The book jacket for Jeff Noon's Vurt is full of hyperboles.

Vurt is sui generis in form but filled with the shadows of classics--from the Orpheus and Faust myths to A Clockwork Orange and Blade Runner. With relentless pacing, exuberant originality, and prodigious wit, Jeff Noon has created a language, a world, and a love story destined to take its place among the classics.

I beg to differ.

What is (the) Vurt? Nobody knows. And one of the problems with Vurt is that Noon never bothers to explain what the Vurt is. The closest to an explanation that I found is that the Vurt is collective dreaming, some sort of disembodied virtual-reality consciousness that can be accessed by stroking a feather in one's mouth. Different colored feathers give access to different parts of the Vurt. The most powerful color is yellow; while a user can jerk out of most Vurts, yellow feathers open the door to Vurts that you can't escape, unless you survive. Desdemona, the sister of Vurt protagonist Scribble, took one such yellow feather. And now Scribble is trying to get her back.

The Vurt is a fascinating idea. Too bad Noon didn't feel the need to explain it more fully--or, indeed, at all. Instead, the Vurt ends up being a vague nothing in the plot, an area where no rules apply and therefore very little of excitement can actually happen.

But that shouldn't be fatal to the book: after all, plenty of science fiction novels introduce bizarre ideas with very little explanation. (Cf. Michael Marshall Smith.) Sadly, Noon lacks the werewithal to pull off his audacious creation with panache. Throughout Vurt, he attempts to maintain a writing style that oozes hip and cool; the only problem is that he's trying too hard, and it shows. The resulting jerky sentences and fast-spun slang sound forced and, ultimately, annoying; rather than jazz, it's the voice of a bad rapper trying to fit in with the gang. Even worse, the plot of Vurt is as limp and dull as the language. Scribble scatters thither and yon in search of his sister, hooking up with various characters whose lives hardly matter to the reader, only to succeed (or fail?) in his quest in a bizarre conclusion that saps whatever life was left of the novel in the last few pages.

Vurt is only partially redeemed by the fact that Noon does have quite an imagination, and his ideas, taken by themselves, are interesting. Too bad you have to sit through the rest of the book to capture all of the noteworthy nuggets from his mind.

Copyright © 2003 Steven Wu