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going to come out of it. It just seems right and correct
that it should be happening now, at this space in time.”
Right here and right now being the end of the century,
the nonexistent year double-zero. The year where trend
itself is outdated, and there is no mode.
“Yeah. In this whole kind of pro-Postmodern world
we’re living in, I think it’s fruitful that people can
discover new ways of telling stories. The way we live
now, I call it Liquid Culture, and I think to find the
prose equivalent of that is great.”
And has he? Noon has another book due to be published
in Autumn 2000, entitled Cobralingus. Is that his
liquid fiction?
“Cobralingus takes this whole idea of remix fiction
and pushes it right to the extreme. It’s based on electronic
music techniques, where I take sampled text and
I push them through a series of gates. Each gate has a
different effect upon the text, but it’s not done using
computers. It’s all in my mind. And as it works its way
through, each time it’s a remix of what’s gone before.
“I’m also starting to write with another writer in
Brighton here, and that extends the thought into other
people – we’re remixing each other’s text. My work’s
become very experimental at the moment, since coming
to Brighton. Coming here was difficult, as you can
imagine. Removing myself from the source of all those
stories took me a long time to even start.”
And Manchester meets liquid fiction – or at least, liq-
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and
uid music – in Needle In The Groove. I have to admit,
even to a ‘hardened’ Noon reader like myself, the first
few pages of his latest novel were a shock, simply due
to the extremely unconventional layout of the text and
the way the narrative is presented.
“Well, it’s no more unconventional than the way Patti
Smith sets her poetry out, or Bob Dylan…”
Maybe not, but for Noon it was a big step forward,
and one he’s obviously happy with. Will we see more
of that? Is his work going to continue, and develop, in
that style?
“Certainly in these separate projects I’m talking
about, yeah. Cobralingus is the first of them, and it will
become more liquid. But in my ‘mainstream’ novels,
there’ll still be an overriding sense of story and narrative.
I’m never going to lose that. I have no interest in
presenting the reader with a kind of ‘destroyed’ narrative,
unless it’s specifically in an experimental setting.
But obviously, the experiments that I’m doing will feed
into the narrative stuff as well.”
This poses a question. If he’s committed to developing
this style, and now that he’s crossed the threshold
with Needle, will he feel comfortable ‘going back’ to
conventional narrative?
“I think it’s to do with being honest to the story you’re
telling, that’s all. I have this idea that every story has its
own particular language. A lot of writers don’t consider
this at all; they’ve got their style and they do it. But for
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