The Body Library

John Nyquist #2

by Jeff Noon

Jeff Noon returns with a staggering hallucinogenic sequel to A Man of Shadows, taking hapless investigator John Nyquist into a city where reality is contaminated by the imagination of its citizens

In a city dissolving into an infected sprawl of ideas, where words come to life and reality is contaminated by stories, John Nyquist wakes up in a room with a dead body... The dead man's impossible whispers plunge him into a murder investigation like no other. Clues point him deeper into an unfolding story infesting its participants as reality blurs between place and genre.

Only one man can hope to put it all back together into some kind of order, enough that lives can be saved... That man is Nyquist, and he is lost.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Science Fiction, Mystery, Horror, Crime, Thriller

384 pages, Paperback

First published April 3, 2018

About the author

Jeff Noon is a novelist, short story writer and playwright whose works make extensive use of wordplay and fantasy.

He studied fine art and drama at Manchester University and was subsequently appointed writer in residence at the city's Royal Exchange theatre. But Noon did not stay too long in the theatrical world, possibly because the realism associated with the theatre was not conducive to the fantastical worlds he was itching to invent. While working behind the counter at the local Waterstone's bookshop, a colleague suggested he write a novel. The result of that suggestion,

Vurt, was the hippest sci-fi novel to be published in Britain since the days of Michael Moorcock in the late sixties.

Like Moorcock, Noon is not preoccupied with technology per se, but incorporates technological developments into a world of magic and fantasy.

As a teenager, Noon was addicted to American comic heroes, and still turns to them for inspiration. He has said that music is more of an influence on his writing than novelists: he 'usually writes to music', and his record collection ranges from classical to drum'n'bass.

Reviews

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

To call this a simple Noir mystery is to completely miss the point. Noon has created something on a completely different level of anything I've read before.

Yeah, that's right. The world of the imagination taking to the mean streets, turning meta-fiction on its head and grounding a whole world in a stinking reality where people really are the stories and stories walk the streets.

This is a fantasy and a science fiction novel. Make no mistake about that. Noon is running with a fantastic idea where a city must live with the fundamental fact that words are magic for everyone. Everyone is a writer, and if they aren't, then they're a character in someone else's' story. The motivations are clear. To get ahead, you must write. And then the police are editors and there are Dada fiction writers rebelling against the same-old narratives and murder isn't always murder... it's art.

The novel makes it gritty and grounded in the Noir foundation, but by god, it gets hallucinogenic as hell as Nyquist (our escaped protagonist from a city beset by shifting timelines) finds himself in a murder mystery he has to solve, only to get caught up in a madness of becoming a writer or be the written.

Lordy, this was one HELL of a trip. Not for the faint of heart. Or the impatient. But by Bradbury in heaven, I swear this is the spiritual godson of The Illustrated Man on PCP.

Noon's imagination is TOP NOTCH. I think I've just found my new favorite to-go guy for cutting edge and brilliant Weird fiction.

*does a happy dance*

A BIG thanks to Netgalley for letting me read this early. :)

[Glenn Russell]

The Body Library - an extraordinary novel that set my imagination on fire, a full ten hour blaze, the time it took for me to read its 380 pages. I also listened to the audio book expertly narrated by Toby Longworth. Jeff Noon has quickly become one of my all-time favorite authors.

In A Man of Shadows, a morose, tough guy private detective by the name of John Nyquist hunts for a runaway teenager in the cities of Dayzone (perpetually day) and Nocturna (perpetually night) with the misty Dusklands in between, all the while forced to deal with thousands of artificially constructed clock times and timelines.

Noon's second Nyquist mystery, The Body Library, takes place in Storyville, a city where all the streets and buildings are named after authors, a city where everyone is a storyteller or listener of stories or reader of stories, a city where stories and narratives come alive in ways most uncanny. Since I LOVE novels where books, reading, writing and writers play a prominent part, I cherish every page of Body Library.

Noon frames his tale thusly: an agency hires Nyquist to report on the movements of one Patrick Wellborn during the city's international festival of words. But then it happens right on the first pages: Nyquist kills Wellborn in an act of self-defense and, as if a fly snagged by a Venus flytrap, the private eye is immediately swallowed up in a Storyville turned ghastly Horrorville.

With all its weirdness and freaky surrealism, The Body Library would make the perfect candidate for director Richard Linklater to once again employ distinctive digital technology and animation as he did in his film based on Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly. I'm not usually a moviegoer but I'd pay good money to watch such a movie again and again - Noon's story is that good.

The British author told an interviewer he always wanted to write straight crime fiction in the tradition of Ross Macdonald but bizarre images and crazy scenes kept pulling him off in wild and weird ways - case in point: the Nyquist novels. Jeff went on to say his goal is to create stories that are brilliant, magical and completely insane along with giving a reader unending intense pleasure.

Jeff Noon certainly achieved what he set out to accomplish in The Body Library. The events and happenings in the novel are forever unpredictable and contain breathtaking shocks and surprises. Thus, so as not to take anything away from a reader's enjoyment when turning the pages, here's a handful of sparkling candy for your glazzies, a dozen short, quick hits in the spirit of what could be a trailer for a Richard Linklater Body Library film:

LOCOMOTIVE LETTERS
In the book's opening pages two lovers enter a library and discover a man who might be dead, a man whose every inch of skin is covered in words – and the words move as if insects crawling over his skin!

HORROR HIGHRISE
Tower Five, Mellville Place is a sinister highrise apartment building that figures prominently in Noon's plot, sinister in the sense that one might have to deal with realms cutting our familiar three-dimensional world into tiny pieces. Beware.

QUIZZICAL KID
Once in Tower Five, Nyquist spots Calvin, a boy sporting white hair in a pudding-bowl style and the letters ABC on his shirt. Calvin is perhaps six or seven years old and his fingertips are black and smeared as though he has been playing with ink. Calvin hands Nyquist a key to apartment 67...and things swiftly take a nasty turn.

FEMME FATALE
What's a noir murder mystery without a Femme Fatale? Nyquist quickly forms a relationship with Zelda, an attractive fallen woman who owns a backstory with a wollop.

PSYCHOTROPIC PAGES
Set fire to pages from a certain book and you'll soon find the smoke contains hallucinogenic properties more powerful than LSD. I wonder what Timothy Leary would have to say.

TITILATING TITLE
The Body Library, a title that turns out to be a truncated version of Agatha Christie's The Body in the Library - and between the covers is a book coauthored by a Dadaist, a work containing much hidden, diabolical meaning.

ALPHABUGS
Storyville features flying bugs like lightning bugs only these bugs, alphabugs, light up with different letters of the alphabet - and sometimes these aphabugs can gather together to spell out words.

KAFKA'S CASTLE
Can you believe there are “word police” and “story cops” reporting back to The Grand Hall of Narrative Content in Kafka Court where stories are examined to make sure those stories don't stray off proper story paths? Does this sound like government censorship as conducted in the former Soviet Union? Surely this is one of the eerier aspects in an otherwise seemingly innocent Storyville.

HYPNOTIC HYPERTEXT
Have you ever been pulled into a story so deeply it's as if you've been hypnotized? In Storyville, the hypnotic might lead you to a building where you'll crossover and you yourself will become a fictional character, a second self.

LIFE STORY/STORY OF LIFE
Nyquist attempts to compose an autobiographical narrative entitled A Man of Shadows. Could this be the very same book as Jeff Noon's first Nyquist Mystery?

NYQUIST'S NARRATIVE
Nyquist to the rescue! Is it possible Nyquist coming to grips with a tragic part of his past will effect a transformation for scores of women, men and children in Storyville? Such is the magic of fiction as nonfiction. Or, is that nonfiction as fiction?

NYQUIST NOIRGUY
Through all the surrealism and freaky happenings, one thing remains constant: John Nyquist might be a surly, glum gumshoe but, in the tradition of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, he doesn't veer from his quest for the truth and his desire to do good.

Again, I created a trailer for the novel. And I didn't even reference a number of the key characters. I urge you to read this Jeff Noon knockout, soon.


British author Jeff Noon, born 1957

[Faith · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The only sound in the library came from the pages of the books as they rustled on the shelves. All the empty pages. Among them lay a man covered in stories." In Storyville Central, the location of the Twenty-First International Festival of Words, people have gathered to share stories. "The night was liquid, flowing with words, with language itself, dissolved and shared like wine amongst the poor." Private investigator John Nyquist has been hired to follow Patrick Wellborn, and he trails him through the festival. They wind up in a supposedly vacant apartment building called Melville Five that turns out to be under the spell of a book titled the Body Library. Nyquist was also the protagonist of "A Man of Shadows" but this is not a sequel and can be read as a standalone.

I was fascinated by this strange fever dream of a book, although a lot of the time I had no idea what was going on. Nyquist must find a missing book, solve a murder and save a city, but there is nothing straightforward about any of this. It's all about words and writing and deconstructed literature. It has buildings that won't let you leave, words inhaled as narcotics and people who exist simultaneously in both a fictional and nonfictional world. Places are named after Calvino, Melville, Chaucer, Marlowe, Bronte, Blake, Asimov, Wharton, Plath, Kafka and other writers. In the Grand Hall of Narrative Content, "millions of stories that currently threaded their way through the city were represented and accounted for." People can be arrested for interrupting a narrative in which they are involved.

This book is weird and confounding and I'm sure it's not for everyone but I enjoyed it (although I did prefer the prior book). I look forward to whatever unexpected trip the author takes me on next.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

[Gary · Rating 4 out of 5]

In A Man of Shadows, Jeff Noon created a metafictional world where his detective hero John Nyquist needed to transgress the boundary between the cities of Dayzone and Nocturna – one of perpetual day and one of eternal night – to catch a killer. In its sequel, The Body Library, Nyquist finds himself in Storyville, where a new mystery unfolds after he kills, in self-defense, the man he was hired to follow. Like its predecessor, the world of The Body Library eschews all the figuration we expect from symbolic representation in favor of direct implication. In Storyville, streets and buildings are all named after famous writers, people get killed by viruses made up of stories, and the government fastidiously manages each of the stories that make up its residents’ lives. To cross the threshold into Storyville is to accept that every action, every interaction, every choice, is valuated solely in terms of its place in a story. It is a world, ironically, made up almost entirely of references, rather than the metaphors and allusions we generally associate with literature and storytelling.
Nyquist has his own story to tell, and part of the allure of taking a case in Storyville is that it gives him the opportunity to work on his own memoir (not surprisingly titled A Man of Shadows, because Noon can’t seem to leave meta-enough alone) about his search for the elusive serial killer Quicksilver. Nyquist may be suppressing, or outright avoiding, aspects of that experience, which in turn is keeping him from completing his new narrative – finding out who is responsible for a novel manuscript called The Body Library that has inspired cult-like devotion in some of Storyville’s residents, and appears to have an unnerving control over the stories of those who encounter it.
Most commercial SFF series published today treat its subsequent volumes as tentpoles in a larger ongoing saga. By contrast, The Body Library is a traditional standalone sequel, the way Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels were sequels that required little or no knowledge of the other novel’s events to be comprehensible. That isn’t to say that reading A Man of Shadows first doesn’t inform your reading of its sequel; it does, much in the way that reading The Big Sleep is not crucial, but helpful, in reading the novels that follow it. References to A Man of Shadows are clearly explained where they are essential to the current story. In fact, for a pair of novels that flaunt their surreal settings like a peacock plumes its feathers, there is a surprising amount of clarity of intent in its pages.
While most novelists prefer to explore gray areas, Noon’s Nyquist novels take on the black-and-white of their id-centered world. “Normal” in this world is whatever fits an established pattern; “mystery” is what occurs when a pattern is not immediately apparent. This is more or less true of all fiction, but rarely is it rendered so explicitly. The Body Library, the unfinished, ever-evolving novel inside the novel, is a dangerous agent of disorder – expanding outside of the confines of its pages in a world that prefers to keep its metaphors and allusions tucked safely between the margins.
Noon is one of those authors whom I admire more than enjoy. The Body Library is as much of an intellectual/artistic enterprise as A Man of Shadows, and just as maddeningly opaque. Characters seem to pantomime their emotional lives more than feel them. Everyone is so hyper-aware of the formulas that dictate their narratives it is near impossible to connect with anyone on a basic human level. Even more egregious are the instances in which the novel fails/refuses to account for some of the ritualistic formulations within its metafictional framework. Through much of the novel Nyquist is driven by an injustice done to a “fallen” woman – a nod to one of the most overused conventions in both literary and genre fiction, but Noon offers the reader neither a personal investment in Nyquist’s obsession nor a probing commentary on the narcissistic moral outrage of the white male hero in western literature.
What we are left with, if not a novel that we can connect with on a base emotional level, is an ingeniously manufactured art object, directing the reader’s attention with a concatenation of smoky-eyed dreamlike imagery punctured by the Pavlovian responses of its actors – like a film noir mystery directed by Luis Buñuel and edited by Lev Kuleshov.
The Body Library can’t help but propel Nyquist toward the center of the labyrinth, his gaze retreating further inward with each turn of the page. The image of Odin bleeding from his self-inflicted wound, dangling face-down from the world tree (or in this case, the word tree) trying to penetrate the water’s depths for that final key to true wisdom, projects outward from the center of the maze. Like the one-eyed god, Nyquist has already given up a piece of himself in his quest for knowledge; masochism is the only avenue that remains in his dogged pursuit for more. A cynical solution to the mystery of self-knowledge, but a haunting one nonetheless.

Thanks to Netgalley and Angry Robot for the opportunity to read this ARC.

[Liz Barnsley · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading the first Nvquist novel,A Man of Shadows, I said I’d never look at time passing in the same way again. The Body Library has given me the feeling that I’ll never read a book in quite the same way again, without wondering if somewhere, in some other realm just beyond reach, things I’m reading are being affected and changed by the very fact of me reading it..

The Body Library is a surreal reading experience, this time throwing our main protagonist into a city built upon words, narratives and stories – where everyone either tells the tale or listens to it – where “narrative officers” monitor the written word and keep track of intersections, where Nvquist is writing a tale called A Man Of Shadows….

Yes it sounds quite quite mad and it absolutely is -but it is also completely, imaginatively and utterly brilliant from the opening hallucinogenic journey through an abandoned tower block to the final emotionally charged moments of resolution – this is a story that kind of doesn’t really have a beginning middle and end so much as a stream of feelings and observations – to call The Body Library immersive reading doesn’t really come close to explaining the feel of it but is probably as close as I’m going to get. The little nuances of character, the dreamlike setting, the smart little descriptive touches and the clever, rewarding literary allusions (look at the title of the book for a start) all add to what is a novel like no other I have ever read. But I want to read more, I was sorry to leave it behind….

Still, this is noir. It really is. Noir within science fiction, within fantasy, within crime – the Nvquist novels so far break all the genre boundaries and dissolve them all into one glorious technicoloured mash up of a read. With Alphabugs…

Underneath the beautiful madness The Body Library is wittily observant, creepy and disconcerting, occasionally humorous, always on message even as it goes off on tangents and is a wonderfully hypnotic and completely mesmerizing story. I loved every single insane moment of it, just riveting. Completely riveting.

More Nvquist please. Soon as possible.

Highly Recommended

[Chris Berko · Rating 5 out of 5]

My brain feels like it's doing gymnastics while reading this series and it is oh so cool. The first book deconstructed time and personality and this one does the same for story telling and writing. Totally original concepts on display again and just as compelling a story as book one. The Body Library is hard to describe and like his other books just sorta needs to be experienced, in this one you can go to this city and literally become part of your own story or get lost in someone else's. And there in lies the rub, whose story is Nyquist in? His own or just part of another story? It's crazy where this book goes, Noon's imagination knows no bounds.

I wouldn't necessarily say you gotta read book one to get this, they are totally independent from one another with only the barest of references to book one, and I recommend both equally.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.4⭐
Another quirky, surreal, well written, novel by the talented Jeff Noon. I'm told this particular style, which strikes me as a blend of science fiction, fantasy and horror, is being called " The New Weird ". New or old, it's surely weird. But also not, really. It follows the forms and conventions of those other genres and also of the " hard boiled" private detective story.

Noon sets his tales in a strange, alternative England, during an alternative 1950's. His hero from the previous book in the series, A Man of Shadows, the somewhat hapless private eye John Nyquist has moved from the eternal light of Dayzone, to Storyville, a city that exists for the telling of tales. Every resident is expected to develop his or her own plot along acceptable lines, carefully watched by the Narrative Officers, also known as the story police, who are more feared than the regular cops.

Nyquist is hired to follow a man and to report on his activities, a seemingly simple but well paying job. Naturally, things soon take a dark and unexpected turn, or two. Nyquist gets beaten up as badly as he did in the first novel, actually getting put into a coma at one point but this time around he at least gets to hit back, on occasion.

Noon's baroque style won't be for everyone but I like his heavily embroidered characters and settings. He's particularly good at creepy or eerie atmospheres. This is a fine follow-up to the first book and left me wanting to read the third of the Nyquist adventures, Creeping Jenny.
I also really like the cover art of these books by Will Staehle. Subtle, evocative, geometric drawings, sort of like Escher but not really .
-30-

[Scott Hitchcock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book 1: 5*
Book 2: 5*

The most original series this side of Manifest Delusions ( Beyond Redemption, The Mirror’s Truth ) Noon is a master of twisting reality. My average rating for Noir fiction is probably below 3*'s and this series has earned two 5*'s. The books are a combination or Noir, fantasy, horror, mystery and dystopia. To try to compare them it's Coraline for adults with much more complicated characters and storylines. Coraline middle school creepy. These books are adult mind fuck creepy.

As you can guess by the title this volume is about book(s). Noon twists the storyline between fiction and nonfiction for the characters as even they cannot tell reality from the story. The words never dry on the pages, the story and intent ever changing.

Through all the craziness Noon even manages to pull on your heart strings. Who wouldn't want to rewrite a chapter of their life? Or better yet rewrite somebody into it vs living with platitudes of loss?

Definitely crazy but for those of you looking for something different this is it. I hope he has more volumes in mind.

[Pop Bop · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Whole New Level of Noir

Jeff Noon's Nyquist novels manage to marry high quality noir conventions with wildly imaginative speculative fiction in order to create compelling and immersive experiences. Noon creates alternate worlds, but not in a fantasy sense, or as mere alternatives to our reality, or even as quantum-babble folded space-time constructs. His alternative worlds are much more imaginative, loaded, and densely created than that.

In the first Nyquist novel, "A Man of Shadows", detective Nyquist was caught between Dayzone, where the lights never go out, and Nocturna, a place of permanent dark. Here, every person, business, or neighborhood had its own personal time. Maybe a 50 minute hour, or 26 hour day. Time schedules were created, copyrighted, bought and sold, and Nyquist was in a classic noir corruption plot that turned on the manipulation and corruption of time. Noon made this real and plausible and totally convincing.

This time around we are in "Storyville", a city built upon and powered by stories and words. Everyone is either a storyteller or a listener. People buy and sell each other's stories. There are forbidden stories, smuggled stories, shared stories, and secret stories. Vast bureaucracies keep track of each person's "story" and how they all fit together. "Narrative Officers" monitor and annotate what writers are writing, (Nyquist is writing "A Man of Shadows"), and whether what they are doing fits in with the larger city story. Alphabugs, bugs representing different letters of the alphabet, fly around, and words roam the streets. This sounds hallucinatory and maybe a bit precious, but it works because Noon sets it out with conviction and deep imaginative power.

Nyquist finds himself tailing some guy at the request of a client. A murder, a disappearance or two, getting sapped with some frequency, and a dame all increase the stakes. The plot is twisty and sometimes a bit fevered, but the plotting is tight and the pieces come together nicely. Noon doesn't follow the tough guy and snappy patter rules; this is noir in the honorable man in a tough world style. Nyquist is a bit lost and a lot damaged, but doing the right thing matters. And, words are escaping, letters are infecting people, fictional narrative is turning up as a drug, corrupt forces are planning something big. Nyquist needs answers.

Unlike the first Nyquist book, this one has a showier and sometimes more playful side. There are, as you might imagine, loads of literary allusions tucked away, almost on every page. (Even the book's title is a play on the title of a similar real book.) Noon has fun with place names. The bureaucratic government center is on Kafka Court. A grimy dark alley is ironically named Betjeman Way. Nyquist lives in A.C. Clarke Town. And then there are a number of secondary characters who appear in nicely structured set scenes and cameo bits that recall other fabled books.

The upshot is that you get a classic twisty detective noir, a fantastical setting, and sly, witty and deadpan literate humor. These are great books for reading.

(Please note that I received a free advance ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

[Nichol DeRosier · Rating 5 out of 5]

This series is wild and I’m here for it. The world is so bizarro and imaginative. Do I have all the answers? NOPE, and I don’t really care because it all feels like a trippy fever dream laced with a detective noir vibe. Excited for the next two and feel like these will have great re-read value to pick up more on all the crazy details and eccentricities.

[Michael Hanscom · Rating 2 out of 5]

Much like the first in this series, there are a lot of interesting ideas, in this case about stories, narratives, and our relationships with them…yet it simply didn’t resonate with me at all.

With both of these, I’ve felt like I should enjoy them more than I do, and keep finding passages and ideas that strike me as being intellectually and conceptually interesting. But there’s no emotional connection, and because of that, I’m simply not invested.

The main character doesn’t seem to have much purpose beyond moving from plot point to plot point and getting repeatedly physically abused in the process. It feels like the author had these ideas, and wanted to wrap them in the trappings of a noir environment, but wasn’t able to come up with anything for the protagonist other than the bare minimum stereotype skeleton for a noir private eye. Without that, the events he encounters are just things that happen, but not things I ever really cared about. And that ended up being disappointing, since there really are a lot of neat concepts there to work with.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not just noir. Neo noir? Noir punk? Jeff Noon's writing is terribly hard to classify as usual. But oh so very enjoyable.

The easiest correlation to make here is with The Neverending Story, only darker. Mystery, darkness, literature, word games, head games, mindf#%^ etc.

The reader is once again plunged into a strange world with our protagonist John Nyquist. This time the town is Storyville which is fueled by... stories. But what happens if there is a fictional version of yourself living out a different story from your own personal living real world story? Messed up things.

This book is so quotable. I think I highlighted about 85% of it. Noon's writing is captivating and unsettling. After finishing this book I saw a stinkbug in my home and for a split second was terrified it was an alphabug.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 Stars

A dark continuation of book one. A really twisted second book.. Awesome stuff

[Bandit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine randomly finding an abandoned looking library. You walk in and browse the books, but all the pages are blank. And then you come across a man covered in letters, a moving text, a story inked in as an ever evolving complicated tattoo. That’s how the Body Library begins and as far as beginnings go it’s definitely one of the most striking and memorable ones in recent literature. From there on it gets progressively stranger, but then again Noon is an expert in strange. Man of Shadows, the first book introducing Nyquist and my personal introduction to the author, was auspicious on every account. Body Library raised the stakes, taking the gruff detective from Dayzone (the city that defied the natural order of time itself) to Storyville (a city where everyone lives in and for a good story). Multiple narratives interweave, some deadlier than others, and now it’s up to Nyquist to unravel a tangled web of a book that comes to life. And also, of course, there is a murder to solve. This is, after all, a detective novel, however unconventional. Man of Mystery was odd, peculiar, strange, Body Library is so much stranger still, with an M.C. Etcher’s logic and Moebius plot twists. And for all that, it’s absolutely mesmerizing, the mind is wowed even when it’s struggles to follow along and visually it’s a spectacle of such outlandish creations. Noon’s world building is superb, Storyville comes to life (much like its eponymous creation) in the most vivid technicolor way. It’s a dizzyingly bizarre and probably not for everyone, but for the right reader or the right mood, it’s really awesome. I may have finally figured out the genre for it to, it’s bizarre noir or noir bizarre. Nice, right? Sat in the past (1959) of some parallel universe and told like a mad fairy tale. Absolutely singular, nothing like it out there. Noon’s originality and imagination continue to astonish. Gorgeous book. Thanks Netgalley.

[Robin Duncan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoroughly compelling, highly inventive brain bender of a book, The Body Library--for me--completely delivered on the goodwill I had for John Nyquist after A Man of Shadows. I am not a fast reader, but I set off apace with this, and barely a day went by without me picking it up. I did get a little downhearted at a couple of points in the last quarter, but completing ...Shadows left me completely satisfied. As noir goes, I find this on the rewardingly chewy end, wearing its genre trappings like a trusted trench-coat, but eschewing the most familiar and well-worn tropes to pay off on my expectations in spades. Heartily recommended.

[Elana · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a second in the series of impossible cities by Noon. Since it is my favorite genre, I cannot be anything but enthusiastic. The novel is a bit to “writerly” for my taste (yes, that’s a reference to Barthes). In other words, it is a bit too full of allusions, metafiction, clever puns, and the rest of the stuff beloved of us, academics. But after all, it takes place in Storyville. What else would you expect?

[Seriesbooklover · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this book in the science-fiction and fantasy section as I thought it had been misplaced but the book refers not to a body in the library but the Body Library ( to say any more would be a spoiler) but bought it anyway. I was sold by a line on the book jacket with the words 'Clues scattered like punctuation' and had to read the book.

This is a hard book to summarise. John Nyquist is a PI in town where stories and words can be used against people. You are either the master of your own story or a character in someone else’s story. Everyone is required to be honest and write their story with oversight from the Story Police and Narrative Council who makes sure writers are following a conventional method of writing.
John has been hired to follow Patrick Wellborn and erase him. He follows Patrick one night and is led into a world with a God-like saviour, drugs made of words, violence and a mysterious woman called Zelda. The next day he wakes up and finds himself mixed up in a murder investigation that only he can solve.




I found it hard going at the start of the book, it felt like I was reading the account of someone high on a drug trip. The style is very much noir but the book got a lot more interesting when the actual mystery began and the narrative is a little more conventional( the Narrative council know what they are talking about!)
Jeff Noon’s prose is deliciously sparse but evocates the strange world of Storyville brilliantly. The world-building in this book is intricate and complex with ideas that stories are currency particularly intriguing. Some cracking lines will make bookworms and writers smile or groan with sympathy.
Despite the book being only 382 pages long, it did take me a few days to read with its complex word building, twists and turns.
The romance between John and Zelda was sweet but a bit too quickly established. I thought Zelda was a two-dimensional heroine, a bad girl with a heart of gold, but imagine this was deliberate given the strong Noir elements.
.
This really wasn’t my kind of book but other readers may love this quirky book.
Content warning-
References to substance addiction, suicide.

[Elanor · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's too much to say about this book, and not enough. Put simply: it's incredible, you should read it.

The story's quite wonderful but honestly what makes it is the words...It's just so beautifully put together.

This book is a tactile experience, I defy you not to pause to read snippets out loud just for the joy of feeling them take shape.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This had a similar feel to A Man of Shadows which makes sense since it is in the same world however detective Nyquist has moved from the city of many timelines to a city where everybody and everything is a story. He takes on a new case here. Very fun read.

[Nicky Mister · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a fever dream and I feel that I definitely need a second read through. I really appreciated how beautiful the ideas of stories, words, language, and love were portrayed, and I'd check out other books by this author!

[Alex Storer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Following on from A Man of Shadows, The Body Library follows detective Nyquist, as his career takes him to the surreal city of Storyville, where books are the very basis of existence.

We’re sucked into a strange and sinister murder mystery that goes way beyond the norm, as fiction and reality merge in this literary film noir. With streets, buildings and parts of the city named after all manner of influential writers, this is the most unique and unusual setting you’ll find yourself exploring.

Although we gradually have more of an insight into our protagonist’s backstory, the main character here is really Storyville, the spellbinding and mysterious world that Noon has created.

This is an absorbing read, and a book of just the right length, which refuses to be put down. It is a feast of mind bending creativity and quite unlike anything I have ever read.

The Body Library challenges the very concept of the written word, in this mesmerising work of original brilliance.

[ben holum · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like I should have liked this book more than I did. I liked it more than A Man of Shadows, but I have the same issues with this one that I did with that one. John Nyquist is simply a dull and uninteresting character. I don’t hate him, but I don’t like him either - he’s basically just some guy. The world he’s in is so imaginative and interesting and special, and the writing is great overall, but when everything happens to someone I struggle to care about, it’s difficult to actually enjoy the story to its fullest extent. It’s like if a band you love music-wise had a singer that was just kind of talking over the melodies, or like if the main character of Harry Potter was Ron Weasley. It’s almost an amazing book, but to me, it failed to live up to its potential - much like A Man or Shadows.

[RG · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing read!! Noon has done it again. Tbis time not about Time but about words/writing. Its detective noir with scifi weirdness. Once again Noon takes you down "the rabbit hole" but you never want to leave. Great stuff here. I hope he continues to write more in this world.

[Rebecca Warner · Rating 5 out of 5]

JEFF NOON IS A GOD

[Bill Hsu · Rating 2 out of 5]

As in my previous Jeff Noon experiences, I like a lot of the ideas here. But it's so bogged down in excess verbiage and thriller mechanics, I gave up around p.100.

[Steven Shaviro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jeff Noon's new novel is a sequel of sorts to his previous book A Man of Shadows, which I reviewed here on Goodreads. It is a sequel in the sense that it involves the same detective character, John Nyquist. Both novels seem to have a mid-20th-century setting; they are set in a world without computers or mobile phones. Having left the city of Dayzone/Nocturna, where the previous book took place, Nyquist now lives in Storyville, a city of a very different sort. Both books are science-fictional noirs, set in unique settings which are characters in their own right, and largely control the shape of the novel. Storyville, the city where The Body Library is set, is a city dominated by words and stories. Everything you do needs to be told, to yourself and to others - it becomes a narrative, that intersects with other people's narratives. This means that words are important - there is no separation between words and deeds, because words are themselves deeds, the most important deeds - they determine the shape of your life. Stories are real, but they are also self-conscious fictions, and this duality, at the heart of how words relate to bodies, is also what drives the novel. On the one hand, Storyville seems like a totalitarian state, since a vast bureaucracy is continually keeping tabs on all the stories, trying to make sure that they cohere and follow a logical narrative course. At the same time, stories as fictions continually threaten to evade this surveillance, to the point where people split into two, their "real" self and their fictional self, which seem to follow separate courses, though they remain entwined with one another. Add to this a subculture of avant garde novelists (dadaists, experimental modernists) who write narratives in which words, and therefore bodies and characters, do strange things; and people - readers - who become addicted to this strange form of literary production, in the way one becomes addicted to a drug. There is "midnight ink," which writes crooked texts but also sticks to bodies, and causes changes of consciousness when inhaled. There are lightning bugs that are illuminated with letters of the alphabet. There are typewriters that mysteriously spell out sentences on a sheet of paper, even in the seeming absence of a typist. I don't think that The Body Library comes to any firm conclusion about the metaphysicla and aesthetic issues it raises, but it is filled with powerful ideas, or perhaps I should rather say with words made flesh. These issues become embodied in the tropes of noir narrative. It is as if the two sides of 20th century literature -- say, James Joyce on the one hand and Raymond Chandler on the other -- had somehow become entangled, or had sex and gave birth to some monstrous, but darkly beautiful progeny.

[Jan vanTilburg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly imaginative. This is for people who like to take the path less travelled by. And for sure that will make all the difference. Follow the stories of the noir new weird writers. The surrealists; who depict unnerving, illogical scenes and allow the unconscious mind to express itself.

A hallucinatory story. Surreal. What to believe? Is it real? Make belief? Nyquist is now in a totally different city: Storyville. Where visitors get the warning to never: “stray off the marked story paths. You’ll never know what happens next.” After his ordeal in Dayzone he needed a story to settle down with. But he forgot that it’s easy to get into other people’s stories….And when fact and fiction mix, the end of the story may well be out if your control!

Everyone has it’s story. But once a story is started there is no escaping it. Not until it’s done. And now Nyquist finds himself in a murder story from which he needs to escape. But he’s not really sure which story he is in. (p.61). He believes he himself has no story. But it seems to be written. He is in Storyville after all. He’ll soon find out how it goes…

Nyquist is on an assignment to follow someone; Wellborn. It brings him to a mysterious apartment building on the shady side of town; Melville Five. Here, in self-defense, he ends up killing him. When he then meets Zelda, who is somehow involved with his subject, everything goes haywire. Nothing makes sense anymore. They are somehow trapped in the building; the story has taken them over.

Just as Nyquist, I was puzzled with what is going on. Zelda did tell him why she met Wellborn, but it does not make it any more clear. It’s a confusing story. And I won’t tell anything more. One has to discover this story oneself. I found it thrilling to read. All this was only at one third of the book. A real mystery.

Nyquist soon realizes that he must write his own story. Not being a character in someone else’s narrative. Otherwise he could ”reach a blank page”, as they say in Storyville.

And then there is the Narrative police, who control all stories. Noone can stray of the page. Gestapo like. p.174: “It’s the most terrible of crimes when you’re caught up in the wrong story.” And Nyquest clearly got on the wrong page with them. It’s very telling that the Narrative police headquarters is at Kafka Court. And that Nyquist’s case is handled by K.

In the meantime a revolt is brewing. People want a new story. Not as predictable. They want their stories back. Not being controlled. But one has to be careful. If you’re taken over by the words you’ll loose yourself in the narrative. One could get ”High on language. Plugged into the alphabet.” Lost.

And just as in Nyquist’s previous case in A Man of Shadows he needs to loose himself, before he can finish his story.

A very cool premise. A real page turner. It sounds weird. Which it is. Confusing. Very. Witty with all the puns related to stories, words, pages, books etc. With all this weirdness aside, it’s a gripping detective. There is a plot. A thread. The words formed sentences. A story. A story in which I willingly got lost. Wonderful!

[Borja · Rating 3 out of 5]

He de reconocer que me descoloco bastante el cambio de localización de la novela. La primera estaba centrada en una ciudad que tenía bastante por explotar con aquello de que una parte estuviera con luz y otra a oscuras siempre. Y eso que apenas se profundizaba en ello, siendo este quizá su mayor defecto. Ahora, sin embargo, el protagonista despierta en una ciudad donde las letras son lo importante, donde todo el mundo escribe o tiene historias que contar, y estas son clave para la historia.

Esta segunda entrega de las aventuras de este detective me ha resultado algo más interesante que la primera. Es una novela más "negra" en su argumento, cercana a esas novelas de detectives que se mezclan con lo fantástico y que se lee a toda velocidad dado que su ritmo es mucho más alto que "A man of shadows". Una novela con un punto de locura importante y un protagonista al que sigo esperando conocer más en profundidad. Quizá en futuras entregas.

[Melisende]

John Nyquist wakes up in a room with a dead body - he can hear the man's voice - and starts on an investigation into his murder.

The tale takes place in Storville - a city where the citizens are readers, writers and characters of their own and others' narratives.

I hadn't read the first in the series which I think I should have, as this just didn't work for me.

It is apparently well reviewed by others.

[DRugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A trippy book that separates the world into the real and the fictitious. The detective protagonist slips into the fiction to investigate a murder and discovers layers of illusion. By the end, I found the novel losing the thread of the story.