Vurt

The feathers in Vurt pass the user's consciousness into a virtual reality which interacts with the real world. People and things can be lost in the Vurt, or they can come from the Vurt into the real; the limitation being that they must be swapped for something of similar worth. Scribble lost his sister Desdemona to the Vurt and in return he got an alien drug being known as the Thing-From-Outer-Space. The novel tells the story of Scribble's attempts to bring Desdemona back from the Vurt, in a cyberpunkish world threatened by shadowcops and hostile dogmen. Scribble is also known as Inky MC; he is a DJ and keyboards player, hence the musical connection to the Orpheus legend. His gift of prophecy comes from his long interactions with the Vurt which have given his being some of the stuff of the Vurt itself. Vurt is one of the five states of being; the others are Human, Dog, Robo and Shadow, and most people of his generation mix two or sometimes three of these. Scribble's quest requires him to find Curious Yellow, the rarest Vurt Feather of all; only this will enable him to find Desdemona, as it was Curious Yellow that snared her in the Vurt to begin with. He encounters the Game Cat, an enigmatic gentleman who tells him of a Vurt feathermaker called Icarus Wing, who will know how to get Curious Yellow.

Scribble's gang, the Stash Riders, are busted by the cops for illegal possession of an alien. The gang's leader Beetle is infected with a fatal fractal virus, a stray bullet kills Vurt-born Suzie whose lover bound her hair to his in an effort never to lose her back to the Vurt ... the Riders fall apart hounded by cops, and militant dogs led by the sinister Das Uberdog, whose hatred for humans is only matched by his lust for human women. Scribble becomes Inky MC and distances himself from the remnants of the gang, but his fate compels him to keep seeking Desdemona. Eventually he is able to enter the Vurt and bring her back, but remember the rule that anything brought out must be swapped for something else of equal value, plus or minus Hobart's Constant? The alien is dead. All that can be swapped is Scribble himself. He takes his place at the Vurt's controls alongside the Game Cat. This version of Euridice does return from Hell, but as with Orpheus, the beloved cannot enjoy the fruits of his labours. Scribble stays in the Vurt and watches the years passing. From an age of 17 to Desdemona's 15, he ages to 25 while Desdemona, now in the real world, takes up with Mandy of the Stash Riders and reaches the age of 38. The swap, though, was fair; Desdemona was a creature of the real and Scribble inhabits the Vurt as though born to it.

Loved the energy of this when it came out, the youthful characters in a reinvented Manchester at just the right time, a not-in-your-face allegory of racial tolerance, and dogs. And feathers. May have given me ideas re stories that involve parallel worlds.
A boy puts a feather into his mouth ....

In his first novel, Vurt, (1993) Jeff Noon introduces us to a Manchester where the drug of choice is immersion in a virtual world, delivered by feathers placed down the throat. Some feathers (the blue) are benign: but others, the yellow, can kill. Vurt is a chase thriller set in a violent world where dogmen roam and shadowcops patrol the streets, where in Bottletown the streets are carpeted with broken glass, and where the old divisions between beast and human, real and virtual (hence, Vurt) are thinning. 

It’s a book with drugs in, but Noon - who strongly denies being any part of a generation that would involve Irvine Welsh - spares us the obligatory drug hell. Junkies are boring. All they care about is where the next fix is coming from. But what if the drug, or the feather, actually got you into another world, and that world was objectively real, made so by the Vurt feather? And if, to go further, objects could be lost inside the Vurt, if they were swapped for an object of equal worth? Hence the Thing that the Stash riders, up until then a happy-go-lucky crew of youngsters living Moss Lane East, have in their van. The Thing just turned up and in exchange the Vurt took Scribble’s sister/lover Desdemona; now all Scribble and his friends want is to swap the two back. All the police want is to do them in. And somewhere, retreated into the Vurt, is the game’s controller, the Game Cat. 

 So Vurt becomes the Orpheus story, with Scribble - he’s a DJ sometimes known as Inky MC - going into Hell to retrieve his lost love. The language isn’t quite as unleashed yet though there are already plenty of jokelets: naturally a robocrusty (a half-robot being with a dog on a string) has his hair in droidlocks .… Turdsville, where the dogs live, is a particularly nasty invention, a dog equivalent of Bottletown, surrounded by waste. Right from the start Noon is obviously fascinated by boundaries, by the edges of things, by the way that one state can slide into another. The world of Vurt allows five basic states of being: human, dog, vurt, shadow, robot. Then there are second-level beings - hybrids between two of the five basic states - who are generally accepted as being superior to the five. Pure, goes an often repeated slogan, Is Poor. (and third- and fourth-level beings, while rare so far, are even better than second-level).

The protagonists of Vurt while not necessarily from poor backgrounds are alienated, by unfriendly family lives - a common Noon trope is the absent or abusive father - or by their choice of life. Jaz, a principal character in Noon’s third novel Nymphomation (1997) is British-Asian, and Vurt contains a remarkable sequence where Our Heroes evade the cops by diverting through an Eid celebration. Scribble himself is an outsider to outsiders by being apparently pure human but having within him, though he tries to deny it, a sliver of vurt, which betrays itself by flecks of gold in his eyes, and by his ability to go into the Vurt without needing a feather.

[originally published as part of "Falling out of Cars" in "Scream City," issue 1, 2006]