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Wurt (1993)

by Jeff Noon(Favorite Author)

4.05 of 5 Votes: 4

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

MAG

series

Vurt

review 1: So here's the second Dystopian novel I read. Well! it was definitely lot better than 'Harm'. However, I felt it was a lengthy and a tad boring at some points. Still, I liked it. I liked reading it. I might not go and tell my friends to read it for sure. But sure it served the purpose for me.and we'll just ignore the incest aspect involved in the book which I think was completely irrelevant.
review 2: I would’ve never stumbled on this book had it not been for Dave Haslam’s Manchester, England, an absorbing, music- and politics-focused account of Manchester, with special attention given to the era between 1970 and 2000. In that book, Haslam cites several authors, and of Noon he particularly notes some of the Madchester influence, which I found was exactly ri... moreght. This is one of my shorter reviews, more a rhapsody than my usual way of recounting a book and the experience it afforded...This is a strutting book, thrusting itself onto a reader’s consciousness with a sustained, implacable beat. While most of the riffs are terse and laid out in a steady thump thump thump, the harmonic melody (largely a positive major-key melody) always carried along with it a plangent minor-key air, and the two alternate in intensity throughout, sometimes one almost wholly dominant, but always both weaving a harmony. This novel was visceral, musical, visual, and cerebral. Noon is able to tell a quest story (Orpheus and posse tracking down Eurydice through a landscape that rivals Odysseus’ Mediterranean and Dante’s Hell) that seems always to be on edge, just poised to totally collapse in on itself, and it’s only the momentum that keeps it upright. The “edge” is a concept that is explored a good deal—it’s the seam that exists between “this” world and worlds of dreams, and dreams within dreams. There is a poetic and misty aspect to the descriptions of the denizens of the flesh world of Manchester, and it’s even more heightened when the words describe adrenalized rapid-fire neuronal activities that exist in a hazy reality of our (the readers’) imaginations. Noon’s ability to play on this haziness to evoke unseen worlds and give them some shape in our minds is wonderful, and even dull plodders like myself are able feel what it may be like to soar.To call this story an epic puts it in the ranks of the Odyssey, the Iliad, Beowulf, et al, and Vurt’s principal characters are the gods, spirits, titans, and demons of another world and time. About Vurt there are volumes of possible exegesis, just as the Greek epics spawned nearly three millennia of praise, criticism, and pastiche. What makes the work epic is Noon’s ability to keep the bare bones simple, while using language and prosody that taps into springs of imagination, keeping everything on the edge.[I enjoyed the book, and I especially liked the additional three stories that came with this 20-year anniversary edition, as it showed that besides this mock-epic story in the world and time of Vurt, there are others ways of being, that there is a “reality”, both a context and an extension of the world in the novel proper.] less

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