It’s perhaps the most dreaded question for a writer: “Where do you get your ideas?” Though for Jeff Noon, it’s actually one he seems to relish, because it’s something he thinks about quite a bit. In his latest novel, Moon Over Brendle, he gives us the answer: Brendleshire.
Which, of course, doesn’t exist, even in the partly autobiographical setting of Moon Over Brendle, in which Noon maps a magical-realist version of 1968 onto the Lancashire countryside where he grew up. The book is disguised as the coming-of-age story of 11-year-old Joe Sutter, who really wants to be a writer—but, both on and off the page, the 68-year-old Noon is more interested in performing gymnastics with reality and readers’ perceptions.
A chance meeting with the hermitic Mr Holbrook, a science fiction author who has retreated into splendid isolation on the moors near where Joe lives, and his mysterious assistant Marjorie, kickstarts the youngster’s understanding of stories and how they’re crafted—and just what the act of creation entails.
“The book started from a dream,” says Noon. “It’s quite unusual, this, because I was sitting at my computer writing in the dream, and what I was writing was set in the 1960s and there was this 11-year-old boy and it’s kind of like, in the dream you know it’s you, but it’s also not you.
“And this boy goes to a farmhouse and meets Ray Bradbury [celebrated author of hundreds of sci-fi and fantasy short stories and novels, such as Something Wicked This Way Comes]. I don’t know what Ray Bradbury was doing in Lancashire at the time.
“So anyway, Bradbury texts this lad and says, ‘I’m going to make you a science fiction writer’. And I was in the dream and I’m writing this and I’m thinking, well, this is quite good. I wonder what this novel is called? So I scrolled up the page I was writing in my dream and when I get to the title page it just said Fiction Science by Jeff Noon. And I woke up and started to make notes right away.”
Those notes eventually became Moon Over Brendle. The world of the book is very much like ours, aside from the presence of Greot, an all-encompassing, multicoloured dust that ebbs and flows around and only shows itself to people in fabulous displays for a few minutes each early morning, unless you’re one of the gifted few who can see it all the time, such as Joe.
The world of the book is very much like ours, aside from the presence of Greot...
Greot coats everything, and apes the things it touches. It creates its own stories. As Holbrook tries to teach young Joe the concepts of creative power, he uses the notion of Brendleshire, a sort of alternate reality that Greot transposes onto real life and brings with it various fictions.
Noon has played with the conventions of reality all his writing career. He started his association with the book trade working at Waterstones in Manchester, in what he calls the glory years for readers and writers—“We’d sometimes have two or three author appearances at the shop in one day”—and began writing himself, what he at first thought was going to be a play.
A friend was setting up an independent publishing company and asked Noon if he might consider reworking his script as a novel. Noon gave it a go, and the publisher, Ringpull, published the book in 1993. It was called Vurt, and was a sensation. Set in a near-future Manchester, it was a rave-culture cyberpunk extravaganza, in which an alternate reality (yes, one of those again) known as “the Vurt” was accessed by sucking on different coloured feathers. The novel followed Vurt veteran Scribble and his street gang the Stash Riders as they search for an almost mythical feather that will allow them back into the deep corners of the Vurt and find Scribble’s long-lost sister.
Though separated by more than 30 years (and almost 20 novels and short story collections), there does feel some connection between Vurt and Moon Over Brendle. “Well, in a kind of like meta way, definitely, because after you’ve written a certain number of books, you realise that you’ve only got one story to tell,” laughs Noon. “And every book that you do is somehow a variation upon that book. And I know what that story is.
“There is a kind of a family group that is split in some way. And some person has come out of that group who essentially now finds a new family of different types of people, who are also being cast out in various different ways, sometimes quite drastically like in Vurt, sometimes, you know, in a much more close-to-home way, like Joe has. And then they form this alternative family.
“Joe, Holbrook and Marjorie would become this little family group. He’s now got two families, basically. That happens in every book I write. And then there is some kind of parallel world or universe or realm which the character has to go through. In this case, it’s Brendleshire, this mysterious county that only Mr Holbrook can see. And obviously in Vurt, it’s the Vurt.
“I just think everything comes out of the same place, in the end.”
Jeff Noon’s Moon Over Brendle (Angry Robot Books, £9.99) is available now
