Book Reviews

by Anna Battista

Jeff Noon - Needle in the Groove (Anchor)

Imagine a different way of making music, or rather a different way of recording tracks in a studio. Imagine if all the digital shit was past and people recorded their tracks on liquid music, little plastic balls that contained tracks recorded on the rippling waves of an enigmatic liquid. Remixing these tracks would be rather easy: you should just shakeitshakeitshakeit and with a flip of your wrist you would have the umpteenth version of the same track. Imagine also that the liquid music might be sniffed or injected, where would the music take you? To have the answer to this question you must only read Jeff Noon's latest novel, Needle in the Groove. Noon, former member of unknown punk band Manicured Noise and also known to the literary world as "the Lewis Carroll of Manchester's housing estates," as the press christened him, tells, in his latest novel, the story of Elliot, a bass player who finally finds the right band to play with: DJ Jody, sensual singer Donna and drummer 2spot. What he doesn't suspect of finding is also a new way of making music and of taking drugs and an enigma, the secret of 2spot, to solve. Noon's novel becomes a map of rhythms, the words of the text become lyrics in a style that resembles dub and have the inconsistency of the buzzing of an analogue and of the pumping lines coming out of Elliot's bass. That is why Noon can finally describe the remix of a song with the words "the creeping two-shots of a flow-down/drumfall and the rim of skin-beat, in a snare-dancer's downtime rhythm-loop explode lament/where all the rain cymbals sing/the contours of the voice, waiting for the bass to steal, the sliced and crazy feel." Reading this book is a bit like taking a trip, a journey through a vibe as the writer reinvents the music like a DJ remixing, scratching and killing his decks. The novel becomes a kaleidoscope where the vinyl glides, the liquid music shines and the boomsonic words collide. Life, what is it but a remix? (www.needleinthegroove.com)

Henry Baum - The Golden Calf (Rebel Inc)

After being sacked, the loner Ray Tomkins finds a new job as a security guard in a college and things seem to stabilise for him, at least until he starts writing paranoid letters to one of the students and has to leave. So, he shifts his attention to another kind of job, that of scaring Hollywood stars, one in particular, Tim Griffith, beloved and respected actor, idolised by his hordes of fans like the proverbial golden calf. Thinking that Griffith doesn't know anything about real life, being confined in huge villas, obliged to live a glittering life, after harassing him with endless letters, Ray commits an extreme act dictated by his rage. Henry Baum manages to portray in his first novel what at the beginning looks like a normal and ordinary character, but ends up in being an obsessive paranoid maniac described with detailed and precise accurateness. The author also shows how the media can turn a man into a phenomenon: angry, unknown and desperate, Ray finds his fame as a potential killer, taking his personal revenge on Hollywood and on the media. Baum's novel will have you feeling divided between love and hate, sympathy and pity for the main character of this story which turns into a quest for the truth in Hollywood where everything is made of plastic, feelings are trampled on and people sell their souls and bodies to the filmmaking business. (www.cannongate.net)

Issue 3, October 2000 |