"Travelling without moving" by Nathan Jones

 Napalm Erroneous Carton (all the characters have fabulous names, my favourite being Flip Zide, the DJ) lives in Kaputt, a dome world run by Main Computer and largely powered by clockwork. Of all the inhabitants of Kaputt, only he seems able to see the mechanisms by which the world is run: the clockwork lamp that is the sun, the hatches in the sky. 

A brilliant student at the Omniversity, Napalm has manufactured hallucinogenic drugs which enable the takers to collaborate in virtual reality games. He hopes to use these games to find a door to the outside of the dome; his friends hope to use the games to make money. But there is another party interested in hijacking the games: is it ThinkDom, the scientific establishment, MC the Main Computer itself, or Hue, Napalm's identical twin and nemesis?

So we have a variety of levels of reality: the (illusory) reality of the hallucinogenic drugs, the (illusory) reality of the game and the (illusory) reality of the computer-controlled dome to mention just three. Can increasingly drug-addled Nathan work out which is the truth?

This book is hugely ambitious in its conception and there is a large cast and a tortuous plot, and I admit to sometimes getting confused, especially given the shifting chronology of the story. But this is a book with wonderfully weird characters.  The core characters are Napalm's group of omniversity friends. These were perfectly drawn: I know students like these: "think fame and pussy, Liquid, fame and pussy." (C 2). Even more fabulously, there are literally fantastically baroque settings. I loved the fact that every colour has an emotion: eg Vigilance-orange, loathing-purple, angry-red. 

The book reminded me of Veniss Underground by Jeff Vandermeer, though with more humour, or the cult novel Dhalgren by Samuel R Delaney. 

I love the descriptions which can be vertiginously over the top but contain a wry downbeat of humour:

• "The smell was awful, chemically floral with undertones of urine." (C 1)
• "Mellow, mid-tempo beats drifted from wall-mounted smart-speakers; Mokey’s pride and joy, imported from The Americas, and again, a gift from Cloche.  Hoodoo-powered, mass-produced crap in his opinion. They reliably misjudged a room’s mood with impeccable timing, like bursting into jazz when someone delivered bad news, or wailing out the blues when you were close to orgasm." (C 2)
• "Bleary-eyed tourists and a slow downhill trudge of overalled locals placed the clock at far too early to care." (C 5)
• "Many of the Dravidian and Sumerian floors of Kaywan redefined filthy. They mugged filthy. Wiped their arse with it, passed it through a blender, imbibed it, and pissed it all over the walls." (C 15)
• "The whiff of breakfast, sizzling in skillets, teased Napalm's nostrils. Dustmen brushed another night’s muck into the gutters as they passed tipplers, topplers, spinouts, grinners and gooners, bumping and mumbling their way down The Spiral to the tune of the last few desperate hollers of colour peddlers." (C 29)

It was this quality of the prose, often as lush and tangled as a rain-forest but always hacked down with the machete of humour, that I most loved about this book.

More memorable moments:

• "He and Mokey were now exiting the cage of lies they existed within as ghosts of their true selves, and were entering into a dreamlike purgatory, a passage formed of his imagination, colours, delusions, and desires. And something else." (C 1)
• "Sunday shone in thick beams through NewRome’s crumbling arches." (C 8)
• "Earth’s skies hung loathing-purple, exactly as reported, except the shade was licked with heavy grief, and the vigilance-orange desert was flecked with rage." (C 8)
• "Napalm felt better. Better, better. One hundred and ten per cent better. No, one hundred and fifty. Instantly revitalised, invigorated, focused, and sharp as a knight’s pike. He felt real, in the realest sense of real, centred on the moment and bio-alchemically maxed. The flexible joints of a ten-year-old, the overflowing spunk of a teenager, the heart of an athlete. He rolled his shoulders, enjoying the satisfying chorography of renewed muscle." (C 13)
• "Curiosity and Hue’s buzz had him horny for whatever game was afoot, but he still understood that bravery and stupidity shared a bed." (C 13)
• "I guess I’m ready for a debriefing, even though I still don’t know what that bloody means, but I am not taking my pants off." (C 18)
• "Going with the flow had taken him nowhere, because the flow wasn’t his anymore." (C 21)
• "The cherry on the cake, of course, was that he had finally attained his dream and stepped through the door, to the place beyond, the final destination or the next step, the escape, transcendence, reality, whatever, and all he’d found was a new shade of hokum, but he couldn’t give a toss." (C 21)
• "The suspected lab coat looked more like a fetishist’s dress-coat-type-thing, something to be worn over kinky underwear, or nothing at all." (C 21)
• "Winners in commerce required much larger sections of the tribe to live and serve as lowly workers" (C 24)
• "It tasted old.  Not rotten old, but the cared-for old of a well-aged cheese." (C 27)
• "The epitome of Twig’s inspired wonderland hung motionless in deep space. A hollow, geometric webwork of tied, nailed, and glued scrapyard trash floated in a backdrop of impossibly dense, twirling galaxies and glinting stars, the illusion so complete the void of space continued seamlessly around the entrance doors’ perimeter. The whole place thrummed, the scent of grease and metal carried on Flip’s musical output." (C 27)
• "Do you really think the winding of a small key can run a vehicle or an elevator?’ ‘Always wondered about that,’ Ranks said. ‘It’s the pulley effect,’ Napalm explained, already doubting his knowledge." (C 29)
• "Hue was more full of shit than the gutters" (C 29)

A hugely enjoyable read. This is an author with a definite voice. I am looking forward to his next novel.

August 2021

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God