[In the review below, Miller lauds Noon's use of language in Vurt.]

[In Jeff Noon's Clarke Award-winner Vurt, we're] amongst the Stash Riders, a bunch of druggy kids on the dole in near-future Manchester UK, scruffy, unromanticized, as aimlessly amoral as the worst of Kress's Livers and considerably less picturesque than [William] Gibson's usual cyberpunk lowlives. The virtual reality that gives the book its title is the world of a strange drug (taken in the form of a feather), rather than a realm accessed by computer. The cybernetic element here is the prevalence of robots and cyborged humans with random bits of tech in them—human/machine combinations just as seedy as the ordinary humans, as sad, as hungry for the dreams that only Vurt can provide. Even Gibson's hackers would seem a more energetic variety of outlaw, not content to sit and drool, bleed, or rust away in an inner-city doorway.

Vurt provides dream-triumphs, sensual pleasure, even knowledge, for a weary European country decades ahead of America in its acknowledgement of defeat. An expert known as Game Cat describes the effects of the drug known as English Voodoo: "There is a dream out there, of a nation's second rise: When the dragon is slain and the good queen awakens from her coma-sleep, to a land capable of giving breath to her."

As this passage indicates, there's beauty in the sad nation under the sway of Vurt—it just lies in the language, more than in Noon's apparently unpromising subject matter. Witness this observation from Scribble, the narrator: "The emptiness inside of me reflected in the glass fragments. So I was a thousand times sad, with each footstep. Sometimes even broken glass, cracked cement, sad lives; well, they seem like the good dreams of bad things." That last bit, italicized in the book, could easily pass for Noon's own response to his material—and to his characters as well (though Scribble isn't such a bad sort really; he's just been deprived of what we'd call "a life").

So, rather like the feather-drug itself, Vurt gradually comes to fascinate with its sad beauty, and a wayward form of mystery not to be confused with standard genre action, but found in some of the more haunted Raymond Chandler novels. I should emphasize that the book's pleasures are not all matters of language. There's eventually a plot, involving Scribble's loss of his incestuous sister-lover Desdemona, Eurydice to his Orpheus, and the powers of loss, madness, and other factors can drive the characters to actions as gripping as anything in our own more apparently purposeful society.

In all, Vurt is deserving of its prestigious award, and well worth reading, so long as you're into literary quality, convincing atmosphere, and a future animated more by age-old passions than by whatever high-tech lies behind those strange drug-feathers that lead to another world….