna, where it is perpetually dark--separated by Dusk, an area of magical happenings and creepy mist that follows you everywhere and hides all of these magical, creepy beings from you!

I will simply gloss over how the setting and how it exists is not explained at all, and instead focus on time, which is very important to the world that Noon has created, but is not really explained very well. In Dayzone, people are obsessed with switching up their timezones, so that almost each person is running on a different zone. However, it is not explained how this really works, or why it is beneficial (or if it was explained, it was not in a very good way since I remained confused throughout my reading). People are compelled to switch their timezone to match the different zones of whatever area they are in, but why? When do people sleep? When do they eat? I'm confused... and it's overly complicated! There is also some sort of disease when all these timezones becomes to much for one's body to handle, and you go into chronostasis. Nyquist seems to be verging on this condition the entire novel, but somehow remains a semi-functioning human being.

But that doesn't make the story any better. As the novel progresses, Nyquist just gets more and more obsessed with Eleanor's case, and cannot be dissuaded... but why? And he also gets more violent, more confused, more drunk. He is just a blabbering old man running around grabbing and shaking people to try and get answers and just horrifying any passerby. He was not likeable at all, but not in a good way where it makes the book more interesting. Just in a bad way, and I'm not 100% sure how I finished this novel with him leading. 

Anyways... now it's done. And I would not recommend this book. I was expecting a fun sci-fi adventure and that is not what I got! Even so, thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for providing me with a review copy of this book.

Interesting if somewhat hard to wrap your mind around due to all the time changing. My advice is to read until the end. It's worth it. Quite a complicated plot where the main character comes over rather like a time weary Philip Marlow, hardly surprising the amount of traveling between artificial day and night zones and trying to keep to his own sense of time and one foot in reality. All this and trying to solve unexplainable deaths in full view of people. I wouldn't say this was easy book to read but would appeal to sci- Fi fans looking for something a little different.

When Noir Isn't A State of Mind, or a Genre, But An Actual Physical Place

The overarching joke, or frame, here, (which I found exceptionally appealing), is that this is a noir mystery/thriller that plays out in a city that is divided into a half that is always daylight, a half that is always night, and a border that is always dusk. All noir thrillers take place in that space between the light and the dark, but usually that space is metaphorical and is the locus between right and wrong, good and bad, moral and immoral, or noble and craven. This author has made that all explicit and has turned the metaphor into a physical reality, which, of course, just puts an extra spin on the whole deal.

Just considered as a noir thriller this book is fine. Tortured, noble hero. Femme with a dark past, lost present, and dubious future. Crosses and doublecrosses. Greed and mendacity. And a stylishly feverish sense of displacement and despair. Yep, that says noir to me.

But then we add the brilliant world building. It is the compelling, beguiling and repulsive physical analogue of everything we love about noir. Forget the plot entirely, just savor the mood and atmosphere, and you still have a marvelous book. Then add the conceit involving multiple personal time lines. It's almost overkill, but it adds the surreal, ambiguous and vaguely incomprehensible flavor that pushes the whole tale into the weird and hypnotic. 

This is a one of a kind sort of book, and for me it felt like it would be one of those few books that make an impression that will linger. What a great find.

(Please note that I received a free advance ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

An interesting mix of noir, sci-fi, and horror elements that ultimately maybe tried to do too much all at once. The world-building was great, but seemed to take primary focus, more so than any sort of narrative or the challenges in front of the detective.

A Man of Shadows by Jeff Noon

Within the world lies a very strange city indeed, concealed by a dome. Almost half of it is called Dayzone, where endless bright lamps reproduce hot sunlight for every hour of the day. Connected to it by train is its opposite – the endless night of Nocturna. But, to travel between the two, the train must pass through an area of fog and permanent gloom called Dusk and therein lives the unexplained and the terrifying. As if all of this weren’t strange enough, the whole city has turned its back on the linear time of the outside world. Hundreds, if not thousands, of timelines co-exist, many available to be bought, and they mean that the inhabitants of Dayzone and Nocturna move from timeline to timeline, often obsessed with their watches and clocks. Never has the question ‘what’s the time?’ seemed so vital and yet also such a waste of time.

Moving between the timelines is a feared killer called Quicksilver, managing to commit murder in broad faked daylight, sometimes in front of an unsuspecting audience. Private detective John Nyquist has taken on the case of a runaway wealthy young woman Eleanor but he’s soon sure that there are links with Quicksilver. His pursuit of Eleanor takes him not only across Dayzone and Nocturna but also into the place he dreads the most, Dusk, and even to the very edges of his sanity. And all the time, all of the times, he has that feeling that he’s being watched and judged.

A Man of Shadows is a quite extraordinary novel. Its world building is absolutely fantastic – intricate, complex, moody and disturbingly real. The movement between timelines means that John Nyquist rarely sleeps and you can strongly sense his extreme fatigue as the hours pass. People who become too time-obsessed almost literally lose their minds and you know that Nyquist is well on the way to this state. It gives his task an extra urgency and desperation.

Dayzone and Nocturna are brilliantly visualised and would have been sufficiently impressive on their own but the skill of Jeff Noon astounds even further with his treatment of time. I found myself wondering why anybody would chose to live such an existence, what its appeal might be. Many of the inhabitants of this city have almost a euphoria about them as they defy the restrictions of a conventional life but others are clearly damaged by it. This is a book that makes you think as you read it. It is extremely clever.

We never see the world beyond the city, although occasionally characters are nostalgic for a sight of the real sun or the real stars. The city itself has a 1950s’ feel to it, just as the mystery element of the novel is detective noir. Now and again we’re given extracts from guidebooks which tell us a little of the background to Dayzone, Nocturna and Dusk, but generally we experience it all through the increasingly fraught mind of John Nyquist. This can be claustrophobic at times and there is also chaos and confusion. It is certainly atmospheric.

In the final third of the novel, the mystery inevitably takes us into Dusk, and what a frightening place this is. I must admit that I did become a little lost during this section as it becomes increasingly surreal and fantastical. Throw in some mind bending drugs and you get an idea of the state of Nyquist’s mind during this phase of his hunt. It’s hugely disturbing. Personally, and this is probably because I’m more of a science fiction reader than a fantasy reader, I enjoyed more the majority of the novel which portrays so brilliantly life in a world of endless day or endless night, in which time is a force to be controlled, manipulated and even sold. And all the time, outside the city lies the ‘real’ world, out of reach in so many ways to a man such as John Nyquist.

I was completely absorbed by A Man of Shadows and deeply impressed by the skill and imagination of this author. This is the first novel I’ve read by Jeff Noon and I’m not sure why that is – there are such big ideas here that provide an unusual and quirky perspective on our own lives. I love a book that makes me think while also entertaining me and A Man of Shadows does just that.

I love the cover – it really contributes to the mood of 1940s’ and 1950s’ detective noir in an extraordinary environment.

When I read Jeff Noon's Vurt a couple decades ago, I discovered a storytelling voice that I loved. There's just something about the way the author writes that I really enjoy. I haven't read all of his books, but the few I have read I have really gotten into. A Man of Shadows is another one that fits the mold.

What seems to be the beginning of a series, this novel is a detective story about a missing girl who lead character John Nyquist is hired to find. But if you've read anything else by Noon, you know things are never that straightforward. The setting for the novel is a world full of time, where people live on their own time, switching to someone else's as necessary. (It's not really time zones, nor is it a multiple time lines sort of thing... it's difficult to explain.) There are also cities that are always daylight or always night, with a mysterious and dangerous region of dusk in between.

Nyquist searches for (and finds and loses, etc.) the girl who may be a key to time, getting more involved in finding out about her life. In the midst of this there's a serial killer at large who no one is able to catch in the act, even though the murders happen in crowded public places. At times, pieces of the plot are difficult to follow, but things do, for the most part, tie together in the end.

It's a good book if you like a side of sci-fi with your mystery. Expect to be confused, but also satisfied by the end result.

This book was really hard for me to settle into. The first hundred pages were really difficult for me to get through but once I started to understand the characters, setting, and pace it grew on me. Dayzone and Nocturna really piqued my interest and I love the way Nyquist describes all of this. It really makes you question everything from all points of view and it leaves you wanting more.

I read once that taking away watches and clocks from people and not allowing them to know the time will slowly drive them mad. After reading this book I can believe it.

It starts out as a hard-boiled detective story set in a world that feels like a futuristic version of the 1950’s. The city is split into three different zones, Nocturna that is eternal night, Dusk, a place of fog and monsters where it is always twilight and no-one dare go, and Dayzone, a world of bright neon lights where it never goes dark and the citizens are constantly switching between the hundreds of different timelines.

John Nyquist is hired to find the teenage daughter of one of the richest men in the city. But like any good detective story, nothing is what it seems.

I loved the first half, the atmosphere created and the characters and the sense of place are almost perfectly done. Towards the middle it starts to feel surreal, it’s like a bad dream where Nyquist is losing his sense of time and reality. I struggled with reading this, I’ve never enjoyed dream sequences and this was more confusing than most. It messed with my mind, and it made me feel a bit ill reading it!

It settles down towards the end though and it got a bit easier on my brain.

The writing is brilliant, and it’s full of plot twists that I didn’t predict. The atmosphere and the world building is just right, I could see Dayzone in my mind, and I loved the contrast between the frantic pace of life there and the calm and quiet in Nocturna.

I do struggle sometimes with books that leave you to decide what’s real and what’s not, but if you don’t mind that then I highly recommend this book as it’s very well done, with an interesting story, good characters, and original ideas.

Siempre es un placer contar con Félix García, uno de los mejores reseñadores de este país, en Sense of Wonder. Y aún más cuando viene a hablarnos de una de las novelas más esperadas del año: A Man of Shadows, de Jeff Noon. ¡Espero que os guste!

Man of Shadows: otra historia de dos ciudades.

Banda sonora de la reseña: Félix sugiere leer esta reseña escuchando The Drugs Don't Work, de The Verve (Spotify, YouTube)

Corrían los años 90 y Jeff Noon partía la pana. Con su primera novela, Vurt (1994), consiguió eso tan difícil que es captar la atención de los fans de la ciencia ficción (se alzó nada menos que con el premio Arthur C. Clarke) y de la literatura en general (llegó a España de la mano de la editorial Mondadori). Tanto Vurt como sus secuelas, precuelas y demás periféricos (Pollen -1995)-, Automated Alice -96-, Nymphomation -97-...) son libros que, de haber aparecido diez años después se habrían calificado sin ningún reparo como New Weird y, si lo hubiesen hecho veinte años antes, acabarían en la estantería de la New Wave. Por suerte o por desgracia, lo hicieron en la zona gris del fin de siglo, tuvieron que lidiar con la categorización mucho más efímera de post-cyberpunk y soportar comparaciones con Trainspotting (1996). 

Tanto Vurt como las otras eran novelas que hablaban de drogas, drogas potentísimas capaces de reescribir la realidad. Su prosa exuberante y algo confusa parecía escrita bajo los efectos de esas mismas sustancias y, en cierto sentido, ellas mismas eran drogas que alteraban la percepción del lector. Como todo el mundo sabe, tras el subidón llega la bajada, y en las algo más de dos décadas transcurridas desde entonces a quien más y a quien menos se le ha ido pasando el puestazo. Al menos ese parece ser el caso del propio Jeff Noon que, tras algo así como veinte años de relativo silencio, roto sólo por recopilaciones de poemas, proyectos colaborativos y otros placebos, vuelve a la primera línea con A Man of Shadows (Angry Robot) y lo hace de forma más mesurada y sensata. Algunos dirán que es una novela de madurez, otros que es conservadora en las formas. ¿Es esto algo bueno o malo? Antes de pronunciarnos, examinemos los hechos.

A Man of Shadows, subtitulada “A Nyquist Mistery” (¿por qué va a ser la primera de una serie? No sé, la vida es demasiado corta como para leer las hojas de prensa), nos presenta a John Nyquist, un detective privado aquejado de todas las dolencias asociadas a esa profesión en la literatura y en el cine. Taciturno y bastante alcohólico, Nyquist presenta además una crono-patología (más sobre esto después) que debilita gravemente su sentido de la realidad y, por qué no decirlo, sus dotes detectivescas. Por lo dicho hasta ahora, los sagaces lectores ya habrán deducido que se trata de una novela que discurre por los rieles relativamente seguros de la novela negra más clásica y, por lo tanto, estaría feo de nuestra parte revelar demasiado del misterio que encierra. Baste decir que Nyquist ha sido contratado por un hombre poderoso para localizar a su hija fugada y que su camino pronto se cruzará con el de un misterioso asesino en serie que trae en jaque a la policía. Nada demasiado original, pero la gracia de las novelas de Noon no solía residir en la originalidad de sus tramas precisamente.

Por otro lado, es evidente que si todo se redujera a eso no estaríamos hablando de aquí de A Man of Shadows (echadle un vistazo a la cabecera: esto sigue siendo Sense of Wonder). El caso es que lo que nos ofrece Jeff Noon viene a engrosar la siempre creciente lista de novelas policiales o de misterio enriquecidas por una premisa especulativa, una lista tan larga que no tendría sentido reproducir aquí (buscad “science fiction detectives” en Google, que así acabamos antes). Sí citaremos algunas de las más recientes y claramente emparentadas con ésta, como pueden ser imprescindible La Ciudad y la Ciudad (2009) de China Miéville o la interesante The Last Policeman (2012) de Ben H. Winters, aunque la tendencia del pobre Nyquist a perder el oremus y sumirse en estados de duermevela nos haga pensar más en el Osama (2011) de Lavie Tidhar. 

Las pesquisas de Nyquist tienen lugar en una ciudad, de la que, por cierto, no llegamos a saber el nombre, dividida en dos (pero no entrelazada como la de Miéville), Dayzone y Nocturna. Como sus propios nombres indican, en una es siempre de día y en la otra de noche, aunque las diferencias no acaban ahí. En Dayzone todo es movimiento, la radio escupe constantemente canciones alegres en claves mayores y se adora a los dioses solares de todas las religiones; Nocturna, por su parte, es un lugar de recogimiento en el que la gente habla en susurros y la banda sonora la ponen los viejos bluesmen del Mississippi. Ninguna de estas dos zonas es la parte poco recomendable de la ciudad, eso queda reservado para la misteriosa franja que las separa, Dusk, y los barrios adyacentes. Dusk es uno de esos sitios que, parafraseando a Stephen King, están rodeados de afirmaciones apócrifas, talismanes y leyendas, o lo que es lo mismo, un lugar misterioso eternamente cubierto de niebla que da pábulo a todo tipo de supersticiones y que sólo se puede cruzar en tren. 

Esta fabulosa segregación del día y la noche se logra, por cierto, por medios que nada tienen de fabulosos. El cielo de Dayzone está cubierto de bombillas siempre encendidas y el de Nocturna, sencillamente, tapado. O sea, que nada de magia, nada de fantasía (o, bueno, sí, un poco: en Dusk), nada de mecánicas celestes y nada de tecnologías avanzadas. De hecho, A Man of Shadows sucede en el tiempo arquetípico de las historias de detectives clásicas, que no tengo muy claro a qué década de nuestra Historia corresponde, pero desde luego a una en la que no se habían inventado ni internet ni los teléfonos móviles.


Los lectores muy, muy avanzados igual reconocen en esta premisa algo similar a lo que sucede en la novela de Michael Cisco Celebrant (2012), donde se nos presenta una ciudad en la que el tiempo es función del espacio (o sea, si se camina en una determinada dirección se avanza hacia el futuro; si en la otra, hacia el pasado), pero la cuestión de la temporalidad en A Man of Shadows es a la vez más simple y más compleja que eso. Los habitantes de la ciudad, una vez liberados de la alternancia natural entre el día y la noche, encuentran que ya no tienen ninguna razón para seguir dividiendo el tiempo en veinticuatro intervalos iguales y, consecuentemente, proliferan las escalas temporales heterogéneas. Las hay para el trabajo (aumentan la productividad) y para el ocio, para el amor, para las compras... en realidad cada edificio, cada negocio y casi cada persona vive según una escala temporal propia y autónoma. Las escalas temporales son el producto más importante de su economía, las hay homologadas y piratas, y hasta existen empresas e instituciones dedicadas a mantener la coordinación entre todas ellas. 

Lo único malo es que no todas las personas son lo suficientemente estables como para soportar está situación, existen individuos que experimentan la compulsión irresistible de ir cambiando su propia escala temporal a medida que visitan diferentes lugares, lo que puede conducir a graves trastornos del sueño y de la personalidad, como es obvio, e incluso a dolencias más graves. Ni que decir tiene que John Nyquist es uno de esos individuos.

De la misma manera que la trama de A Man of Shadows reproduce con fidelidad los arquetipos del género negro, la escritura apenas se aparta de la prosa funcional que tendemos a asociar con este tipo de novelas. Esto no es de por sí criticable, es más, gracias a ello la narración administra correctamente la intriga y la exposición, es sólo que el estilo no es aquel al que nos tenía acostumbrados. Es cierto que hay momentos brillantes (el que tuvo retuvo), como la sobredosis sensorial de las descripciones del mercado que abren la novela o las ocasionales visitas a Dusk, pero en muchos de estos casos, como en las contadas experiencias de Nyquist con la droga de moda en Dayzone, el kia, parece que lo único que pervive de su típica confusión visionaria de los noventa es, precisamente, la confusión.

Está claro que el kia no es vurt, de la misma forma que A Man of Shadows no es Vurt. Donde antes teníamos el trabajo de un artista psicodélico, ahora tenemos el de un dedicado artesano. No me cabe duda de que muchos lo preferirán así, pero los fans del Noon de los 90, entre los que me cuento, haríamos bien en ir buscándonos otro camello.

A MAN OF SHADOWS by Jeff Noon is an alternate world story about John Nyquist, an alcoholic private eye, who is struggling through life when a missing persons case falls in his lap that the deeper Nyquist investigates, the more the truth reveals itself.
   A fascinating world of two lands, a permanent daytime, called Dayzone, (created by more light bulbs that can be counted) and a permanent nighttime, called Nocturna,  (completely with artificially created constellations) and the world in between, the dangerous Dusk space.   Time is also fabricated, with people living within different times each day, as if time is a commodity, not just a reality.  Nyquist floats through everyone else's time and pays for it by constantly forcing his way through his own confusion and dodging insanity.  Mind-bending by nature, A MAN OF SHADOWS is told through Nyquist's eyes, so the reader's grasp of this world is like how one interprets an expressionist or even an abstract painting; our perception fills in the blanks of information that don't exist in the painting to inform us of our understanding.  A MAN OF SHADOWS takes Nyquist's thoughts and perceptions to introduce the unique world of the book, but the reader must complete their understanding on their own.  Noon's ability to create a scene's mood and emotion is a delight to read, all the while making Nyquist and all of his alcohol induced haziness a likable hero that the reader roots for.
   Unlike anything I've read before, A MAN OF SHADOWS is a thought provoking tale layered with some wonderful and mysterious scifi imagery that really comes to power, perception, and family and what's most important.

A sci-fi thriller of sorts. Interesting if slightly confusing ideas and ultimately too much of a narrative on the world created rather than on telling the story left me cold. 

The story takes place in a city made up of three distinct parts - Dayzone, which is permanently bright thanks to the billions of neon lights covering the area, Nocturna, which is permanently dark and Dusk, which seperetaes the two areas, a type of no mans land which is avoided at all costs, neither light nor dark and covered in fog. 
The city has numerous time zones. Companies work to their own time zones.  More and more time zones are becoming available and being sold by private corporations. 

Our main protagonist is a Private Detective called John Nyquist, a washed up heavy drinking man, confused and weary from the numerous time zones and their constant changing as he moves across the city. He is hired by the head of the biggest corporation that develope and sell these different time zones, to try and find his runaway daughter. 
That's the basic premise of the story and as it developes we are introduced to a serial killer that can kill in broad daylight without anyone seeing him, street drugs that can alter time and let you see into the future and some ghostly elements thrown in for good measure. 

So, I didn't really enjoy this book. The story felt like it took an age to tell. The descriptive narrative of the city continuously interrupted the flow of the story progressing. Yes it's a sci-fi novel with a surreal city but, just as the story is moving along we get pages of descriptive prose of the surroundings etc. It just left me cold. The characters were just smothered by this and as a result played second fiddle and were extremely two dimensional. Nyquist, our main character is literally nondescript  and therefore held little or no interest. 
The second half of the book is certainly better than the first. The story did move along and there chapters of real interest and page turning elements as you were finally sucked into the story. But that didn't last ultimately as the descriptive prose took over again and all momentum of the story was lost. The ironic thing is, with so much time spent by the author describing the world and its workings, so much wasn't really explained and many elements just vaguely gone through, not really making sense to the reader. 

There are some really interesting ideas here but the vagueness with which they are executed left me cold on the whole world the book inhabits. The story seemed to play second fiddle to the surroundings. In the end it was a bit of a chore to finish this one. Not one for me I'm afraid. 


Thanks to NetGalley for an ARC.

In Dayzone, the lights are always on and there is no night. In Nocturna there is no day. Then there is Dusk, a place which John Nyquist, looking for a teenage runaway, must go if he is to find clues as to her whereabouts. Meanwhile a serial killer known only as Quicksilver is creating terror amongst a population unable to protect themselves from this seemingly invisible threat.
A Man of Shadows is essentially a murder mystery in which private eye, Nyquist, undertakes an assignment to find a missing heiress, while a rather unpleasant and untraceable serial killer stalks the streets. It is definitely more than a nod to noir, given the settings of cities in perpetual day and night and what these do to the mind-set of Nyquist, taking the genre to a whole new level. If you think about the world we live in and the extent to which our lives are now ruled by appointments and time management, A Man of Shadows brings an interesting perspective to the activity of clock watching. In this world time is different from one area of a city to another and even within buildings, requiring you to keep adjusting your watch. Think jet lag within only a few paces rather than after a transatlantic flight. Think of the physical and mental illness this induces because of the need to constantly adapt to whatever time zone you unwittingly find yourself in when you go out of one place into another. Think of how this can be exploited by those seeking to make money out of it. Then think about how difficult it is to solve a crime and keep your sanity when the past is always coming back to haunt you.
Do not expect the style of writing found in his earlier work, but in A Man of Shadows Jeff Noon crafts an equally bizarre world to his previous novels set in an alternative Manchester. You are not air dropped into this new world of Dayzone, Noctural and the in between Dusk, and expected to get on with it. Instead it is largely explained through the eyes of Nyquist as he passes by. You do need this because you’ll spend a while getting your head around the complexity of how Noon takes the concept of time and plays with it from every possible angle.
What emerges from the story is an intricate murder mystery set within a complex world of ruthless commerce driven by and perpetuating the notion of time, which has insinuated itself into the very minds and soul of the population governed by it.

I have been a fan of Jeff Noon ever since his debut novel, VURT, from 1993. Noon's latest novel is a noir detective thriller, set in a city divided into two zones, Dayzone, where it is always bright daylight. and Nocturna, where it is always nighttime. In both cases we have artificial day and night: Dayzone is lit with so much artificial light, bulbs and neon lights and whatever, that you cannot see the sky at all -- it is huamn-made illumination however high up you go. Nocturna also seems to be domed away from the sky; bulbs high up are like stars, making for artificial constellations. Between these two main regions is the ambiguous realm of Dusk, an area of ambiguity, of mist and shadows and diffuse artificial moonlight, where it is dangerous to go. People who enter Dusk are most often never seen again. Trains traverse the Dusk as they shuttle people between Dayzone and Nocturna, but the trains never stop in Dusk itself. 

A Man of Shadows is about day and night, or light and darkness; but it is also about time. There are multiple time streams in Dayzone and in Nocturna -- every activity and every place seems to have a different time. People are always manically switching the time on their watches and clocks, in order to keep up with whatever region they are in, or whatever activity they are following. In Dayzone, the incessant light supposedly boosts industrial productivity; everyone is always busy and nobody gets enough sleep -- nobody even knows when it is time to sleep. Rest and sleep are possible in Nocturna, but there are also plenty of nighttime activities -- bars and clubs and the like -- as well as mysterious zones where it is always midnight, so time barely seems to pass at all. 

The novel's protagonist, John Nyquist, is a down and out detective drawn straight from the realms of film noir. He is hired by the richest man in Dayzone to find his missing daughter, and from there he is drawn into ever-deeper regions of mystery and ambiguity. I won't go into the plot in detail, but suffice it to say that Nyquist discovers the seamy underside both of Dayzone's frantic capitalist activity, and of Nocturna's hidden underworld. There are mysterious illicit drugs that alter your sense of time, murders by an invisible killer that turns out to involve time theft, and art works that expand or contract light and shadow, time and stasis. Nyquist struggles to figure out what is going on, and to rescue the young woman Eleanor who seems to be in danger from her involvement in all these activities, at the same time that he struggles through his own neurotic difficulties. The threat of a "time crash" -- sort of like the financial crisis of 2008, but involving everyone's existential sense of duration (since after all, time is money) hangs over everything.

What really makes the book, though, is its surreal, poetic evocations of the three realms of daylight, nighttime, and dusk. The novel's emotional center lies in these descriptions: the exultation and madness of the day, the alluring mystery and menacing coolness of the night, the physical heaviness of the mist of dusk.

Jeff Noon's latest work is a masterpiece. It'll have you thinking about time in ways you never thought of while you're caught in the neurotic, time-obsessed cities of his creation. The world-building is splendid, along with the skillful writing that shows years of experience. I love when genres cross over, and "Man of Shadows" is a perfect crossover between a thriller and a science fiction novel. Really great work; am so glad I got a copy to read. 

My only critique is that this book got a lot better at the end. Until that point, something about it just wasn't ... solid enough? The world took too long to feel fleshed out. And even then, "A Man of Shadows" was just missing something crucial that other great fantasy books have. A more likable protagonist, maybe, or better worldbuilding?

Either way, it was very enjoyable. Thank you for the opportunity!

A Man of Shadows is a surreal detective book which blends popular elements of the fantastical and private-eye genres to form a uniquely stylized story about a missing woman and the contrasting cityscapes of Dayzone and Nocturna of which she ventures. There's a lot of imagination infused in the dime-store detective facade that brings complexities conceived through clever concepts and well thought-out plot devices which make A Man of Shadows a joy to read.

Rather than go into full 'review mode' I thought I'd highlight the pros and cons of this book. This is something I'll likely do with other surreal detective books, given I love the genre and generally dig the added fantastically elements.

Pros:
- Nocturna and Dayzone are atmospheric cityscapes which add another dimension to the story.
- The characters are well defined and, as a commonly used term on my blog 'read real' 
- Nyquist is an interesting protagonist who conforms to all the lone wolf stereotypes commonly associated with a private detective. 

Cons:
- The story got a little weird and off track in the 'dusk' (the mysterious landscape between Nocturna and Dayzone). While I like the unconventional P.I book, the family drama aspect detracted from Nyquist and changed the feel of the book. It became more about the missing woman and her family woes as apposed to a P.I book.

My rating: 3.5 / 5, could've nearly been a 4 and might end up that way as time passes. This is a book full of interesting concepts that will resonate with the reader long after the last page is turned.