Subject: Review of Pollen by Jeff Noon (fiction, sf)

From: [email-masked] (Richard )
Date: 18 May 1996 20:29:23 GMT

Enter at Your Own Risk

Pollen
By Jeff Noon
335 pp
Crown Publishers. $23.00

By Richard Tortora
	
The late eighties debut of William Gibson' s new brand of science
fiction helped to revitalize the genre, been copied countless times,
and has since left readers thirsting for more. With the release of
Neuromancer he became a father of the dark extrapolative genre of
Cyberpunk, as well as mainstreaming usage of the term Cyberspace.
Where Gibson's first novel is akin to sleek modern architecture, made
of razor-straight-edged steel, chrome and smoky glass, in Pollen, Jeff
Noon uses a Gibsonesque steel frame, but layers it in conjured myth,
Gothic dark-wood carvings, soft lush colorful murals and a strong
floral scent of burning incense wafting from its pages.  Where
Gibson's Cyberspace is toured rationally by hardware resonant of
familiar technological extensions of the computer; mouse and keyboard,
as told by the author in an Interzone interview, Noon describes his
version of Cyberspace, "I wanted to take it to the point that it had
become such a part of society that they no longer know what it was.
Its origins were hidden in a kind of myth, a kind of magic."    The
vurt is a vague and murky place reached through the insertion of
`feathers' down the throats of the would-be virtual reality travelers,
a realm where all dreams of human kind have existed as long as the
species has been dreaming, but only recently realized.
       	 This is a novel of dog people, napalm cigarettes, a hive of
cabbies who must wipe their memory to receive and realize the same map
of Manchester that is tattooed on the whole of their bodies...  This
futuristic city has become plagued by a deadly hay-fever where its
citizens are forced to wear protective breathing masks and observe the
steadily rising pollen counts of the day.  The plot commences with a
cab ride odyssey where a  fictional character from the vurt,
Prepesterone, pays Coyote, a doggie cabby, with a fatal kiss that
roots flowers in his lungs. Sibyl Jones is a psychic Shadow-cop,
assigned to the case, while Boda, a potential lover of the victim and
cabby, begins a parallel investigation or her own.  Both figures learn
of their past ties, as well as the shared handicap of being unable to
dream.   This disability leaves the pair immune to the messy plague
whose origins are rooted in the vurt or dreamworld
	Despite the eventual revelation of the character first introduced
being some kind of  likeable rogue dogman cabby driving through a
murky nondescript dangerous realm of `limbo' where he has to fight off
violent stowaway `zombies', Noon allows a neon-blue thread of
coherence.  It serves as a guide through this bizarre, unfamiliar and
darkened room, where instincts would suggest a guarded tension lest
the reader bangs into a low table, or into that silent someone waiting
in the shadows to slit her throat.  Just as the reader is well exposed
and ready to walk unimpeded throughout this surreal world, Noon pulls
a plank from underfoot,  leaving her to a plunge helplessly into the
murky, bewildering environment,  grasping for shards of coherence, and
desperately scrabbling  for some sort of reality orientation.  In the
middle of the book the aforementioned thread can now be described as
the very thin line between characters. There is often a delay of
uncertainty as to from whose point of view the story is told.  Save
for the sporadic inclusion of a sense of maternal instinct, the
principal character Sibyl's, femininity is nonpresent and only
occasionally disrupts the more dominant unintended male image,
mirroring that of the author's masculine thirty-something book-jacket
photo.  In the final third of the book the surviving reader is allowed
back on her feet, able to understand and appreciate Noon's odd world
with its epic weaving of  fable and fabricated myth, and being left
with a sense that the whole trying acid trip was somehow well worth
it.   
	Like the blossoming of religion from the seed of  fact in Pollen,
Noon splices multiple layers of mysticism upon the enduring Gibsonian
model.   It tempts the reader into its colorful pages, slaps her
around and than unceremoniously spits her out to convalesce.  There is
a frustrating muddied portion of road in this book, where the average
cars should not venture.  This kind of disorientating encounter is not
meant for everyone, so take pause to be forewarned to brace yourself,
shift into that four wheel drive and enter at your own risk...