Not just noir. Neo noir? Noir punk? Jeff Noon's writing is terribly hard to classify as usual. But oh so very enjoyable.

The easiest correlation to make here is with The Neverending Story, only darker. Mystery, darkness, literature, word games, head games, mindf#%^ etc.

The reader is once again plunged into a strange world with our protagonist John Nyquist. This time the town is Storyville which is fueled by... stories. But what happens if there is a fictional version of yourself living out a different story from your own personal living real world story? Messed up things.

This book is so quotable. I think I highlighted about 85% of it. Noon's writing is captivating and unsettling. After finishing this book I saw a stinkbug in my home and for a split second was terrified it was an alphabug.

This isn’t the type of book I would usually read but it sounded different so I thought I would give it a go.

The book is well written and I found myself pulled in to the story quite early on, as there are a lot of mysteries set up in the first few chapters. There is definitely a clear mood and feeling in the book, and in this sense it reminded me of 1984 with the descriptions of the city. There were a few times when the names of areas or streets and their descriptions seemed to be a little tongue in cheek or trying to hard to be satirical but I like to think this wasn’t the point and it was a lighthearted jest.

For me the story was quite confusing and I’m still not sure if I would recommend or would say I enjoyed the book as such - but I can see others enjoying it and think it’s purely that this is out of my usual comfort zone.

After reading the first Nvquist novel,A Man of Shadows, I said I’d never look at time passing in the same way again. The Body Library has given me the feeling that I’ll never read a book in quite the same way again, without wondering if somewhere, in some other realm just beyond reach, things I’m reading are being affected and changed by the very fact of me reading it..

The Body Library is a surreal reading experience, this time throwing our main protagonist into a city built upon words, narratives and stories – where everyone either tells the tale or listens to it – where “narrative officers” monitor the written word and keep track of intersections, where Nvquist is writing a tale called A Man Of Shadows….

Yes it sounds quite quite mad and it absolutely is -but it is also completely, imaginatively and utterly brilliant from the opening hallucinogenic journey through an abandoned tower block to the final emotionally charged moments of resolution – this is a story that kind of doesn’t really have a beginning middle and end so much as a stream of feelings and observations – to call The Body Library immersive reading doesn’t really come close to explaining the feel of it but is probably as close as I’m going to get. The little nuances of character, the dreamlike setting, the smart little descriptive touches and the clever, rewarding literary allusions (look at the title of the book for a start) all add to what is a novel like no other I have ever read. But I want to read more, I was sorry to leave it behind….

Still, this is noir. It really is. Noir within science fiction, within fantasy, within crime – the Nvquist novels so far break all the genre boundaries and dissolve them all into one glorious technicoloured mash up of a read. With Alphabugs…

Underneath the beautiful madness The Body Library is wittily observant, creepy and disconcerting, occasionally humorous, always on message even as it goes off on tangents and is a wonderfully hypnotic and completely mesmerizing story. I loved every single insane moment of it, just riveting. Completely riveting.

More Nvquist please. Soon as possible.

Highly Recommended

The Body Library is the second book in the Nyquist Mysteries series published by Angry Robots but this is the first of Jeff Noon's books I've picked up.

There is a fluidness to Noon's writing that initially made me think The Body Library would be like Ishiguro's dream-like The Unconsoled. As I read further, however, I felt more like I was in the atmosphere of 1408 by Stephen King or the movie Dark City -- the noir settings and slip-away realities where what's around the corner can't be articulated and yet ... Things change and reality is different but the writing is well-structured so it's easy to follow. The writing is as much of a treat as the setting and the story and the characters.

In this magical realism structure, writing such as that below, fits in seamlessly before we go back to the pace of the noir setting.

INK … his eyes closed and he sank further down into the dark into the flow the fluid all was fluid a black liquid in which his body floated drifted suspended submerged breathing yes still breathing in the liquid in the blackness of the pool he sank down and lay there suspended and dreaming and being read yes being read head to foot every part of him his mind his thoughts his blood and bone his eyes his limbs his heart yes all of him read again and again as a book of flesh where the ink was seeking the stories all the stories of his life every last one being read by the pool of ink in which he lay suspended drifting floating submerged breathing yes breathing still and being read and his eyes...

I loved the story with its world of writing and the mechanics of it all come to life. In 1959, Storyville, Private Eye John Nyquist is set on the trail of a man who doesn't seem to be doing much apart from talking to people but as the trail leads to a tower at the edge of the city and an illicit book -- the Body Library -- he both can't and can escape.

When narrative structure becomes legislated and mandatory, abstract experimental works become intoxicating. The writer's life becomes a metaphor for the human condition, which Noon brings to life and then deconstructs again. And when you break down life there's always some pain right in the middle of everything.

A great read with a creepy child and a place where you can check in any time but you can never leave.

The Body Library is published on April 3 2018.

The Body Library by Jeff Noon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

To call this a simple Noir mystery is to completely miss the point. Noon has created something on a completely different level of anything I've read before.

Yeah, that's right. The world of the imagination taking to the mean streets, turning meta-fiction on its head and grounding a whole world in a stinking reality where people really are the stories and stories walk the streets.

This is a fantasy and a science fiction novel. Make no mistake about that. Noon is running with a fantastic idea where a city must live with the fundamental fact that words are magic for everyone. Everyone is a writer, and if they aren't, then they're a character in someone else's' story. The motivations are clear. To get ahead, you must write. And then the police are editors and there are Dada fiction writers rebelling against the same-old narratives and murder isn't always murder... it's art.

The novel makes it gritty and grounded in the Noir foundation, but by god, it gets hallucinogenic as hell as Nyquist (our escaped protagonist from a city beset by shifting timelines) finds himself in a murder mystery he has to solve, only to get caught up in a madness of becoming a writer or be the written.

Lordy, this was one HELL of a trip. Not for the faint of heart. Or the impatient. But by Bradbury in heaven, I swear this is the spiritual godson of The Illustrated Man on PCP.

Noon's imagination is TOP NOTCH. I think I've just found my new favorite to-go guy for cutting edge and brilliant Weird fiction.

*does a happy dance*

A BIG thanks to Netgalley for letting me read this early. :)

A Whole New Level of Noir

Jeff Noon's Nyquist novels manage to marry high quality noir conventions with wildly imaginative speculative fiction in order to create compelling and immersive experiences. Noon creates alternate worlds, but not in a fantasy sense, or as mere alternatives to our reality, or even as quantum-babble folded space-time constructs. His alternative worlds are much more imaginative, loaded, and densely created than that.

In the first Nyquist novel, "A Man of Shadows", detective Nyquist was caught between Dayzone, where the lights never go out, and Nocturna, a place of permanent dark. Here, every person, business, or neighborhood had its own personal time. Maybe a 50 minute hour, or 26 hour day. Time schedules were created, copyrighted, bought and sold, and Nyquist was in a classic noir corruption plot that turned on the manipulation and corruption of time. Noon made this real and plausible and totally convincing.

This time around we are in "Storyville", a city built upon and powered by stories and words. Everyone is either a storyteller or a listener. People buy and sell each other's stories. There are forbidden stories, smuggled stories, shared stories, and secret stories. Vast bureaucracies keep track of each person's "story" and how they all fit together. "Narrative Officers" monitor and annotate what writers are writing, (Nyquist is writing "A Man of Shadows"), and whether what they are doing fits in with the larger city story. Alphabugs, bugs representing different letters of the alphabet, fly around, and words roam the streets. This sounds hallucinatory and maybe a bit precious, but it works because Noon sets it out with conviction and deep imaginative power.

Nyquist finds himself tailing some guy at the request of a client. A murder, a disappearance or two, getting sapped with some frequency, and a dame all increase the stakes. The plot is twisty and sometimes a bit fevered, but the plotting is tight and the pieces come together nicely. Noon doesn't follow the tough guy and snappy patter rules; this is noir in the honorable man in a tough world style. Nyquist is a bit lost and a lot damaged, but doing the right thing matters. And, words are escaping, letters are infecting people, fictional narrative is turning up as a drug, corrupt forces are planning something big. Nyquist needs answers.

Unlike the first Nyquist book, this one has a showier and sometimes more playful side. There are, as you might imagine, loads of literary allusions tucked away, almost on every page. (Even the book's title is a play on the title of a similar real book.) Noon has fun with place names. The bureaucratic government center is on Kafka Court. A grimy dark alley is ironically named Betjeman Way. Nyquist lives in A.C. Clarke Town. And then there are a number of secondary characters who appear in nicely structured set scenes and cameo bits that recall other fabled books.

The upshot is that you get a classic twisty detective noir, a fantastical setting, and sly, witty and deadpan literate humor. These are great books for reading.

(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.)