Ugh, Jeff Noon. Dammit. He's never lived up to his first two novels. I loved Vurt, one of the earliest cyberpunk novels, and Pollen, a tripped out cyber-environmental apocalypse. But I was meh on Automated Alice and Nymphomation. I actively disliked A Man of Shadows.Ostensibly, a science-fictional/fantasy noir detective story, it falls down on all accounts. The main character, the detective, is a sad sack. A rather pathetic failure who gets beat up a lot and only succeeds by accident. At times,

I read once that taking away watches and clocks from people and not allowing them to know the time will slowly drive them mad. After reading this book I can believe it.It starts out as a hard-boiled detective story set in a world that feels like a futuristic version of the 1950's. The city is split into three different zones, Nocturna that is eternal night, Dusk, a place of fog and monsters where it is always twilight and no-one dare go, and Dayzone, a world of bright neon lights where it never

In my teens I read Jeff Noon's delightfully bizarre sci-fi, including Vurt, Pollen, and Automated Alice. Although I remember very little about the plots, the weird technologies stuck in my mind, notably virtual reality feathers and nanotech pollen. When I saw he'd started publishing a new series I was a little wary of the crime noir concept, but decided to give 'A Man of Shadows' a try nonetheless. The setting is strange and vivid: an unnamed city half in permanent artificial darkness and half i...

In the end, it comes down to feeling, as much as it pains me to say, and this was solidly uninteresting. Whether an unlikeable protagonist, stock characterization, or predictable plotting, I couldn’t say. Remember when you were young, playing with toys and spent all morning setting up your Lego world/Barbies/miniature houses, but then quit playing an hour after the story finally started? That’s this book. Our [insert stock here] hard-boiled detective takes the case to find the [insert trope] mis...

I just recently learned the term "new weird" fiction, but I think it can be applied to this book. It's sci-fi, horror, urban fantasy and detective noir, so there's a lot going on here. John Henry Nyquist is a private detective looking for the missing 18 year old Eleanor Bale. Robert Mitchum could have played Nyquist in the movie. It turns out that Eleanor is not just a runaway, she plays an important role in the very strange world created by the author. The action takes place in a city comprised...

What a book! Jeff Shadows does a remarkable job of bringing a thoroughly surreal setting to life.Dayzone and Nocturna, two cities separated by Dusk, each having decided to live in perpetual light or dark. Citizens run on separated zones of time; and into this dazzlingly original setting steps John Nyquist, detective on a mission. And it's with his introduction that I realised this - no matter the setting - was a classic noir novel. We never step foot in his office, dead messages, unpaid bills, a...

5 Stars A Man of Shadows by John Nyquist is a terrific summer science fiction read. I absolutely loved it and had a blast with this one.An awesome start to a series.Fabulous.

I think this book suffered both from my misplaced expectations and a poor handling of genres.In the first case what I expected to read and what the book actually contained were rather different. Based on the description I expected a detective/noir story set in a city with one part in permanent light and the other in permanent darkness. I thought this was a cool idea and would play well into the idea of a literal dark side of a city that is metaphorically prevalent in the noir genre. There is lot...

A sci-fi thriller of sorts. Interesting if slightly confusing ideas and ultimately too much of a narrative on the world created rather than on telling the story left me cold. The story takes place in a city made up of three distinct parts - Dayzone, which is permanently bright thanks to the billions of neon lights covering the area, Nocturna, which is permanently dark and Dusk, which seperetaes the two areas, a type of no mans land which is avoided at all costs, neither light nor dark and covere...

3.5 stars.A former professor of mine was fond of saying that great art is not merely engaged with, but surrendered to. That particular quality of experience – the willing submission of the viewer to the mastery of the art object itself – is hard to nail down in words; so then, is the absence of that quality. This, in a nutshell, is the ambition of the critic – to find the words to relate that experience, or lack thereof (or the gray in between) to other potential consumers of said object.Jeff No...

This book came onto my radar kind of randomly. I downloaded Body Library by Jeff Noon on Netgalley to try a new author only to realize that it was a sequel. So I figured why not check out the original and got the Audible version of that. Very glad I did too. Usually I’m content for the audio book just to entertain me sufficiently on my walks, this one surpassed expectations by actually encouraging long walks to find out how the plot unfolds. Mind you, it’s quite a strange book, not sure what the...

This is a multi genre sci-fi thriller that is dark, intelligent, atmospheric and decidedly ambiguous. It is guaranteed to absorb and provoke thought. Jeff Noon engages in the heavily detailed world building of a city concealed amongst us by a dome. Half of the city, lit by lamps, exists in endless sunlight, and the other half in Dusk, wherein lies the odd and all the horrors of darkness. The two zones are connected by train. Within this weird world, time is money, a commodity to be traded and wh...

Fact: I don't like noir fiction for the most part. I loved this. The best noir I've ever read .Fact: I generally like character driven stories. This is completely world driven. The characters are merely a conduit for which to experience this vivid, original, amazing and very strange world. Usually I can hate characters and that's as good as liking them. By the end I did embrace the two main characters but only because the world drew me into them. Fact: This is the most original world and story s...

This review and others posted over at my blog. I don’t know how to describe this book because I feel there are two potential stories here and the way they were blended together left me confused and a little underwhelmed.My main issue with this book stems from the feeling that there were two different worlds, or, I don’t know, major story elements maybe, that belonged in two different books. There is one world with the cities of Dayzone, Nocturna and Dusk (that apparently reside in a seemingly...

I think this book should be proud to sit atop the "New Weird" label. It is like Dark City, a potboiler Noir with a very timey-wimey worldbuilding twist.For the early part of the novel, it's all hardboiled detective stuff and it's familiar and fun, but I for one was clicking my teeth for the moment it started showing me the good stuff. And it did... in time zones.A city all in man-made darkness, stars that never moved, where time is a relative thing, where industry collapses when certain pieces o...

After a re-read..I loved this novel. Originally a 3.5* but Noon at his best!!What a strange and weird rollercoaster ride. This blend of detecitve street noir with new weird scifi world buidling creates a completely new type of experience for the reader. Its not as quirky as Vurt but very close. Two cities each different in their own way but the distinguishing feature is the daylight and perpetual darkness of them both. Time is a currency of sorts, and this has a huge influence on the themes and

"Time, time, time/See what's become of me"While reading A Man of Shadows I found myself becoming wary of every timepiece in my house. Why does the microwave clock read 11:45 when the oven clock reads 10:32 and the wall clock reads 2:55?Which is th correct time? If I call the speaking clock number will anyone answer? Can anyone tell me "at the tone the time will be..." or am I on my own? Who decides what time it is for me? In short this book has caused me a great deal of anxiety. With a major bir...

As a huge PKD fan, I searched out a contemporary heir, an author who could be considered a modern day Dick. One website pointed me to Jeff Noon. Oh, baby, I feel like doing a backflip. This Brit's writing is tops – fast-paced, weird and mind-blowing trippy. A Man of Shadows is a novel set in or around 1959 in two fantastically imagined cities, Dayzone and Nocturna, connected by a hazy middle turf known as Dusk. The story is classic 1950s crime noir: private eye searching for a teenage runaway am...

I really will never look at time passing in the same way again.Sometimes a book comes along that just ticks every box in the “things I love about reading” stakes – A Man of Shadows is such a novel, so incredibly immersive, such brilliantly incisive descriptive prose and a set of fascinating, beautifully imagined characters – that you just dive into it with abandon and leave the real world behind.A Man of Shadows has a decisively built world, a world of literal light dark and shade, where time is...

My all consuming fascination with Jeff Noon continues. A Man of Shadows isn't as mad-hatter down-the-rabbit-hole crazy as Vurt but the slower pace and more deliberate story line doesn't mean it's boring. The plot has the main character running around all over the place and that gives Noon the opportunity to showcase the imaginative and wonderful world this takes place in. The world is as much a part of the story as any of the characters. You can't really put the story into words and it really sh...