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did inspire with books like Vurt was a sense that no
matter who you were or where you lived, your town
was as good a place as anywhere to tell a story. It’s
very easy to get trapped into the feeling that interesting
things only happen in ‘glamorous’ places, like London
or New York…
“Yeah, and the reason for that is quite simple, but
a difficult truth for people to handle. It’s to do with
stories, and the kind of environments that allow stories
to happen. Obviously, with places like New York and
certain areas of London, you have an environment that
does very readily create stories; it’s to do with the way
that people live their lives there. Once you get into the
provinces, of England especially, you start to lose that
melting-pot of ideas. There has to be a lot of work done.
It’s much more difficult to write about Manchester than
it is about Soho, for instance. But these are problems
that writers in the future will have to face and sort out.”
A matter of finding the stories?
“Yeah. I think that in a place like Manchester there
are a limited number of stories anyway. And a lot of the
writers that have written about Manchester have tended
to concentrate on these certain things.”
Is this why Noon chose to make his work ostensibly
science fiction? As a way of creating a Manchester
where stories are created more readily?
He pauses, contemplating his orange juice. “Difficult
question, that.”
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and
That’s the idea…
“Certainly, I’ve been writing plays…” He pauses,
considering. “I’ve been writing since 1984, doing
one-man shows. And that stuff wasn’t really about
Manchester as such. It tended to be quite experimental,
just set nowhere. My only big success as a playwright
was Woundings, and that’s set on the Falkland Islands!
“So I didn’t really have that inkling to write about
Manchester, and I think that was because nobody was.
There wasn’t the heritage there which you get in, say,
pop music. Pop’s been rooted in Manchester since
1977, the idea that this is a place where you can do
that. So young generations of people automatically
fall into it.”
But it seems the final impetus came from an unexpected
turn of events. “I started writing a play called
The Torture Garden, again set in a totally fictional
environment. But the person I was writing the play for
left the country for a job abroad, and I was left with this
half-finished idea.”
At that point, Noon was working in a Waterstone’s
bookshop in Manchester. This is the point where everything
happens; this is where it all turns around. Steve
Powell, the man behind the fledgling Ringpull Press,
was also working there. And he needed someone to
write a novel for him…
“I took the ideas of that play, and turned them into
Vurt. And that’s the first time that I started to write about
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